March 15, 2008
In Culture Wars: Liberalism, hospitality and sovereignty in Borderlands Elaine Kelly asks the following:
What marks this period - neo-liberalism - from the last? What is 'new' or 'beyond' in relation to liberalism signified by the 'neo'? What does the disjuncture look like, and how do we mark it? Is it something radically different from liberalism and what is its connection to this theoretical and institutional heritage? This framework, its historical contingencies and structural racisms, informs contemporary limitations and possibilities for hospitality. How does it reiterate and transform the relationship between sovereignty and hospitality?
It's not clear that she answers these questions. She says that RPVs, TPVs, and other subsets of such visas, disproportionately effect non-white subjects. Highlighting this goes beyond recognising the hypocrisy of neo-liberalism's values of 'choice'.
Such visa categories and the management of bodies is part of a morally inflected neo-liberal immigration structure ideologically underpinned by liberalism and its end point: racelessness. If a deconstruction of liberalism reveals the epistemological whiteness of the individual and the structural privileging of the group rights of whites, the proliferation of visas as legalistic determination and programmatic response to uninvited asylum seekers, exposes the investments of the centre; it reveals its own role in projecting itself as occupying the position of 'pure innocence'.
Such failures of hospitality and their violent consequences are inherent to a model of neo-liberal immigration unwilling to respond with compassion to the (un)expected arrival of refugees.
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