The State Negation of Social Life

Amín Pérez, Université du Québec à Montréal

How and why does the State organize the non-existence of a population within its territory? This work draws on as yet unstudied cases to observe the experiences of exclusion from community life. From the United States to Europe, a series of attempts and practices are currently seeking to deprive racialized migrants and their children of their rights. A recent decree of the Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic retroactively revoked the citizenship of persons born in the country to Haitian parents between 1929 and 2010. This unprecedented act offers a heuristic case study to examine how the neoliberal State redefines the national and human conditions. Based on this case study of the Caribbean, this presentation proposes to reveal the grounds of this political turn that seeks to reestablish racial hierarchies and create new precarious social categories within the nation. More broadly, it proposes a study of the conditions that enable this regression of citizenship, that deprives some populations of any possibility of claiming rights and subject them to leading clandestine lives of the country where they were born or, for immigrants, where they have worked all their lives. I seek to analyze the imperial present that annihilates the possibility of social life and to examine the moral economy that legitimates a drastic separation between those populations who have the right to life and those subject to “social death” in our neoliberal times.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 37. Marginalization, Exclusion, and Inclusion