THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN POSTPONED. WE'LL UPDATE WITH THE NEW DATE SOON.

Part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Humanitarianisms: Migrations and Care through the Global South

In this talk, Anne McNevin will reflect on the colonial continuities at stake in humanitarian border security through an engagement with the writings of Kurdish-Iranian refugee, Behrouz Boochani, who spent over six years detained in one of Australia’s offshore immigration detention camps in the Pacific. McNevin will also engage with gestures of welcome extended to refugees by Australian Aboriginal elders, and with visions of non-sovereign independence proffered by anti-colonial thinkers in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing connections across these different sites of struggle, McNevin suggests that a sustained relation between liberal notions of care and colonial forms of violence, manifesting in what Boochani calls “Manus Island Prison,” generate what can be thought of as epistemic urgencies. By this, McNevin means the urgency of recognizing the epistemic conditions under which humanitarian violence appears as violence, rather than care, and the epistemic conditions under which the geopolitical “realities” shaping such violence might be unsettled as the limits of the possible for contemporary forms of self-determination and organized hospitality.

Anne McNevin is Associate Professor of Politics at The New School. She is author of Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political, and co-editor of the journal, Citizenship Studies. Her recent publications examine the transnational governmental regimes that shape the experience of refugees and migrants in and around Indonesia. She is working on a new book that aims to bring a world beyond bordered states into the realm of serious political consideration.