Securing Swiss Futurity: The Gefährder Figure and Switzerland’s Counterterrorism Regime

This article explores the notion of the Gefährder, the German term for a ‘potentially threatening individual’, in the context of the latest expansion of both the spaces of prevention and preemption, particularly through the new anti-terror law (PMT) in Switzerland that drew widespread criticism from the international community for its wide judicial reach and vague terminology around terrorist activities, thereby breaching a series of international legal norms and treaties. The term Gefährder represents a historical and political assemblage that exists across space and time in various iterations based on the colonial and racialized Other. This article argues that the latest prototype emerging out of the current Swiss counterterrorism architecture has unique qualities. The Gefährder serves as a bio- and ontopolitical governance tool, through its bodily and affective qualities, that exerts Swiss state control, and reaffirms Swiss national identity and national conservative underpinnings to preserve a particular kind of Swiss futurity. This research aspires to contribute to a body of research on counterterrorism regimes and its affective and bodily subjects in post-imperial nation-states.

The construction of the racialized Other in the educational sphere: The stories of students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal

This paper presents the results of an empirical study of social relations from a critical race theory perspective crossed with the sociology of the life course. The objective of our study was to understand how social relations in Quebec’s educational sphere, specifically in high school, construct fixed categories of racialized students in university. With the aim of discovering the underlying process of racialization of the students of racial backgrounds in educative sphere, the study analyzes the self-reported relational experiences of 10 university students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal. Based on a narrative inquiry, the analysis of the retrospective life story interviews allowed to explain the complexity of the process of racialization in two categories of “complete racialization” and “incomplete racialization.” In the “completed racialization” category, negotiating domination relationships results in the construction of a racialized Other. In the “incomplete racialization” category, the construction process is in progress. Our study has shown that social relations in high school contribute to the construction of fixed Black and Latinx racialized groups. Interpersonal relationships at school play a role in the racialization of students with immigrant backgrounds, and, although limited in scope, persistence in school may be a reversal strategy for their experiences of racism.

COVID-19 and the Political Framing of China, Nationalism, and Borders in the U.S. and South Korean News Media

Using an inductive framing analysis of news coverage, we examine how the most popular liberal and conservative news media in the United States and South Korea mobilize different nationalist narratives on China in responding to social, economic, and political upheavals during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify three major areas of political cleavage in both Korean and U.S. media discourse on nationalist identities vis-à-vis the construction of the national or racialized “Other.” This includes (1) imagined solidarity against China as an adversary; (2) political disputes over boundary-making; (3) and the construction of ethnonational belonging and exclusion. Our research underscores how intrastate and interstate shifts during periods of crisis can heighten political cleavages along racial and ethnic fault lines and complicate dominant frameworks of civic and ethnic nationalism in both countries.

Midwives and Humanitarian Bureaucracy: Managing Migration at a Postcolonial Border

Drawing on Foucauldian biopolitics, Max Weber's and Hannah Arendt's understandings of bureaucracy, and Achille Mbembe's theoretical insights into necropolitical power, I propose the notion of humanitarian bureaucracy to account for the involvement of medical personnel in the summary deportations of pregnant Comorian women in Mayotte, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean. In addition to their usual consultations, hospital midwives are asked to assess the health of pregnant women arrested at sea in order to state whether they can be lawfully detained, while deportations happen within hours owing to the specificities of this postcolonial migration regime. The notion of humanitarian bureaucracy traces how a series of bureaucratic acts, duly sanctioned by qualified professionals, performs a minimal and fragmented biopolitical surveillance that neutralizes the question of responsibility and rejects the racialized Other into a liminal space between failing to “make live” and avoiding to “let die.” The article argues that humanitarian bureaucracy represents an ambivalent power, stemming from biopolitics yet producing necropolitics through processes of racialization. The article draws on three months of fieldwork conducted in Mayotte in 2017 and analyzes midwives’ discourses and bureaucratic practices as materialized by the medical certificates they deliver in the context of these assessments.

“Where Are the Americans?”

The War on Terror’s aggressive surveillance of Arabs and Muslims as national security threats accelerated their becoming a racialized Other. The history of race-making in America has followed a pattern of groups differentiating themselves from lower-status nonwhites in order to gain membership as white. Iraqis who came to the Inland Empire’s majority-Latinx neighborhoods found themselves in an America they had not anticipated, prompting some to ask, “Where are the Americans?” While the Latinx-Iraqi interactions evoked frustration, confusion, and ambivalence toward an unexpected cultural reality, Iraqis were ultimately able to bridge differences and recognize many similarities with their Latinx neighbors, such as family values and hospitality. The youths frequently quoted the Arabic proverb “not all your fingers alike,” meaning that it is better to be accepting—after all, not all people are the same, everyone is different, just like the fingers on your hand.

Too painful to forget, too painful to remember: Ashes of memory in Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Duras’s La douleur (1985)

This essay threads the striking images of the couple’s embrace at the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour through an examination of the film’s exploration of memory and victim and perpetrator traumas. Duras and Resnais render the lovers almost indistinguishable as, they hold each other, encased in ash. As they embrace, something gently falls on them, encrypts them, isolates them from their surroundings but simultaneously embeds them in their respective histories. If, for Derrida, ash becomes the paradigm for the trace, we can see how this image becomes paradigmatic for memory’s unspooling threads; the film rejects an either/or memory or forgetting when it is a question of traumatic pasts. By re-reading Hiroshima mon amour through the powerful metaphorics of ash and against echoes of the international and dramatic rise in racist discourse, an increased anxiety about nuclear catastrophe, and a return to Duras’s wartime “memoir” La douleur, I show that these texts’ representation of memory and the rotating axes of perpetration and victimization open up larger questions about the trauma of both sides of the culpability line. This reading reveals the fluid border between victimization and perpetration in ways that help explain how both victims and perpetrators are traumatized. Interpreting the film and memoir in this way helps to blaze a path to envisioning an understanding of committing crimes as itself inflicting (self-imposed) trauma. The most optimistic possible implication (one that is completely unlikely) is that if perpetration is also viewed as traumatizing then perpetrators would no longer fling nuclear bombs at the racialized other and expect to sleep well.

Entry Denied: COVID-19, Race, Migration, and Global Health

This essay uses the novel coronavirus pandemic as an entry point to explore the intersections between race, migration, and global health. The pandemic is simultaneously reviving stereotypical colonial imaginations about disease directionality, but also challenging racialized hierarchies of diseases. This essay illuminates how the racialization of diseases is reflected in historic and ongoing United States' migration law and policy as well as the global health law regime. By demonstrating the close relationship between often separately treated areas, the essay clarifies underlying currents in global health and migration law and policy that stem from fears of the racialized other. Rendering these intersections visible creates avenues for rethinking and reshaping both theory and praxis toward anti-subordination efforts.

Disrupting a Canadian Prairie Fantasy and Constructing Racial Otherness: An Analysis of News Media Coverage of Trevis Smith’s Criminal HIV Non-Disclosure Case

This paper studies how HIV criminalization is portrayed in the mainstream Canadian press by examining news representations of Trevis Smith. Smith’s case is the most reported case of criminal HIV non-disclosure in Canadian history. Our analysis is based on a corpus of 271 articles written about Smith between 2005 and 2012. Our analysis shows that coverage of Smith’s case is distinct from reportage of other criminal HIV non-disclosure cases because he was a well-known Black athlete playing for the Saskatchewan Roughriders at the time of his criminal charge. We argue that news articles represent Smith as a particular kind of threatening racialized “other” through forms of writing that link crime reporting with sports reporting. Our analysis of headlines and quotation patterns emphasizes how news articles construct Smith as a blameworthy outsider and produce Canada as an imagined white settler nation.

The Colors and Flavors of My Puerto Rico

Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s song “Despacito” shattered numerous records to become one of the most successful Spanish-language songs in U.S. pop music history. Declared 2017’s “Song of the Summer,” the “Despacito” remix featuring Justin Bieber prompted discussions about the racial dynamics of crossover for Latin music and Latina/o artists. However, little attention was paid to the ways that “Despacito”’s success in the Latin music market demonstrated similar racial dynamics within Latin music, especially in the song’s engagement with reggaeton, a genre originally associated with Black and working-class communities. This paper examines the racial politics that surround “Despacito”’s success in both the Latin mainstream and the U.S. mainstream. We argue that “Despacito” reinforces stereotypes of blackness in the Latin mainstream in ways that facilitate reggaeton’s crossover. In turn, Fonsi himself becomes attributed with similar stereotypes, especially around hypersexuality, that represent him as a tropical Latina/o racialized other in the United States. Through close readings of media coverage of “Despacito” alongside the song’s music video, we argue that it is critical to look at “Despacito”’s success in both the Latin mainstream and the U.S. mainstream in order to examine the complex and contradictory process of crossing over.

Shape shifters: Racialized and gendered crossings inPiccadilly(1929) andShanghai Express(1932)

The Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905–1961) is today considered an ambivalent icon who, on the one hand, was the first Asian American film star to gain international recognition, and on the other hand, became a symbol of the hypersexualized Asian woman in film. In this article, I will analyse the crossing of racial and sexual boundaries in two of her films, Piccadilly (1929) and Shanghai Express (1932). The comparison of Piccadilly with Shanghai Express reveals the journey not only of transatlantic agents, like Anna May Wong, but also the simultaneous trajectory of sets of interrelated motifs, narratives, and aesthetic tropes. As discourses of gender and race converge into the figure of the transnational Asian American actress, Anna May Wong offers a key and privileged site to unpack and discuss them. The relationship between sexuality and race in these films has often been reduced to processes of exoticization. However, I will show that this relationship ought instead to be understood as interrelated through practices of appropriation, subversion, and cross-dressing.By applying the term ‘exotic’ to the analysis of Anna May Wong’s performances, I aim to foreground the entangled processes of sexualization and exoticization in order to reveal that the delineation of the ‘other’ is more ambivalent than clear. The films are particularly interesting in the context of ‘sexoticization’ because they do not construct a gendered and racialized ‘other’ that is clearly distinct to a western ‘us’. Modes of appropriation and masquerade complicate the representation of the ‘sexotic’, non-European ‘other’.