William Walter, Charles Heller, and Lorenzo Pezzani’s Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion stands as a uniquely articulated materialist engagement with the political, governmental, and scholarly objectification of migration as a “social” issue. While positioning “viapolitics” within a trajectory informed by analyses of biopolitics, the governance of populations, and the formation of the subject, the volume displaces the centrality of migrant subjectivity by foregrounding the vehicle as an “epistemic device to unravel the edifice of scholarly analyses, governmental practice, and policy discourses built around migration and borders” (11). A focus on the vehicle allows for the ambiguous intersections between people moving, the things that move them, and the spaces in which they move to emerge as complex webs of contextualisation, interpellation, and assertion. Tracing migrant mobility through spaces, experiences, temporalities, borders, landscapes, and transformations, the volume asks how questions of belonging, distinction, and common cause come to be understood in terms of movement and how movement itself takes shape as a form of power.
Setting out the broad parameters of viapolitics as a methodological orientation anchored by an integration of the analysis of vehicles (ships, trains, planes, buses, bodies) with the infrastructures which inflect their mobility (routes, airports, railways, corridors, trails) and the structuring of geophysical contexts of mobility (air, sea, mountain, desert), the volume seeks to stage a purposeful intervention in the fields of migration and border studies. Displacing a focus on so-called “migratory” mobilities, it foregrounds those situations where movement and its mediations are called into question and become a focus of struggle and politics, taking up the “events, ruptures, and controversies where the black box of migration is opened up” (9) in order to work against normativisations of “mobility” and the hegemony of a neoliberal milieu in which the signification of mobility circulates. The editors underscore the action and power of movement, multiplicity of scales of movement, and types of boundaries crossed, with a focus on “locomotion” that both exceeds and provincialises frameworks of nation-states and national borders. Working against the “becoming discipline” (9) of migration and border studies and the implied reification of conceptual boundaries such as free versus forced, internal versus international, and citizen versus alien, “viapolitics” is a “de-bordering” strategy that engages the control of movement, bodies, and vehicles, telling stories of migration as stories of “multidirectional transformation and constant reassemblage” (11).
The editors offer an instructive example of how a focus on the vehicle can reveal particular political economies of incommensuration central to the formation of migration as a matter of “public” interest. To accomplish this, they juxtapose how two ships are differently rendered as matters of “public” concern in Canada. (1-6). The first is the Ocean Lady, which arrived in 2009. Its approach was framed through discourses of suspicion and a desire to protect against the deception and criminality in which those on the ship were thought to be entangled. It later became a generic figure in public discussions of migration policy, indexing the migrant as a particular type of problem for governance requiring surveillance, sequester, and violence. The second was the Komagata Maru, which arrived in 1914. The Komagata Maru was similarly received, but was ultimately turned back, occasioning an official apology in 2014 for the hardships visited upon those on that ship. On the one hand, an icon of a present policy, and on the other hand, an image of wrongs committed in the past; and, according to the editors, an effort to consign the very idea of wrongs committed against migrants to the past as revealed by a failure to note the similarity of the two events. Invoking Partha Chatterjee’s work on “the rule of colonial difference” (5), the editors draw attention to the forced disassociation of individual commissions of wrongs and the invocation of selective regret from the continuous experience of harm as a temporalised structure of “exclusionary racism”. Rather than a representation of migrants as a population or the contextualisation of discrete events defining a history of migration, it is a rendering of the distribution of affects, opinions, claims, and representations materially anchored by the ship that reveals the infrastructures of differentiation that structure “common” concerns. Here, the editors invoke Jacques Ranciere’s work on the “partition of the sensible” (11) as a modality of politics, pointing not to a critical orientation toward normativised regimes of differentiation, but to the framing of every rule of difference as a site of contest, dissent, resistance, experience, perspective, motive, aim, and agency. The methodological question engaged by the editors, then, concerns how to make a rule of difference visible, or how to render the materiality of a “threshold” at which “the mobility of peoples becomes a stake in social and political struggles” (11) bringing a specific “field of power/ knowledge” into view.
The migrant anchors an economisation of punishment that aims to legitimate the ordering of a population, capturing the migrant by framing migration as a question of order and the legitimation of order as such.
