Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse

ASYLUM SPEAKERS

ASYLUM SPEAKERS

Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse

APRIL SHEMAK

© 2011 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shemak, April.

Asylum speakers : Caribbean refugees and testimonial discourse / April

Shemak. —1st ed.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-3355-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8232-3357-1 (ebook)

1. American literature—Caribbean American authors—History and criticism. 2. Refugees in literature. 3. Emigration and immigration in literature. 4. Refugees—Caribbean Area—Social conditions. 5. Refugees—United States—Social conditions. I. Title.

PS153.C27S54 2011

810.9’3526914—dc22

2010033990

Printed in the United States of America

13 12 11      5 4 3 2 1

First edition

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Poetics of Hospitality: Refugee, Migrant, Testimony

1 Inter-dictions and Limbo Citizens: Haitian Boat Refugee Narratives

2 False Witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard Photography of Haitian Boat Refugees

3 Silent Subjectivities: Testimony and Haitian Labor Refugees

4 Corporate Containment: Refugee Seafarers on the Seas of Transnational Labor

5 Crossing the Threshold of Asylum: Dominican and Cuban (Post)Refugee Narratives

Epilogue: Diverted Testimonies: New World Refugees in the Twenty-First Century

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project evolved from the ideas that I began exploring in my dissertation and I am thankful for the numerous people who have supported me as I shaped them into a book. My dissertation advisor Sangeeta Ray provided endless guidance and encouragement throughout my graduate career and beyond. I am most grateful to her for imparting her knowledge and for modeling intellectual courage that continues to sustain me. Others at the University of Maryland who helped to create an intellectually dynamic atmosphere include Merle Collins, who provided me with a foundation in Caribbean literature and invaluable knowledge and experience during a winter session in Grenada. My thanks to Stephan Palmié who first turned my attention to the congressional hearings on Haitian sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic (the focus of chapter 3). Ralph Bauer and Zita Nunes also offered helpful guidance and commentary on my dissertation.

I am grateful for all of my colleagues in the English Department at Sam Houston State University for providing me with a kind and supportive atmosphere in which to work. Thanks to Kim Bell, Tracy Bilsing, Paul Child, Linda Cook, Bob Donahoo, Julie Hall, Scott Kaukonen, Carroll Ferguson Nardone, and Gene Young for their enthusiasm, advice, and continued interest in the book. Lee Bebout and Drew Lopenzina provided helpful comments on chapter drafts. Thanks to the chair of the English department, Helena Halmari, for her professional guidance and advocacy. During his time as department chair, Bill Bridges was an encouraging mentor and lent his scrupulous editing skills to my work. I also appreciate Shirin Edwin, Bernadette Pruitt, and Sujey Vega, colleagues whose shared interests allow for interdisciplinary engagement at SHSU.

Sam Houston State University supported my work with three faculty grants. A 2006 Faculty Research Grant enabled me to complete research at the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office in Washington, DC. Two Enhancement Grants for Professional Development allowed me to focus my attention on researching and writing during two summers. My thanks to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Dean John de Castro and to the SHSU Office of Research and Special Programs for their support.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Helen Tartar at Fordham University Press for supporting this project and shepherding it through the review process. Thanks also to the two reviewers whose astute, meticulous comments on the manuscript pushed my arguments about refugees and testimony further, resulting, I believe, in a stronger book. Thomas Lay, Eric Newman, Kathleen O’Brien-Nicholson, Tim Roberts, and Katie Sweeney ushered me through the production process. Lisa Nowak Jerry’s careful and thorough copyediting helped make this into a more readable book.

It is with deepest sincerity that I thank Edouard Duval-Carrié for graciously agreeing to allow me to use his spectacular artwork on the cover. A portion of chapter 3 was previously published as "Remembering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones" in Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 1 (2002) and I thank Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint.

The friends and colleagues I have come to know in postcolonial, ethnic, and Caribbean studies have enriched my work and experiences as a scholar. Liz DeLoughrey has offered excellent advice and information. Her work on oceanic voyaging and Atlantic discourses has proven vital for my understanding of boat refugees. I was fortunate to participate in an American Studies Association panel on refugee cultural production with Crystal Parikh, Nina Ha, and Zenia Kish. Their work and insights on the ideas of refugeeness have been most helpful as I finished this book, and my thanks to Nina for reading and commenting on portions of it. Sandra Paquet has been part of a vanguard of Caribbean literary scholars, paving the way for those of us now working in the field. I most appreciate her kind support and encouragement of my work.

