Chapter 5 - Lynchpins of Sovereignty

Summary

This chapter begins with a consideration of the importance to sovereignty of the right to deport. Beyond exploring what constitutes sovereignty and how such power is preserved and held, it examines why so little attention has been paid to life after expulsion. Expulsion (real or threatened) kidnaps time, creates unlimited forms of captivity, invigorates shame, normalizes violence, and stabilizes concepts such as citizenship and belonging. Showing the long buried links between colonial and US treatment of Indigenous peoples and contemporary deportation practices, the chapter reveals how knitted into the imaginary of belonging forced removal has become. While scholars have slowly begun exploring the experience of life after forced removal, writers of fiction have taken up the question as well and have begun offering portraits of the experience of navigating detention camps and rebuilding a life that might be sustainable after the violence of expulsion. Novels by Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, Lisa Ko, Helton Habila, Mohshin Hamid, and Jenny Erpenbeck are examined in detail because of their careful attention to living a deportable and deported life.