Everyday sovereign exclusion: conceptualising police violence and deaths in custody as a racial production of homo sacer

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although Giorgio Agamben figures prominently in research examining sovereign state-based exclusion, his theories are marked by two commonly identified limitations. The absolute nature of Agamben's conceptualization of exclusion diminishes meaningful minority resistance, and his disembedded account of excised peoples as homo sacer hides the common racial basis of sovereign violence. Consequently, this article draws on the work of Achille Mbembé and Alexander G. Weheliye to reframe Agamben's sovereign exclusion as an everyday and contested process that is inseparable from the racial production of minorities. This reconceptualised framework is used to demonstrate how police violence towards Black Americans in the United States of America and the death of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in custody in Australia is orientated towards the production of political communities. I argue that these cases of racial exclusion treat Bla(c)k people as homo sacer to define the colonial sovereign-state polities of the US and Australia in covert racial terms.