Transcript

Saida Hodžić [S Hodžić 0:00]: I drove here last night, from Ithaca, New York. And as I was approaching the border, I could first sense the border before I saw any signs for the border. All of a sudden it was easier to drive. It was, it was nighttime, and instead of sporadic lights, there were a lot of lights. There was a sparse, depopulated, almost barren kind of eerie landscape. And there were no signs that the border was coming. And so it was really palpable that we remained visible, and that that's a part of what this means. And so I was thinking that my work, and I think the work of so many of us—and thank you for all of you who are here, thank you for Harsha for being here—is to actually do the opposite, which is to make the border imperialism visible.

Alejandro Echeverria [AE 0:48]: At the annual 2023 American Anthropological Association meeting in Toronto, Canada, the Society for the Anthropology of Work (or “SAW”) held a roundtable discussion celebrating Harsha Walia’s contributions. At the roundtable, anthropologists from a variety of subfields, communities, and career stages discussed Walia’s impact on anthropology and migrant labor activism.

I’m Alejandro Echeverria.

Debbie Philip [DP 1:14]: I’m Deborah Philip.

Sharon Jacobs [SJ 1:16]: And I’m Sharon Jacobs. You’re listening to part two of a mini-series on the ideas and influence of writer, scholar, and organizer Harsha Walia.

[01:26 Podington Bear—All the Colors in the World plays]

DP [1:36]: Harsha Walia’s publications include the 2021 book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, and the 2013 book Undoing Border Imperialism. She was awarded SAW’s Conrad M. Arensberg Award for 2023.

SJ [1:56]: The words that opened this episode come from Saida Hodžić. An anthropologist at Cornell University, Hodžić is also the founder and organizer of the Refugees Know Things project and podcast. She was one of the roundtable participants.

AE [2:12]: Here at AnthroPod, we’ve collected highlights from the roundtable. In sequential order, we’ll hear from the roundtable participants Arjun Shankar, Adrian Godboldt, Natasha Raheja, Stephen Campbell, Gerardo Rodriguez Solis, Seth Holmes, and Saida Hodžić. Each of them will share how Harsha Walia’s insights have affected their own projects, inside and outside of academia.

[02:42 Yellow—TreeAmbient R&B plays]

Arjun Shankar (AS) [2:53]: In Brown Saviors, I'm concerned with the nonprofit industrial complex and the way it's situated within twenty-first-century global-racial-caste capitalism.

AE [3:02]: First up is Arjun Shankar, assistant professor of culture and politics at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Shankar is author of the 2022 book Brown Saviors and their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India. Shankar wasn’t able to make it to Toronto for the annual meeting, and instead recorded his comments by video.

AS [3:27]: While it's an under-acknowledged aspect of the coloniality of power, colonial racial capitalism actually required and requires an economy of self-evasion that demarcates racialized and gender difference in hierarchy, along with the savior-saved binary. However, if in the twentieth century, the white savior reigned supreme within the global labor hierarchies of salvation, now the key figures are predominantly Brown.

In my own project, these brown saviors are globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal, Indian and Indian-diasporic technologists who are assumed to be the appropriate actors to do the work of development, poverty alleviation, and the like because of the digital prowess, supposed cultural authenticity, and ancestral struggle against colonization. “Brownness” in this global racial politics is a commodity for a twenty-first-century economy of South Asia that requires diversity and inclusion as part of its proof of legitimacy.

AE [4:22]: Shankar described Harsha Walia’s book Border and Rule as an essential tool for understanding the brown savior.

AS [4:28]: Figures like the brown savior reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have been passed down from the colonial period, really sanitizing projects of global accumulation in this late-liberal fascist period.

In fact, Walia’s careful attention to the continuities between the liberal and the fascist order was key in helping me address one of the major dilemmas in my book: Why were the NGOs I was studying seemingly unimpacted by the rise of Hindutva in India, even as many other NGOs had come under extreme attacks by the right-wing government?

Partly, I thought the answer was something about their perceived nativity, which makes them, from the perspective of state, safe.

But then I realized that did not quite capture why these NGOs were safe. Instead, Walia’s work helps us to see that these NGOs are safe because they, like the fascist state, see their practices as technocratic, one of India's colonial inheritances for governance that works equally well under authoritarianism and liberal regimes. In fact, the Hindutva government articulates almost all of its claims through the rhetoric of universal technocratic economic development, the means for the nation to continue to accumulate capital. In other words, what keeps such NGOs safe is the fact that they sit on the same side of, and do not critique, the racialized stratifications linked to caste, religion, etcetera, upon which twenty-first-century accumulation occurs.

