Tester

normalized and enforced ahead of
its unveiling. For de Genova, the
obscene is already out in the open,
despite being publicly disavowed.
This is paramount to the
Border Spectacle’s capacity to
reify the legitimacy of border enforcement.
Its primary operation
is to make the contingent process
of political calculation that
forms the very premise of migrant
‘illegality’ disappear entirely
from view. De Genova writes
In place of the social and political
relation of migrants to the
state…the spectacle of border
enforcement yields up the thinglike
fetish of migrant ‘illegality’ as
a self-evident ‘fact’, generated by
its own supposed act of violation.
The Spectacle strategically elides
the terms under which migrating
people are incorporated into the
workings of the neoliberal state.
This elision requires a double maneuver,
in which the “scene of exclusion”
is continually asserted over
the “obscene of inclusion.”
The ‘scene of exclusion’ is, in
de Genova’s terms, where border
enforcement “performatively activates
the reification of migrant
‘illegality’ in an emphatic and
grandiose gesture of exclusion.”
It features iconic and particularly
fetishized figures of ‘illegal immigration,’
through which “the
purported naturalness and putative
necessity of exclusion may be
demonstrated and verified, validated
and legitimated, redundantly.”
The scene of exclusion justifies
itself. The dissemination of such
scenes insists that migrants do not
belong where they are, should not
go where they are going and that
their removal is inevitable. The
scenes depend on the development
and cooptation of certain stereotypes
and tropes, which are used to
criminalize migration and enforce
white supremacy.
These caricatures are hyperreal,
emerging not from any enduring
qualities of actual migrating
people but from the securitarian
management of fear. The Border
Spectacle participates in and draws
legitimacy from hygienic nationalism,
which imagines foreign
contagions perpetually invading
the state from its margins. In de
Genova’s words, the border is figured
as a “space of encounter, interaction
and exchange,” materializing
a “constitutive indeterminacy
at the liminal edge of the state and
law.” The sense of boundary loss
and its resulting anxiety becomes
sublimated into what postcolonial
theorist Anne McClintock, talking
about Victorian-era imperialism,
calls a ‘porno-tropic’: an imagined
space in which “knowledge of the
unknown world [is] mapped as a
metaphysics of gender violence”
where “the world is feminized and
spatially spread for male explora-
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