I could not have completed this project without the group of friends who have provided unflagging support and encouragement: Gia Harewood, Randi Gray Kristensen, Bob Mondello, Carlos Schröder, Tanya Shields, Belinda Wallace and the rest of the ñoquis crew. Our DC ñoquis night tradition taught me something about hospitality and friendship that has sustained me in the quiet days of researching and writing this book in Texas. A special thanks to Tanya for reading and commenting on several chapters in their various stages and for always reminding me that I was capable of writing this book. Thanks to Randi for providing me with a place to stay on trips back to DC. My thanks also to Kimberly Brown for extending her welcome—institutional and otherwise—when I arrived in Texas. Although we now live half a world apart, Mark Cenite has been invaluable friend over the years. His encouragement of me to pursue graduate studies while we were both at UW-Madison led me to the path I am on today.

I am thankful for the love, support, and encouragement of my family, especially my parents, Richard and Beverley. Andy, Sharon, Kevin, Tina, Katy, Brianna, Coty, Angie, Rose, and Kevin C. enrich my life with their care, good cheer, and laughter. I am most grateful to Stan for patiently understanding the nature of academic work and for taking our son on countless walks in the park to give me time to think and write. To Gabe, whose mom I became as this project began to take shape. Your life and it have converged in unexpected ways. While this book has taken precious time away from you, I hope one day you will realize that it has allowed me to think about and appreciate home and belonging more deeply.

Finally, this book is dedicated to the lives lost in the January 2010 Haitian earthquake and to those survivors who find themselves in need of refuge.

Introduction: The Poetics of Hospitality: Refugee, Migrant, Testimony

Hospitality consists in doing everything to address the other, to accord him, even to ask him his name, while keeping this question from becoming a condition, a police inquisition, a blacklist or a simple border control. This difference is at once subtle and fundamental, it is a question which is asked on the threshold of the ‘home’ and at the threshold between two inflections. An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it.

—JACQUES DERRIDA, THE PRINCIPLE OF HOSPITALITY

In her 2007 memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat recounts the events surrounding the death of her eighty-one-year-old uncle Joseph Dantica, who died while being detained by U.S. immigration authorities shortly after his arrival at Miami International Airport in 2004. Dantica, a pastor, fled his home in Haiti after gang members burned down his church and threatened to kill him. Despite having a visa, which had allowed him to enter the United States on numerous other occasions, Dantica, not understanding the full implication of that choice, said that he wanted to apply for temporary asylum when questioned by a Customs and Border Protection officer at the airport.¹ Danticat writes, I can only assume that when he was asked how long he would be staying in the United States, he knew that he would be staying past the thirty days his visa allowed him and he wanted to tell the truth.² Danticat notes that the transcripts of an interview with a second Customs and Border Protection officer reveal that the officer did not ask for further details on the three occasions that Dantica indicated that his life was in danger in Haiti.³ The officer determined that Dantica did not have a legitimate reason for entering the U.S, and he and his son Maxo were sent to Krome Detention Center in South Miami, where they were subsequently separated and Dantica’s personal effects, including medication for blood pressure and an inflamed prostate, were taken from him.⁴ During his daylong detention at Krome, he was given medical attention for high blood pressure, but his medications were not returned to him. During his asylum interview the following day, he suffered a violent seizure that paralyzed his body. When a medic finally arrived, he declared that Dantica was faking. Danticat explains that to prove his point, the medic grabbed my uncle’s head and moved it up and down. It was rigid rather than limp, he said…. The medic then turned to Pratt [Dantica’s immigration lawyer] and told him that based on his many years of experience at Krome, he could easily make such determinations.⁵ When his health continued to deteriorate, he was transported to Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital with shackles on his feet, where he waited for twenty-four hours to be seen by a doctor.⁶ A few hours after finally receiving his medical examination, he died in the hospital’s prison ward.

