Racism and Borders: Representation, Repression, Resistance

Jeff Shantz

Jan 2010 · Algora Publishing

About this ebook

Despite claims about globalization, we see increasing surveillance, tightened restrictions and growing punitive regimes at international borders. This critical collection examines processes of racialization in relation to border regulations and restrictions. It analyses border controls, racism, and representations of race, within multinational contexts as aspects of neo-liberal governance. It also looks at means by which people resist or challenge racialization. While policies like SB 1070, Arizona s now infamous immigration legislation, have raised issues of racial profiling and policing practices, there have been few detailed analyses of broader practices of racialization and racism at borders more extensively. Some works have focused specifically upon profiling, without looking at varied processes of racialization. In addition, most studies of border controls have examined the US context, while few have looked at racism and racialization and borders in multinational contexts as the current work does. Using the lenses of sociology, criminology, art, literary criticism and political science, the work critically examines varied processes of racialization, criminalization and resistance in relation to borders in the current period, and provides analyses of constructions of race and repressive border policies, beyond profiling, within multinational contexts. and examines critically larger policy questions in the context of neoliberal governance practices. It can serve as a primary or supplementary text for university courses in Criminology, Sociology, Politics, Geography, Cultural Studies and International Affairs; beyond academia, it provides a useful resource for civil liberties and human rights groups, advocacy movements and community organizations supporting immigrants and refugees as well as those representing members of racialized non-migrant communities in diverse contexts. -- Product Description.

About the author

Jeff Shantz, editor of Radical Criminology, is an anarchist activist, poet, and sociologist, currently teaching critical criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia. His books Active Anarchy: Political Practice in Contemporary Movements (Lexington, 2011), Constructive Anarchy: Building Infrastructures of Resistance (Ashgate, 2010), and Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid Beyond Communism (punctum, 2013) offer autoethnographic analyses of anarchist participation within contemporary social movements.