This insight is why I've come to believe that the kind of global racial capitalist critique Walia outlines is so fundamental to understanding our current world order.

AE [6:03] In addition to discussing their own ethnographic projects, many of the roundtable participants spoke how Harsha Walia’s writing affected their teaching, as educators who are situated in neoliberal academic institutions. Here’s what Shankar had to say on that topic:

AS [6:20]: Beyond my book, Walia’s work has helped me to think about my classroom and my students, especially those who want to join an NGO. When my students hear that their do-gooder ambitions may simply be a further re-entrenching of our global system of racial capitalism, they're frozen in guilt, not knowing where to turn or what exactly to do. But when they read Walia’s book, they begin to see that there's no time to give up or be frozen, that they need to be able to sit with discomfort and recognize that their discomfort is a call to action. Whether they work within the nonprofit industrial complex or not, they will still be living in a racial, gendered, and caste-capitalist world. There's no outside, and there's no pure position, and there will be work to be done no matter which life path they choose.

What they take away is that whatever their position within the system, the system itself requires annihilation and a radical reimagining. Most important, they begin to extend their imagination beyond the very limited confines of the nonprofit-industrial complex to engage with the vast number of radical solidarity movements that already recognize the inseparability of neoliberalism and fascism, and are working to create futures that don't yet exist.

If there's one thing that Walia’s book makes clear, it is that we need to learn how to be in solidarity and move beyond the comfortable position of savior. As Walia herself writes, “Empires crumble. Capitalism is not inevitable. Gender is not biology. Whiteness is not immutable. Prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law. We can weave solidarities through the lens of abundance rather than scarcity and celebrate the interdependence of the particularities of our humanities. We can and must embrace a basic yet expansive vision. No human being is illegal.”

DP [8:05]: That last quote came from Border and Rule, which was published by worker-run collective AK Press. Speaking of Walia’s influence on students, the roundtable heard from Adrian Godboldt, who is studying towards a PhD in anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Godboldt discussed the collaborative work he did with a local community radio station in Lexington, Kentucky, while working towards his applied master’s.

Adrian Godboldt (AG) [8:35]: I partnered with Radio Lex because of their response in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear released crucial and daily updates—which is at a moment in the U.S when we're being delivered a constant and conflicting stream of information, from needing to wipe down your groceries before bringing them indoors, to being told not to buy in mass.

However, there was a huge oversight with these updates. This information was only disseminated in English. And for context, the city of Lexington is just shy of 322,000 people, which almost a quarter of that population are foreign language speakers.

Radio Lex took it upon themselves to translate these updates into ten different languages, as well as translating other information into twenty different languages—including Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, Japanese, Nepali, Kinyarwanda, and Chinese Mandarin, just to name a few.

This oversight isn't particularly surprising if we remind ourselves of what rhetoric was being espoused nationally. However, this work does present us a point of reflection through forms of border governance strategies, as mapped out by Walia.

DP [9:36]: Godboldt pointed specifically to the importance of Harsha Walia’s understanding of exclusion, discursive control, territorial diffusion, and commodified inclusion.

AG [9:47]: Exclusion and discursive control, not in the sense of determining which language to describe migrants or refugees, but the complete unwillingness to even recognize non-English speakers in our communities, to utter language other than English.

Territorial diffusion, in the sense that Radio Lex is in the northern part of the city, which is a predominantly Black neighborhood, and is facing ongoing processes of gentrification. And it's not only dealing with the effects of government bodies that racial exclusion geographically but sonically, as radio waves become commoditized within a neoliberal market, or national corporations such as iHeart Media buy up more spaces that continue to silence local voices, as those voices are physically pushed to the edges of the city.

This is further problematized with commodified inclusion, as migrant workers are still expected to work in these increasingly precarious conditions of the pandemic, with no safety precautions or information provided. These bodies are made to be precarious, and if support isn’t provided from the state—and discursive platforms and spaces are handed over to private capital that could care less about the local—then responsibility for care falls upon the community to fill in silence and center the voices that are ignored.

So, there was a need to build a reliant infrastructure for migrant communities that are ignored. And I collaborated with Radio Lex to produce an onboarding guide to help train diverse community journalists to ensure more resilience and establish a network of information in the case of other disasters.

