Blog Post

In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown uses the wall as an analytical symbol of state sovereignty, but a state sovereignty that  is threated or non-existent.  Walls are being built on the borders of numerous countries, making political scientists like Brown “ask not only what psychological needs and desires fuel their construction but what contingent effects they have in contouring nationalisms, citizen subjectivities, and identities of the political entities on both sides” (Brown).

Building these walls creates an internal discourse on both sides of it. For example, Brown talks about the wall between Mexico and the United States. This wall was built to signify the nation’s defense against Mexican immigrants or drug wars or any other discursive tools of fear the United States uses to justify this wall. However, all the wall actually signifies is the weakness of the US’s government, since the wall is being built in the first place. Brown says it best, hinting toward a Foucault reference: walls “are demanded when the constitutive political horizon for the “we” and the “I” is receding (Brown 118). Essentially the wall is a literal representation of the discursive tools used by neoliberal nation-states.

De Genova’s article helped to solidify Brown’s arguments for me, by asserting that the primary discursive tool used to demonize “illegal immigrants,” other than calling them illegal, is the looming threat of deportation. This constant threat results in a clear Subject/Object relationship, and it manifests itself in many ways… including the building of walls on borders. Ahmed points out the “instability of hate” and creating a wall is a very stable representation, but everything it represents is so abstract. Rather than actually creating separate spaces, the wall represents what it wants to eliminate: an insecure white hegemony.