Stolen lives: What the dead teach us

Abstract

This paper questions the utility the social category of “refugee” as defined by international human rights discourse. The notion of “racializing assemblages” supplies an analytic tool for situating the deportation machine and mass incarceration of refugees/asylum seekers as “death spaces” within modern Western humanity. Building on discussions related to “political death,” “social death” and “muertas en vida” (living dead), this paper explores an alternative framing of “the refugee” that relies less on human rights and more on other forms of emancipation. The history of “African American fugitivity” offers one possibility for reclaiming another articulation of freedom from persecution and enslavement.