DP [11:08]: Godboldt discussed the relationship between field work and home work, drawing on Christina Sharpe, Sara Ahmed, and Hilda Lloréns, and the necessity to break down barriers between the university and the world around it—which was a topic of concern for several roundtable participants, and one that we’ll return to later in this episode.

SJ [11:34]: But first, let’s hear more from the roundtable on the barriers and borders that divide people into different states.

Natasha Raheja [NR 11:41]: By focusing on the political violence of borders, rather than the criminal violence of individual countries, and the identities of their attendant majoritarian regimes, we see the nation-state structure itself as rotten and in need of reimagination. Walia shows us how respective nationalist governments comprise a field of interconnected border imperialist state actors. States, as we know and learn from Walia, and others work together in cascading ways to disenfranchise the migrant and refugee ‘other.’

And I'm thinking right now about Pakistan's mass deportation, for example, of Afghans. Rather than seeing states in the proverbial ‘Global South’ as separate actors who do the bidding of the U.S. and its kind of imperial regime, border imperialism offers a framework that locates accountability in the structure of the state and the ruling class regimes that work in tandem with each other.

SJ [12:40]: Natasha Raheja is a political and visual anthropologist and assistant professor at Cornell University. She produces writing and ethnographic film studying majority-minority relations and majoritarianism in the context of South Asia.

NR [12:57]: Walia’s critique of borders shapes my own kind of focus on liberal democracy’s minority-majority equation for how it reifies the exclusion of minorities from body politics and fixes majoritarian rule. Like the multiplication, flexibility, and fractalization of borders that Walia writes about, the majority-minority equation of liberal democracy has become a recursive pathway for generating permanent, substantive majorities and minorities. And my own research and work considers how majority-minority politics exceeds state borders in ways that are not nation bound. In particular, Walia’s insights are instructive for me as I specifically think through the way that we can observe how national majorities come to see themselves as global minorities, towards justifying their own nationalist rule.

So I'm interested in, specifically, religious nationalist ideologies, like unmarked Christian secularism, Zionism, Hindutva, and Islamization, and the ways that these religious nationalist ideologies construct global religious communities of suffering and redeem them through state forms of recognition, like special citizenship policies that privilege citizens based on their religion.

In the context of South Asia, where I do my research, as a legacy of colonial rules and enumerative technologies like the census and deterritorialization of minority rights, states across the region today count their populations in terms of religious majorities and minorities. And my own research considers how the majority-minority politics of, specifically, Pakistan and India are linked phenomena—whereby each country holds its minorities hostage in relation to each other. And in particular, I look at how minoritized religious groups in Muslim-majoritarian Pakistan may seek recognition as part of an ostensible majority religious group in Hindu-majoritarian India.

[14:57] And this is specifically in the case of the 2019 passage of India's ethnonationalist citizenship Amendment Act, that privileges the migration of minoritized Hindus from Pakistan. And studying how the minority in one context is a majority in another context, and how majorities construe themselves as minorities by gesturing towards the past and to other locales, helps us to understand the mechanics of majoritarian rule as a feature of the nation-state order, not an aberration. And I think this is what Walia’s work really points us to, all of the things that we're talking about as features (and not aberrations) of liberalism.

AE [15:37]: Of course, Walia’s work deals not only with the conditions within particular nation-states, but also their interconnections and global relationality. Many of the roundtable participants touched on the issue of migration as well as cross-border racial capitalism. Stephen Campbell is a sociocultural anthropologist at the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Stephen Campbell (SC) [16:01]: Some anthropology does have a tendency to kind of fetishize the field site, zoom in on the local, and not kind of engage in a global relational analysis. There is a rich tradition in anthropology that does a kind of global relational, historical anthropology. But that's not always the case. So I think one of the provocations or prompts that we can get from Harsha Walia’s work is to say that we need to recognize that these sites that we work in are part of global relational processes—framed as imperialist capitalist processes at a global level—and to be explicit about those global relational processes, and to maybe push back a little bit against that the fetishization of the field site and of ethnography in terms of participant observation.

AE [16:43]: Campbell talked about how he finds Walia’s work to be a more precise and contemporary explanation of the structure of human migration today, compared to turn-of-the-millennium theoretical frameworks.

SC [16:54]: Now, there was a moment in the 1990s and early 2000s when anthropologists were very much enamored by the possibility of post-Cold War mobility and global flows. So think of the work of Arjun Appadurai, for example. But it has since become very evident, very clear, that concepts like global flows and mobility have been inadequate and unable to grasp the unfreedoms and immobility that structure the movement of the vast majority of humanity today.