Ironically, Danticat explains that years earlier her uncle’s natural voice box had been removed when he had traveled to the United States for throat cancer treatment, which resulted in a tracheotomy, leaving him able to speak only with a battery-operated voice box. Immediately prior to his seizure during the asylum interview, he was asked to lean closer to the phone so that his interpreter, who was on the line instead of in the interview room, could understand him more clearly. Once the seizure began, he dropped the voice box: Vomit shot out of his mouth, his nose, as well as the tracheotomy hole in his neck. The vomit was spread all over his face, from his forehead to his chin, down the front of his dark blue Krome-issued overalls. There was also vomit on his thighs, where a large wet stain showed he had also urinated on himself.⁷ In a sense, his body betrays his voice as the vomit makes his voice box inoperable. With the loss of his voice, his body becomes material testimony, a physical response to the poor medical care during his incarceration that authorities, despite the physical evidence, refute—as he is deemed to be faking. That the seizure took place during the asylum interview indicates that the interview is the ultimate space of interdiction, which would have decided Joseph’s future in relation to the United States, because it becomes the space where his speech halts and his body breaks down. The officers bring Maxo from where he was being detained in another section of the facility to translate for his father and facilitate communication. When he points out that his father cannot speak without the voice box, Maxo urges his father to give a sign of physical movement and maybe they’ll let you go.⁸ Instead of acknowledging the desperate situation, the medic interprets Joseph’s stare and failed attempt to lift his hands as signs of rebelliousness: His eyes are open and he’s not unconscious…. I still think he’s faking.⁹

I begin with Danticat’s recounting of her uncle’s case because it exemplifies the main concerns of this book, which include the convergence of testimonial narrative, literary and public discourse for refugees and asylum seekers in the Americas. Brother, I’m Dying operates on a number of narrative registers. It testifies to the appalling conditions of the U.S. asylum process for asylum seekers, a process that has become increasingly criminalized in the country as demonstrated by Dantica’s shackling. In recounting the events that led to Dantica’s death, the narrative witnesses to Dantica’s unheeded verbal and physical testimonials so that it also functions as a human rights document. Danticat pieces together her uncle’s time in detention through hospital and government records, which include the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General’s report that declared, Dantica’s death was the result of an illness that likely pre-existed his entrance into the United States five days earlier. Finally, Brother, I’m Dying is also a literary text in the sense that Danticat, who was not an eye-witness, tells us that she must assume some aspects of the recounting.¹⁰ As such, she cannot testify to its absolute truth. The book tries to carry on as witness when Dantica could no longer do so. Thus, we must consider how testimonial narrative and human rights discourse become inflected through the literary.

Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse is the first interdisciplinary study of refugees, who are located in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States. Both the refugee seeking political asylum and the undocumented transnational laborer seeking economic refuge function as a new incarnation of the native informant who occupies some of the most contested spaces of articulation. In this book, I consider how testimony surfaces as a narrative device in fictional texts and public discourse. My title, Asylum Speakers, emphasizes the role of testimony in searching for refuge, the manner in which language can become a site of either comfort and sanctuary or expulsion and alienation. Those seeking asylum must become eloquent, persuasive speakers despite the enormous obstacles that can hinder testimony: trauma, memory, cultural differences, translation, and political ideologies. As Peter Nyers notes, The banished individual not only loses claim to a political community and identity but also is banished from the space where political speech is audible. This displacement from meaningful discourse also involves a dislodging of their claim to be human.¹¹ More often than not, refugees are denied credibility or even the right to speak on their own behalf. As Liisa Malkki argues, refugees often become so dehistoricized by institutional forces, including those of humanitarian organizations, that they are denied the ability to construct themselves as subjects through narrative. In doing so, they remain within the socially constructed realm of victim.¹²

Asylum Speakers focuses on refugees within the Americas—New World refugees—whose movements, whether they migrate toward the United States, are often tied to U.S. foreign policy in the hemisphere. The twentieth century saw an onslaught of refugee movements in the Americas, as a result of a number of dire circumstances including civil war, natural disaster, genocide, or failing economies, which forced people to flee their homelands. The wars in Central America, the Cuban Revolution, and political and economic upheavals in Haiti have propelled mass migrations throughout the hemisphere, with many refugees from these places attempting to gain asylum in the United States, often without much success.¹³ With increasing migration to the north, the United States has continued to tighten restrictions on asylum.¹⁴ For example, the number of refugees admitted into the United States has steadily declined (by 70 percent) in the last quarter-century.¹⁵ In 1995, the United States had committed itself to resettling about two tenths of 1 percent of the world’s refugees and displaced persons.¹⁶ Of these, refugees in the Americas made up a minute number.¹⁷ Such statistics underscore the falsehoods surrounding the narrative of the United States as a space of refuge and hospitality.