The ultimate stake of their intervention, however, is anchored by a notion of humanity in general, which is not to be confused with a commitment to humanitarianism. Here, the editors position the de-bordering work of viapolitics as an intervention scaled to address “forms of human mobility,” and the volume offers an important insight as to the conditions of universality of such an orientation. If the editor’s introduction offers viapolitics as a methodological frame, Ranabir Samaddar’s epilogue frames viapolitics as a historical product arising from an “economy of punishment” that “shapes… migration strategies of roads, routes, and vehicles” (286). Here, Samaddar remediates a distinction between structures of migration and the experience of migrants through their co-constituted intersection with architectures of illegality. Rather than setting a statist perspective on controlled mobility alongside the diverse experiential perspectives on the movement of people, Samaddar notes that illegality “complicates the idea of a route” in that “migration as an act will always be on the border of legality” and the migrant “the one whom law must punish” (289). Of particular significance here is the objectification of the migrant as a relational category and more importantly as a productive one in subjecting the “economy of punishment” to a political economic analysis which exceeds and encompasses questions of law, regulation, and administration. The migrant as the one who must be subject to a determination of whether they are to be punished or not anchors the production of legality through the distribution of ascriptions of illegality. The migrant anchors an economisation of punishment that aims to legitimate the ordering of a population, capturing the migrant by framing migration as a question of order and the legitimation of order as such. “Punishment has to produce the illegal, otherwise how can punishment be legal?” (288). Remediated through a lens of illegality, the juxtaposition of regulation and experience and the apprehension of their complex entanglements is reframed as a dialectic of punishment versus freedom producing “overlapping domains” of capture and escape. Here, Samaddar contrast the “economy” of punishments with the migrant’s “world” as assemblage, as a fragmented geography of the contingent connections and disconnections between escape and capture, where he suggests it is only through “reconstruction of events of flight and mobility” (282) that accounts of migration can be decolonised. “The way is the route… a connected world… the congealed life of people whom we know as migrants… if you want to know the migrant, go out to be on the way…” (281). Gesturing toward a desire to know the migrant as fixing a trajectory toward decolonisation, Samaddar’s claim on the “world” appears to encompass the introduction’s invocations of publics as politics.
If the epilogue frames the desire to know the migrant as a transcendent cause, placing the recognition of what is commonly human beyond any threshold of difference, placing any “thresholds” against a horizon of freedom, it may be said to frame the volume’s work as gesturing toward a provincialisation of the migrant as an image of containment.
With such a framing of the issue and possible reframing of the introduction, however, Samaddar potentially reifies what the volume’s introduction seeks to provincialise – the terms of intelligibility of the figure of the migrant as such, which are as complex in the “Global South” as they are in the “West”. Where both the introduction and epilogue seek to move against capture of the migrant pursued by framing migration as an epistemic logic of population, what analytical resources can be brought to bear in the interstices between knowledge as power and a desire to know? If the epilogue frames the desire to know the migrant as a transcendent cause, placing the recognition of what is commonly human beyond any threshold of difference, placing any “thresholds” against a horizon of freedom, it may be said to frame the volume’s work as gesturing toward a provincialisation of the migrant as an image of containment. Between the introduction and epilogue as distinct points of departure, the contributions offer accounts of the migrant that escape their discursive capture as subject to any final question of inclusion or exclusion. Between a transcendent singularisation of the “migrant” and a concrete provincialisation of “migration,” the contributors map a political terrain drawn against the ontologisations of “population”.