Now, in my own anthropological work on displaced migrant refugees in Southeast Asia, Harsha Walia’s work and writing has pushed me to be more explicit in naming displacement, unfreedom, and immobility as underlying structural conditions. This displacement, unfreedom, and immobility condition the lives of the Burmese migrant-refugees on whom my own research has focused.

Now for well over a decade, I've been working closely with a group called the Yan Gu Workers Association, which is a migrant worker-run organization based on the Thai-Myanmar border. And the struggles of the Myanmar migrant-refugees that Yan Gu supports and has been engaged with have been shaped by the ways in which formal and informal regulation confines migrants to particular spaces and threatens them with deportation. So confinement, immobility, and unfreedom are central.

Now, all of this works to depress migrant wages below what any simplistic supply-and-demand curve might suggest. And that's why we use the concept of “super exploitation.”

So what this creates is an imperialist or apartheid-like racial capitalist formation, in which the logic and violence of borders figures centrally.

[18:56] And I also acknowledge that the displacement, unfreedom, and immobility of migrant laborers subsidize and make possible many of the comforts in Singapore, which is where I live and work. So this fact has also motivated me over recent years to be involved with a local Singaporean migrant advocacy and support organization, Transient Workers Count Too, which has been very much engaged with the struggles of migrant laborers in Singapore.

DP [19:25]: As anthropologists, we’re always part of the stories we tell. For those of us who study, teach, or do research at universities, that also means we’re implicated in the ways our universities do—or don’t—choose to engage with the communities around them. How can we reach audiences outside academia, and how can we counter the forces of exclusion and gentrification that our universities often perpetuate? To that end, Gerardo Rodriguez Solis, PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, spoke about encountering Harsha Walia’s work in non-academic and mixed spaces.

Gerardo Rodriguez Solis [20:10]: I remember how I met the book Undoing Border Imperialism. And I remember that an anarchist friend, also a graduate student in Santa Barbara, told me about this book in a little anarchist store on the street in Santa Barbara. And he told me, yeah, you have to read it.

I remember that because also, we met in our Black radical tradition reading group in Santa Barbara, that was open to the public, organized from the Black Studies Department. Later, he and I and other friends organized activities, as we're into a call of the Zapatistas communities, autonomous communities in Chiapas to talk about the militarization and the violence in Chiapas that was happening, is happening.

So to me, that's an example of how, yeah, we can talk about the activism or struggles mentioned in the field work, right, in this, like, artificial division of fieldwork and scholarly spaces. But also it's important to understand how can we create another academy—even abolish the academy, right? We understand right now. But to me, this kind of example of how the Black radical tradition, anarchism, Zapatistas communities—we can be within the academy in other ways, right? And how can we be, even in not physically related but also in terms of ideas and struggles, could be within the academy and go against the academy as a bubble in the cities or in the communities when we can. The book, to me, also helped me to try to break this division of the academy and the rest of the community in the cities.

SJ [21:55]: Many of the roundtable participants valued how Walia’s work can uniquely cross social borders between the academy and its outsides. Seth Holmes discussed Walia’s importance in the context of ethnography and social theory.

Seth M. Holmes (SMH) [22:11]: Ethnography, the method of being in places, paying attention to things that we don't usually pay attention to, has this powerful ability to break through received knowledge that we've gotten from the world, that we've gotten from politicians and movies, and maybe our parents or whatever. That we see things, we hear answers to questions we didn't even ask because we didn't know to ask them. And so I think ethnography can be really powerful.

I think social theory can be really powerful to break down received knowledge. Sometimes social theory fucks us up and makes us more bourgeois than we already are. But sometimes it really helps us see things differently. And I think the work that Harsha Walia and colleagues have put together in this book helps us have frameworks to see the connection between the experience of the person or the people or the families in ethnography connected with the global situation and look more at responsibility, who's responsible, and not just think about the people who are being displaced, and what crisis we imagine they're causing, as opposed to the people who are causing the crisis for all of us, in different ways.

SJ [23:24]: Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a physician. He’s the author of the ethnographic monograph Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Indigenous Mexican Farmworkers in the United States. He’s also written for popular media, including The Huffington Post and Salon.com, and spoken on public radio programs.

