because it lightened my day

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Warning: if you follow this link you will be exposed to 80s music and an 80s video clip.

hilarious. wonderfully 80s. made me laugh a lot after a day of reading about the effects of climate change in relation to migration and Indigenous peoples around the world.

- dredgirl

Writing a PhD is really fucking hard

I am currently trying to finish a complete draft of my PhD thesis. I have found that for the past two or three weeks I have been unable to focus on the task. I’ve been restless and had a touch of writer’s block. So, I figured maybe writing about it and explaining my thesis on my blog might help me work through my problem.

My thesis is a theoretical exploration of the relationship between ’sovereignty’ and ‘hospitality’. By this I mean to say that I am interested in a range of questions pivoting around the role that our conceptions and practices of sovereignty (for example, the sovereign nation-state, the sovereign subject) have on our notion of ‘hospitality’ (I am especially concerned with refugees, Indigenous land rights and immigration more generally). What I attempt to show in my thesis is that we have a taken-for-granted understanding of sovereignty which circumscribes and limits the possibilities of being hospitable to others. We also have a view of hospitality as obedient to the sovereign, so we expect that visitors to the country will carry appropriate visas etc. We absolutely privilege citizenship in this world, and seem unable to imagine a world without such a category of belonging.

So in the first chapter, called Sovereign Hospitality: Deconstructing Normative Theory, I look at the historical development of ’sovereignty’, showing that it has traditionally (at least in the ‘west’) been understood as a way of legitimating authority and power, of unifying power and investing it in a recognised political body (the state). I trace the two major strands of thinking sovereignty, one which is derived from figures such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean Bodin and Carl Schmitt and tends to regard sovereignty as indivisible and incontestable (broadly and simplistically these guys are part of the sovereignty=Right camp). The other strand arises out of the works of other white dudes like Locke and Mills, and tends to suggest that sovereignty emerges out of responsibility, that it indebted to natural rights – human rights for example. Thus we have sovereign right and sovereign responsibility. This is then discussed in relation to how it effects ‘hospitality’, our offering of refuge to asylum seekers and other strangers. We are very familiar with the ways in which sovereignty is invoked to guarantee the right of the nation-state to protect its borders (think former PM Howard’s infamous “We will decide…” speech), and we are also aware of how sovereignty is used by the opposing camps to argue for refugee rights (sovereignty requires that we be responsible to those who seek asylum). Ultimately I argue that both of these positions leave the idea of sovereignty intact. This is a problematic position to maintain, I contend, because it is the very concept of sovereignty that must be unpacked and challenged.

In the second chapter I analyse the practices of hospitality allowed under liberalism in Australia. I trace the historical relationship between liberalism and racism, drawing on various theorists, including David Theo Goldberg and Aileen Moreton-Robinson to argue that (neo)liberalism is deeply racist, even as it presents itself as beyond race; as if all individuals are equal and the same. The US theorist Angela Davis refers to Liberalism as a “coded language” that results in “camouflaged racism” I apply this idea to two areas of political interest: Indigenous land rights and refugees. In terms of Indigenous land rights, liberalism and neo-liberalism deny communal rights and attempt to assimilate diverse cultural difference into a normative model of land ownership and production. The logic of exploitation and economic rationalism refuse the possibility of understanding ownership and belonging in ways that challenge corporatist agendas. In relation to immigration, neo-liberalism underpins the current models of migration, bolstering business migration to the country whilst simultaneously advancing corporate interests in the development of private detention centres. I go on to argue (following this) that neo-liberalism is interested in protecting whiteness in Australia, both through the dominance of a liberal notion of property rights as well as a fierce protectionism of the border.

Chapter three develops these ideas but in the context of a major thinker of sovereignty Giorgio Agamben, whose ideas have been extremely influential of late. Agamben’s thesis is that modern forms of sovereignty are concerned with the right to decide on the exception (known as ‘the state of exception’). The state of exception is that space which falls outside of the normal legal order even as the sovereign saturates it. So, an example of this is Guantanamo Bay where the prisoners are stripped of all rights (human and citizen) but subject to the sovereign rule of the US government. Anyway, so basically this chapter analyses Agamben’s theory, draws out its implications and applies it to “climate change refugees”. This chapter deals with the idea that sovereignty may only be able to produce violence, and that this violence is racialised and economically determined. Within Agamben’s paradigm of violent sovereignty, hospitality can only ever be given and taken as a “right”, but is always subject to the sovereign decision.

The last chapter (and the one I am currently trying to finish) is an attempt to challenge some of Agamben’s ideas using the works of Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak. In this chapter I am hoping to answer a few questions, such as: Is there an inescapable violence in the way that state sovereignty deals with and negotiates its borders? Is hospitality toward the ‘other’ consigned to and restricted by violent sovereignty? Is there a way to destabilise the relationship between violence and sovereignty, and finally, what happens to sovereignty when we privilege hospitality?

So, yeah, writing a PhD is really hard, but I think this has helped me Anyway, I’ll return to this soon.

-dredgirl