Building Walls

The readings for the week which included The Organization of Hate by Sara Ahmed, The Production of Culprits by Nicholas De Genova, and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by Wendy Brown provides new perspective into the different types of “walls” that separate people and even countries from each other. In the Organization of Hate, Ahmed examines “the role of hate in shaping bodies and worlds through the way hate generates its object as a defence against injury.” (42) In The Production of Culprits, De Genova analyzes the events after September 11^th and the “wall” or “defense” America used in an effort to protect its country from further terrorists entering the country and those migrants who suffered in the process. Brown’s book brings this all together and makes us look deeper at these types of “walls” and the physical walls, for example like the walls dividing the U.S from Mexico and the Berlin Wall, and the logic behind it. It is Interesting in how Brown looks at the act of walling in her book. In her book, she suggests that these “acts of walling can be read as symptoms of a theological anxiety induced by the numerous forces that attack and erode nation-state boundaries.”

After reading Ahmed’s scholarship, I cannot help but wonder if this can work in regards to people? In Audre Lorde’s testimony, when she was on the subway train and the white woman hugs her coat closer to her in disgust in an effort to separate herself further from a young Audre Lorde. Could it be that this coat represented a “wall” built to keep this woman away from Lorde? Or was it the emotion of hate? Could it be considered a “wall”? After 9/11, the U.S created so many laws out of fear and anxiety in an effort to protect itself from any further attacks from “terrorists”. Could it be with these acts we were building our own “wall”? Yet, does this really work, this act of “walling” and creating new spaces, does it really protect us from what we fear most?