SMH [23:50]: For me, I love having been trained as an anthropologist with ethnography and social theory. It feels really critical and counter cultural encounter status quo—or at least, it can be. At the same time that I don't usually imagine myself writing for anthropology, I understand that that can be really helpful. I read anthropologists who write for anthropology, and they make me think differently. I imagine using those tools that change the way I think and break up the way that I thought I knew how the world worked, to then write for broader audiences, or to try to shift the world some, be part of public debate.

It’s part of that, that last quote that I really liked: “Even amidst omnipresent violence [which we can't not be aware of, and we probably should be even more aware of] we have to remember that the future is a process we generate through our collective commitment to organizing” every day. And I think anthropology can be a part of that, both as anthropologists, and as refugees and migrants, all the different identities we carry.

AE [24:57]: Holmes spoke about how being an anthropologist is always one among many interconnected identities we carry. The complexities of embodied positionality also came out in Saida Hodžić’s contribution to the roundtable. Hodžić is an associate professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is author of The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life After NGOs, published in 2017. Her work blends personal experience with observation and theory.

S Hodžić [25:30]: For me, Harsha Walia's work gives us the structure. It names, explains, and analyzes what that is. And so my work shows how that structure is lived, experienced, and what it does to people's lives, communities, places, in various kinds of narrative forms. I approach it, actually, through a lot of auto-ethnographic work that has to do with the communities that I've been a part of, places—both those in which I live, and so I pay attention to what's happening with the U.S.—but I also pay attention to what's happening at the border between Bosnia and the European Union, what's happening with extraction of labor from Bosnia and other parts of Eastern Europe to Germany, and other places.

This year, I went to an exhibit called “Who We Are” in the German national museum, in Bonn. And it's an exhibit about migration. And a lot of it is about the guest worker program. And the entire exhibit was framed around the idea that that belonged to the past. The guest workers stuff is the story of the past, it's not the story of the present. And so, there was one video that said, you know, I talked to my students about this. And they're like, what? They didn't even know the word.

And that kind of amnesia about the present in which we are situated, in which Germany extracts labor, and extracts labor that sustains life elsewhere, that would sustain life elsewhere, but cannot, can no longer do that, is completely made invisible.

DP [27:14]: At the time that this roundtable took place, on November 17, we were about a month into Israel’s catastrophic assault on the Gaza strip. At that time, over 12,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza alone, in addition to state and settler violence in the West Bank and Israel, and 1,200 Israeli deaths on October 7. The death toll in Gaza had exceeded 30,000 people by the end of February, and the numbers of murdered, injured, and starving people are still increasing. Hodžić connected Walia’s work to Israeli genocide in Palestine and European reactions to it.

S Hodžić [27:59]: Let me move to another story that is related to this, which is a story of somebody who could have worked in Germany as a health worker who is a speech therapist, but who was not, who never got a chance to go to Germany. His name is Faris, and he is in Gaza. And he tried to get out, he was a refugee in Bosnia. He was a refugee on the Balkan route, rather, who never made it to the European Union because of the illegal but coordinated militarized border imperialism there.

And so he's back, and he writes updates now about what's happening every day. And had he been successful, one of the organizations that would have helped him—one of the organizations whose work I follow—is called Grandmothers Against the Right. They are an organization in Austria, a feminist organization who are united against the right. In the middle of October, Grandmothers Against the Right posted a statement saying that we must stand with Israel, and Israel has the right to defend itself.

And so that made me think about all the layers of Islamophobia that have permeated my experience of refuge, that permeate borders today. And that permeate this relationship between the idea that you can have an organization that supports refugees—first of all, Faris never got to be supported. Second of all, what does it mean to be willing to support somebody as a refugee, but to will their displacement, to will their destruction, to will their death?

[29:44] So, to make visible the kind of violence that's inherent in refugee advocacy, is something that I'm committed to and for me, Harsha Walia's work serves as a really important structure to show what dispossession, displacement look like, and how they connect to what Adrian told us about, which is the institutional and the disciplinary forces that we're all entangled with.

[30:14 Podington Bear—All the Colors in the World plays]

SJ [30:23]: Thank you for listening to this episode of AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. To learn more about the scholars whose voices you’ve heard, as well as Harsha Walia herself, please visit our website at culanth.org. That’s c-u-l-a-n-t-h-dot-org. You’ll also find a transcript of this episode and citations for all academic works mentioned. My name is Sharon Jacobs, and I produced this episode with Alejandro Echeverria and Deborah Philip. Special thanks to Jenny Shaw from the Society for the Anthropology of Work for organizing the roundtable discussions and spearheading this episode.