Week 11: Borders, Citizenship, and Constructions of Illegality

       Ahmed, De Genova, and Brown's works all illustrate the social, political, and psychological ramifications of borders.  Ahmed's article is particularly interesting in that it talks about the love/hate relationship the Self (the white state) has with the Other (the immigrant).  Ironically, instead of distancing from each other, Ahmed states that, "it is the emotional reading of hate that works to stick or to bind the imagined subjects and the white nations together" (43).  As such, the two seem dependent on each other for existence.  Indeed, there would be no such thing as a white state if there was nothing to oppose it.  Hate, in this instance is a unique tool that functions on some level like love since the two are bound together.  This does not stop the dichotomy of the victim and perpetuator.  In fact, in order to conceal the strange communal bond between the two, "the ordinary or normative subject is reproduced as the injured party; the other that is 'hurt' or even damaged by the 'invasion' of others" (43).  De Genova looks at this relationship and recognizes that the immigrant is said to "invade" the state because of their illegality.  Indeed, "Migrant 'illegality' is lived through a palpable sense of deportability--which is to say, the possibility of deportation, or in the bureaucratic euphemis of the U.S. immigration regime, the possibility of being 'removed' from the space of the state" (426).
        This sense of power would bee considered a false front by Brown as she describes the nation-state's lack of power.  Indeed, Brown states, "Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls are icons of its erosion" (24).  As such, the more walls are built, the more insecure the nation-state is.  Indeed, it looks to the creation of walls to legitimize its power when it really demonstrates, according to Brown, their lack of power. Walls, Brown states, are performative: "the new walls often function theatrically, projecting power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot actually exercise and that they also performatively contradict" (25).  This contradiction would be in relation to Ahmed's theory of hate wherein the two entities, however different they are, rely on one another for existence; that these walls are more performative than functional.