In their experiments with “viapolitics”, the contributors push on the boundaries that distinguish and define the intersection of the political and its publics through which a desire for publics as political and analytical fora can take shape. The volume is organised in three parts: vehicles of migration; trajectories, routes, and infrastructures, and; the geophysics of migration. In Part One, on the vehicle, Ethan Blue compares the work of vehicle design in distinguishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Indian removal in the US, and the global circulation of coolies, developing an account of the centrality of coercion within biopolitical regimes and the co-articulation of life, surveillance, and mobility which shape spatial articulations of population as an index of territory. Renisa Mawani takes methodological inspiration from the literature on slave ships as formative and transformative social milieu, giving an account of the Komagata Maru as a site of insurgency, subjection, subjectivation, and transformation. She documents how those on board contended with their entangled interpellations by political, ethnic, and national identities mediated through the ship’s own entangled interpellation by regimes of inspection, permission, embarkation, and speculation. Amaha Senu examines how the identification of stowaways and claims on the stowaway as a social identity position the ship as a site of governance, enforcement, and knowledge production, focusing on the role of private insurance companies, the broader significance of commercial shipping and its modes of self-governance, and how stowaways assess the dangers and opportunities of being discovered while still in transit. Tracing the emergence of “comfort” in transit as a right-based metric of civility, humanity, and freedom arising from abolition of the slave trade, Julie Chu examines how inhumane conditions of mobility become an iconic signifier of populations less in “need” of humane treatment, identifying a status of “human cargo” opposed to the “sympathetic stranger”.
In the book’s second part, on infrastructures, Johan Lindquist takes up the culturally specific concepts of antar-jemput (escort) and jalur (track, channel, corridor) In Indonesia as a point of departure for analysing social practices that mediate “circular migration”, showing how both documented and undocumented migrant mobility is encapsulated by a complex infrastructure of brokerage through which origins and destinations are linked and intermediate space of movement sequestered. Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias chart the development of “route thinking” in recent EU migration regimes, describing how movement is made into a targetable object of government control by the expansion of borders across the space and time of any traveler’s trajectory in movement between Spain and Africa, describing the circulation of techniques of “border externalization” and the counter-mapping strategies developed by migrants. Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek examine the emergence of the “corridor” beyond its association with the event of mass migration into Western Europe via Greece and the Balkan countries known as the “Balkan Summer” in 2015, detailing its architecture as a form of containment and how remnants of its construction such as networks of transit camps and processing centers become objects governing how national governments seek to position themselves in relation to contemporary regional flows and border policy.
In Part Three, on the geophysical, Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani seek to displace the ship-wreck as a spectacular image of the “dangers” of migration to show how the sea is weaponised by means of influencing how the vessels that migrants encounter in transit interact with them. They chart the development of a regime of “non-assistance” after the breakdown of return infrastructures as a result of the Arab Spring and how the conflicting imperatives of security and humanitarianism shape infrastructures of rescue as practices of what they call “liquid violence.” Foregrounding walking as both mode of migrant mobility as well as a form of forced mobility, Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli describe how the hardening of controls on border crossing by means of train or ship between Italy and France forces movement through the Alps and its consolidation as a weaponised terrain of disruption, pointing to a broader engagement with infrastructures of migrant mobilities meant to force continued movement while also obstructing, deviating, and decelerating their movement to prevent the completion of their journeys. And lastly, Clara Lecadet and William Walters de-center imaginations of deportation through the moment of expulsion facilitated by the image of the plane, arguing for a move from seeing flight as moment of passage to understanding the “transversal space and aerial geography” of deportation. They describe the complications and entanglements through which forced movement is materialised through arrival and departure terminals, the tactical use of hangars, and how returned migrants seek to support and advocate for each other.
In the complexity of their framings and discussions of the registers introduced through the “viapolitical” – the vehicle, infrastructure, and the geophysical – the body of essays demonstrate that an important contribution of the volume lies in how it gives shape to “viapolitics” as an orientation allowing for exploration of its own varied trajectories, edges, and limits, an essential requirement for is critical viability and adaptation. Speaking beyond its own framing in relation to questions of both publics and decolonisation, the volume interestingly opens a broader engagement with what Antina von Schnitzler (2013) in another context calls the “politics of non-publics” that emerge from material, technical, and semiotic engagements with infrastructures as distinct from but not displacing discursive frameworks, regimes of visibility, and aesthetic registers. In this way, the volume’s articulation of the viapolitical architecture of the vehicle, infrastructures, and the geophysical allows for diverse and dynamic mappings of the shifting registers of power through which mobility is materialised and how these registers manifest through and alongside each other in simultaneously unique and generalisable ways.
Von Schnitzler, Antina. 2013. “Traveling Technologies: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa.” Cultural Anthropology, 28, 4: 670-693.
