University of Ottawa Press Migration and Racialization in Times of “Crisis”: The Making of Crises and their Effects (Studies in International Development and Globalization)

A critical analysis of modern history highlights the sequence of crises and their permanence. This permanence reveals a paradox: the repetition of crises (health, ecological, financial, humanitarian, refugee, etc.) shows that the state of non-crisis does not really exist, and that “crisis” refers rather to a stable phenomenon of “government by crisis” (Hage, 205: 145), enabling the maintenance and reproduction of racial and patriarchal capitalism. We might therefore suggest that an analysis of the process of crisis makes visible the necropolitics of power (Mbembe, 2006), the control exercised by states over the very possibility of life. From this point of view, the grammar of crisis serves to silence the structures of oppression at the root of “crises”, if only to legitimize the violation of rights and freedoms and the reinforcement of surveillance, profiling and arbitrary arrests (Al-Ali, 2020). Issues of which black and racialized people, indigenous communities and refugees and migrants are often the first to bear the brunt. Based on the analysis of a plurality of “crises”―health, migration, aboriginal, academic freedom, Islam, etc.―taking place in different socio-historical contexts, this book explores the manufacture of “crisis” and its grammar. It does so particularly in terms of populist and supremacist ideologies, as well as their sociological effects “of visibility and ignorance” (Aguiton et al., 2019:10) on migrant, black, racialized and indigenous people. This book is twofold: based on the same problematic, an English and a French version are available. The two versions feature different authors and chapters.