By placing the refugee at the center of my study, Asylum Speakers argues that the peripheral nature of refugee testimonial narratives requires reshaping the boundaries of U.S. ethnic, transnational, and postcolonial studies. None of these fields has dealt explicitly with refugee narratives and testimonial discourse in contemporary literature or public discourse in the Americas. Perhaps one reason for this void is the paradoxical position of the refugee native informant; refugees both embody transnationalism and refute it as they pursue rootedness in a new nation. As such, I interrogate transnational studies’ rejection of the nation-state as well as postcolonial studies continued privileging of it. Thus, this book aims to address this scholarly gap by placing these fields in dialogue while examining the role and function of refugee native informants vis-à-vis testimonial narrative. Asylum Speakers engages with questions regarding the central role of testimonial discourse in facilitating or hindering refugee movements, in determining if, or when, refugee voices are heard, and in determining whether a refugee becomes a legitimate member of a state. I aim to expand current discussions of diaspora and migration by examining the role of the refugee in New World cultural and political formations, and the function of testimonial discourse in constructing refugee subjectivity. Additionally, New World refugees, who may encounter a number of nations in their search for asylum, embody what J. Michael Dash proposes as a New World perspective: establishing new connections not only among the islands of the archipelago but also exploring the region in terms of the Césairean image of that frail, delicate umbilical cord that holds the Americas together.¹⁸ The prominence of the Caribbean in my study emphasizes what Dash refers to as the centrality of the Caribbean to the experience of the New World.¹⁹ Dash continues, "Including the Caribbean in any survey means ultimately more than simply expanding the literary canon to include new minorities or the heretofore marginalized. It means dismantling those notions of nation, ground, authenticity, and history on which more conventional surveys have been based and exploring concepts of cultural diversity, syncretism, and instability that characterize the island cultures of the Caribbean."²⁰ Additionally, I include a narrative of Central American refugees in my study in order to consider how refugee movements and narratives are a pan-American phenomenon. I assert that it is necessary to consider how the refugee is a central component to understanding the complexities of migratory movements in the Caribbean and rest of the Americas as they traverse the hemisphere. The fictional narratives and public discourse about refugees that I examine are also linked by their ties to the United States, signaling its role in propelling refugee movements via its foreign policy throughout the hemisphere. Many narratives that I examine are distinguished through refugee experience on the seas in boats.

The History of the Refugee

The conditions of displacement and asylum-seeking are not exclusive to the modern era.²¹ The term refugee can be traced to seventeenth-century France when it was used to describe French Huguenots who fled to England to escape religious persecution when Louis XIV in 1685 revoked the Edict of Nantes.²² Contemporaries distinguished this group as refugees because their plight stemmed from membership in a religious organization targeted for destruction by the governmental authorities of their own country, in peacetime and without any provocation of their own.²³ Current official configurations of the idea of refugee reflect similar considerations.²⁴ In the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees the United Nations defines a refugee as a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.²⁵ To understand the current official definition of refugee, it is necessary to understand the increasing institutionalization of the management of people fleeing persecution that occurred in the early to mid-twentieth century. In 1921, the League of Nations established an office to address the staggering numbers of displaced persons from Russia and eventually also those from Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria.²⁶ Although intended as a temporary measure, it continued to be necessary with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe, especially that of Nazi Germany. In 1936, a draft resolution, prepared by the Institute of International Law, defined a refugee as one who had left one’s state of origin owing to political events (to distinguish them from ordinary migrants). Debate was ongoing among nations over the definition, particularly because much of the globe’s population could be thought of as victims of ‘political events.’²⁷ One fear was that the vast number of people living under colonial rule could argue that they were victims of political events. Not only would this mean that exorbitant numbers of people could potentially claim the status of refugee, but it would also legitimize the view that colonial regimes were equivalent to other authoritarian regimes. In an attempt to circumvent an expansive definition of refugeeness, the official definition written into the 1951 Convention asserted that if one left a country due to political events, it had to be accompanied by persecution or the threat of persecution.²⁸ Thus, from its inception, the Refugee Convention was conceived of in Eurocentric terms, aimed at aiding displaced Europeans, but not as concerned with the non-Western world. In 1946, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) was established to deal with the approximately eleven million displaced people in Europe following World War II. In 1949, the United Nations High Commissioner’s Office for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to succeed the IRO. During this time, the UNHCR remained focused solely on those refugees in Europe, although other massive refugee movements were occurring elsewhere in the world, such as those following Indian Partition (1947).²⁹ The 1951 Refugee Convention stipulated that it would only apply to people who had become refugees prior to 1951, and maintained its focus on European refugees. Not until drafting the 1967 Protocol, however, did the UN address refugee movements outside Europe in the developing world. The shift in focus reflected the ongoing refugee crises following decolonization across Africa, South Asia, and other parts of the Third World.

Initially, the United States had limited involvement with the refugee crisis in Europe. This reluctance to engage with displaced populations came on the heels of a number of xenophobic legislative measures from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century that sought to limit immigration of certain nationalities. These included the Immigration Act of 1917, which banned immigration from India and Southeast Asia and instituted a literacy requirement. The National Origins Act of 1924, like a previous 1921 piece of legislation, instituted quotas based on national origin and favored immigrants from northern Europe; this act reflected a biologically essentialist attitude, which asserted that admitting too many people of non-European descent would lead to a degeneration of the U.S. population.³⁰ One concession made to the refugee crisis occurred in 1948 when, after years of debate, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, which permitted the admittance of 200,000 refugees into the United States; this legislation, however, excluded the majority of Jews.³¹ For the first time the U.S. government made an explicit legal distinction between refugees and other migrants.³² Significantly, the United States did not sign the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The passage of the highly restrictive McCarran-Walter Act (1952) sought to reassert the restrictive measures of the National Origins system. When the United States did allow refugees to be admitted, such admission considered ideological issues more than humanitarian ones. The refugee crisis following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 instituted the executive use of parole power, which authorized the attorney general to parole aliens temporarily in the United States and allowed 38,000 Hungarians to obtain asylum.³³ This same parole system allowed the entrance of multitudes of both Cubans following the Cuban revolution and Indochinese refugees from 1976 to 1978.

The 1965 Immigration Act, seeking to overhaul the system by which immigrants were admitted, erased the racial restrictions that had defined previous immigration laws. For the first time, refugees were given a quota of the total number of immigrants admitted each year to the United States, although they were largely restricted to those coming from the Middle East or Communist nations. The United States subsequently ratified the 1967 protocol to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but not until 1980 did Congress pass the Refugee Act which built into American law the Refugee Convention’s definition of a refugee, expanding it slightly to include those who had been persecuted, as well as those with a well-founded fear of future persecution, on the basis of one of the five listed grounds.³⁴ While the Refugee Act included a measure specifically for granting asylum by allowing refugees to remain in the country permanently, an ongoing battle over asylum in the United States has raged ever since. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, in particular, created more restrictive legislation for the admittance of immigrants and refugees. Among other things, the act required asylum seekers to be detained while their cases were being assessed and allowed for expedited removal of undocumented aliens without hearing.³⁵ These conditions became further restricted following 9/11.³⁶

Refugee as Homo Sacer

The central requirement for the definition of a refugee rests on exclusion from a country of origin; refugees are no longer members of a nation-state and no longer have access to political or human rights protections afforded by a nation-state. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics—the increasingly powerful role that politics has played in defining life in the modern era—Giorgio Agamben develops the figure of homo sacer, an obscure figure in archaic Roman law, in which human life is excluded in the juridical order to articulate the condition of those subjects who have been stripped of political rights and exist as bare life.³⁷ For Agamben, this contemporary notion of bare life marks a reconceptualization of state power and serves as an unprecedented defining figure for modern politics. This bare life is produced through a state of exception where the sovereign suspends the existing order of law to expand sovereign power. In so doing, the sovereign ensures its power to continue to exist as sovereign. Here Agamben is drawing on Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty as the power to suspend all rule of law; he views this as something that has become the norm in modern politics. The prevalence of a homo sacer, who has been abandoned by law, indicates the pervasiveness of the state of exception. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camp serves as the paradigmatic example of this kind of political control over modern life (biopolitics). Agamben also includes refugees as examples of those who are stripped of political rights and embody bare life. They are simultaneously both excluded by sovereign power and included to enable the sovereign to maintain its power. This paradoxical state in which bare life exists—outside and inside the polity—is a zone of irreducible indistinction.³⁸ The sovereign must continuously exclude and include the refugee to maintain its power.

Agamben’s theorization of homo sacer has received an enormous amount of academic attention in part because of the ways in which he engages the questions of human life and modern politics. Homo sacer, although a useful category for considering the profound impact of political banishment on subjects, can also be limiting through its sole emphasis on destitution, which can perpetuate stereotypes of refugees as victims, without agency. For example, refugee is a category generated by the UN human rights enterprises, but it is also an unstable category, in which subjectivity can be undermined by the very human rights practices that seek to aid refugees. In her study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, Liisa Malkki writes of how the administrators of international aid organizations acknowledged the legal claim of refugee status of the Hutus; however, through their expectations of how refugees were supposed to appear and exist as victimized bare humans, the administrators depolitiz[ed] the refugee category and construct[ed] in that depoliticized space an ahistorical, universal humanitarian subject that can strip from them the authority to give credible narrative evidence or testimony about their own condition in politically and institutionally consequential forums.³⁹ Thus it is important to attend to the institutionally and socially constructed inflections of refugees as destitute, starving, mute, downtrodden bare life.

Furthermore, many scholars of the Caribbean have also critiqued Agamben’s emphasis on the Nazi concentration camp as the ultimate site of the conditions that produce a homo sacer in modern politics, and Agamben’s critics have likewise taken issue with his silence around the question of European empire-building that created a state of exception that featured myriad forms of biopolitical manipulation. In his study of New World slavery, Ian Baucom points out that, despite his reliance upon Carl Schmitt, who developed his notion of sovereignty in relation to the New World, Agamben disregard[s] the New World in favor of the old, [and] he thus leaves absent from his account not only the territories of the Caribbean and the Americas but the history of New World slavery and that vast number of persons subjected through slavery, to the mode of sovereignty whose planetary history he had originally intended to write.⁴⁰ I find Agamben’s use of homo sacer productive for imagining the status of refugees and political banishment; yet, keeping in mind his limited historical application, for my purposes, it is necessary to consider how the bare life of New World refugees is linked to prior moments of a lack of sovereignty and citizenship in the region, owing to colonialism and slavery. Particularly, my discussions of Haitian refugees are necessarily linked to the Middle Passage as a state of exception, especially because the writers whom I discuss in chapter 1 make these links explicit.

Neoliberal States of Exception

Furthermore, it is important to consider the ways in which global capitalism, which has increasingly reconfigured state structures, creates other states of exception. The contemporary status of many transnational laborers whose movements are often the result of neoliberal policies originating in the industrialized Western nations must also be considered in relation to the rise of capitalism during European empirebuilding. Undocumented transnational laborers also represent bare life as they exist without political rights, sometimes in conditions that mimic those of a refugee camp, another kind of zone of indistinction. For example, Haitian cane cutters are forced to live in bateyes while they work in the Dominican Republic, and the flag of convenience ship has become the ultimate site of free-floating capital and dangerous working conditions for contemporary seafarers. This is not to suggest that all neoliberal states of exception produce bare life or produce it in the same way. In the context of refugees in the Americas, however, neoliberalist practices have often had devastating effects that are intertwined with totalitarian political regimes—like the Duvaliers in Haiti—or a vested interest in subverting revolutionary movements—like those in Central America. Thus, while my use of the term refugee includes those people who are officially recognized as such—those who are deemed official refugees by NGOs or a nation-state and successfully navigate official channels to gain this status—I also expand the term refugee to include those displaced persons who do not gain official refugee status as political asylees but nevertheless have fled their nation of origin because of political and/or economic hardships to become stateless people. In doing so, I challenge UN, state, and other institutional definitions that exclude economic circumstances as a basis for asylum. The narratives that I examine reveal that for many refugees the links between politics and economics are inextricable. Thus, I am interested in blurring the lines of demarcation between political and economic; the latter has historically been used to deny asylum claims, particularly for Haitians, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans, who have sought asylum in the United States but been denied because the U.S. government has supported the regimes from which they fled and perceived the refugees to be seeking solely better economic opportunities.⁴¹ In fact, asylum determinations have often been based on the types of economies from which refugees come. In the decades following World War II, Cold War politics defined U.S. refugee policy so that those who fled communist nations were typically automatically granted asylum (for example, Cubans). Peter Nyers explains how in the drafting of the UN Refugee Convention, UN delegates of Western states consistently advocated for a refugee definition that would prioritize international protection efforts for people whose flight could be construed as being motivated by pro-Western values. The result of this debate, of course, is a Convention that promotes respect for liberal civil and political rights and makes no mention at all of socioeconomic rights … whereby people displaced by market forces are excluded from qualifying for refugee status.⁴² From this liberal perspective a distinction is drawn between natural nonpolitical market activity and the collectivized command economies of the communist nations [which are seen] as unnatural—indeed as political—arrangements imposed by totalitarian regimes.⁴³

The distinctions made between those fleeing communism versus those fleeing other political structures has had profound effects on New World refugees who have sought asylum in the United States. Philip G. Schrag notes that shortly after the United States passed the Refugee Act of 1980, human rights violations soared during conflicts in Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua so that large numbers of people who might reasonably claim to be refugees under the new act could without too much difficulty (compared with similarly situated Asians or Africans), reach American shores. Asylum applications rose from 3,700 in 1978, to … 63,000 in 1981.⁴⁴ However, reflecting the political agenda of U.S. foreign policy, which supported the regimes in Haiti and El Salvador, in 1983, only 2 percent of Haitian and 3 percent of Salvadoran applicants were granted asylum.⁴⁵ Meanwhile, refugees fleeing communism were granted asylum at a much higher rate with 78 percent of Russians and 44 percent of Romanians obtaining it during the same period.⁴⁶ Similarly, those people who were seen as fleeing Castro in Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were granted asylum at much higher rates than other refugees from throughout the Americas.

Nyers notes that although refugees may fear the dire effects of economic destitution, in the eyes of the UN Refugee Convention (and nations such as the United States, which have adopted the UN definition) this does not constitute a political (well-founded) fear and instead is recast as ‘despair.’⁴⁷ However, the economies of the Caribbean, Central America, and elsewhere in the Americas, have been regulated by the World Bank and IMF policies, which themselves are largely governed by Western nations, especially the United States, so that these economies cannot be extracted from politics. The adoption of neoliberal economic policies has often accelerated the breakdown of the structures of nations throughout the circum-Caribbean. In this sense, those who seek economic refuge outside their home nation are simultaneously seeking refuge from the politics that govern those economies. Paradoxically, this can mean that these refugees seek economic asylum in the very place in which the policies that govern the economies of their home nations are made. Focusing on the dilemmas that contemporary refugees confront in seeking asylum, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness Derrida notes the aporia between political and economic refugee status that nation-states increasingly exploit to deny refugees asylum:

How can a purely political refugee claim to have been truly welcomed into a new settlement without that entailing some form of economic gain? … This distinction between the economic and the political … makes it virtually impossible ever to grant political asylum and even, in a sense, to apply the law, for in its implementation it would depend entirely on opportunistic considerations, occasionally electoral and political, which, in the last analysis, become a matter for the police, of real and imaginary security issues, of demography, and of the market. The discourse on the refugee, asylum or hospitality, thus risks becoming nothing but pure rhetorical alibis.⁴⁸

The fictional narratives, photographs, human rights documents, and governmental documents that I examine in this book present specific examples of the ways that state (in)hospitality manifests vis-à-vis political and labor