Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Social Text Book) - Softcover

Mezzadra, Sandro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822355035 ISBN 13: 9780822355038

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Far from creating a borderless world, contemporary globalization has generated a proliferation of borders. In Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson chart this proliferation, investigating its implications for migratory movements, capitalist transformations, and political life. They explore the atmospheric violence that surrounds borderlands and border struggles across various geographical scales, illustrating their theoretical arguments with illuminating case studies drawn from Europe, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas, and elsewhere. Mezzadra and Neilson approach the border not only as a research object but also as an epistemic framework. Their use of the border as method enables new perspectives on the crisis and transformations of the nation-state, as well as powerful reassessments of political concepts such as citizenship and sovereignty.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sandro Mezzadra is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bologna.

Brett Neilson is Professor of Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.

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BORDER AS METHOD, OR, THE MULTIPLICATION OF LABOR

By SANDRO MEZZADRA, BRETT NEILSON

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5503-8

Contents

PREFACE....................................................................
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
xiii
CHAPTER 1 The Proliferation of Borders.....................................
1
CHAPTER 2 Fabrica Mundi....................................................
27
CHAPTER 3 Frontiers of Capital.............................................
61
CHAPTER 4 Figures of Labor.................................................
95
CHAPTER 5 In the Space of Temporal Borders.................................
131
CHAPTER 6 The Sovereign Machine of Governmentality.........................
167
CHAPTER 7 Zones, Corridors, and Postdevelopmental Geographies..............
205
CHAPTER 8 Producing Subjects...............................................
243
CHAPTER 9 Translating the Common...........................................
277
REFERENCES.................................................................
313
INDEX......................................................................
349

CHAPTER 1

THE PROLIFERATION OF BORDERS

The World Seen from a Cab

Anyone who has used the taxi system in New York City over thepast decade will know the vast diversity that exists within the laborforce that drives the city's yellow cabs. Fewer people will know whatit takes to organize a strike among these predominantly migrantworkers who speak more than eighty different languages. In Taxi!Cabs and Capitalism in New York City (2005), Biju Mathew, himselfan organizer of the grassroots New York Taxi Workers Alliance(NYTWA), documents the history of the many strikes that led to thehistoric fare rise victory for the city's cab drivers in March 2004.Mathew's book is in many ways a story about borders—not only thelinguistic borders that separate these workers but also the urbanborders they routinely cross as part of their working lives, the internationalborders they cross to reach New York City, and the socialborders that divide them from their clients and the owners fromwhom they lease the cabs. Investigating the restructuring of theNYC cab industry and its links to the wider shifts of capitalism in aglobal era, Taxi! illustrates how these many borders figure in thecomposition, struggles, and organizational forms of the labor forcein this sector.

It is no secret that many NYC cab drivers are highly qualifiedindividuals, whose presence in such a job is often a kind of transitstation or waiting room for further labor mobility. Indeed, as hasalso been noted in a recent study of Indian techno-migrants inSilicon Valley (Ong 2006, 163–65), it is frequently the case that the "illegal" juridical status of these workers produces another border that crisscrossesand multiplies the already existing diversity of this workforce. Moreover,the wounds of history resurface in the composition of the labor force.This is particularly the case with migrant workers coming from South Asia,for whom the memory and actual legacy of the subcontinent's partition is anongoing experience. It is thus all the more remarkable that, as Mathewrecalls, Pakistani and Indian drivers acted side by side during the 1998 NewYork taxi strike when some 24,000 yellow cab drivers took their cars off theroad to protest new safety measures that subjected them to higher fines,mandatory drug testing, higher liability insurance requirements, and a prohibitivemeans of attaching penalty points to their licenses. Just one weekafter their home countries tested nuclear weapons in an environment ofescalating nationalist tensions, these drivers acted together in two day-longstrikes that brought the city to a halt.

Mathew bases his research on a particular image of globalization andneoliberalism as well as a critique of multiculturalism and postcolonialismas a set of state- and market-friendly discourses that protect establishedclass positions. At times this seems to us too rigid. More interesting, in ourview, is the way Taxi! can be read as a chronicle of the proliferation ofborders in the world today and the multiscalar roles they play in the currentreorganization of working lives. Although Mathew's study focuses on asingle city, the increasing heterogeneity of global space is evident in thestories he tells about negotiating the metropolis. Issues of territory, jurisdiction,division of labor, governance, sovereignty, and translation all collapseinto the urban spaces that these drivers traverse. This is not merely becausethe city in question is New York, where migrant labor has played a key rolein the reshaping of the metropolitan economy and the development ofsocial struggles in the past fifteen years (Ness 2005). As we show in thechapters that follow, the proliferation of borders in other parts of the world(whether on the "external frontiers" of Europe, the sovereign territory ofChina, or the Australian sphere of influence in the Pacific) displays tendenciescommon to those discussed by Mathew.

Our interest is in changing border and migration regimes in a world inwhich national borders are no longer the only or necessarily the most relevantones for dividing and restricting labor mobilities. The nation-state stillprovides an important political reference from the point of view of powerconfigurations and their articulation with capital–labor relations. Nevertheless,we are convinced that contemporary power dynamics and strugglescannot be contained by national borders or the international system ofstates they putatively establish. This is an important point of departure forour work. Though we emphasize the strategic importance of borders in thecontemporary world, we do not intend to join the chorus that in recent yearsand from many different points of view has celebrated the return of thenation-state on the world stage, dismissing the debates on globalization asmere ideological distortion. To the contrary, one of our central theses is thatborders, far from serving simply to block or obstruct global flows, havebecome essential devices for their articulation. In so doing, borders have notjust proliferated. They are also undergoing complex transformations thatcorrespond to what Saskia Sassen (2007, 214) has called "the actual andheuristic disaggregation of 'the border.'" The multiple (legal and cultural,social and economic) components of the concept and institution of theborder tend to tear apart from the magnetic line corresponding to the geopoliticalline of separation between nation-states. To grasp this process, wetake a critical distance from the prevalent interest in geopolitical borders inmany critical approaches to the border, and we speak not only of a proliferationbut also of a heterogenization of borders.

The traditional image of borders is still inscribed onto maps in whichdiscrete sovereign territories are separated by lines and marked by differentcolors. This image has been produced by the modern history of the state,and we must always be aware of its complexities. Just to make an example,migration control has only quite recently become a prominent function ofpolitical borders. At the same time, historicizing the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822355035
• ISBN 13: 9780822355038
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 380
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland