Captive maternals and democracy as Hegelian Sittlichkeit: the case of the undocumented, incarcerated, and racialized in the United States and India

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to theorise the labour and corporeal carcerability of the non-citizen non-subjects in contemporary democracies of the United States and India. I reappropriate Joy James’ framework of ‘Captive Maternals’ to understand the relationality between the undocumented, racialised, or incarcerated with the neo-liberal states that they inhabit and serve but where they do not belong. James describes Captive Maternals as those bodies subject to consumption by the democratic order in the tradition of slavery. I expand upon her framework to argue that the dehumanisation of illegal ‘aliens’ and racially policed bodies not only challenges the notion of freedom in the modern democratic social organisation but rather manifests the fundamental correlation between democratic sovereignty and its exclusionary violence. This phenomenon internal to the workings of democracies challenges Hegel’s idealisation of the modern rational state as the most advanced form of government characterised primarily by freedom. Democracy also constitutes the exercise of necropolitical sovereignty which I interpret not as the right to kill but as the right to police and incarcerate. Against the Hegelian struggle for recognition (Anerkennung), I deliberate on the possibility of transcending to a less than fully-determined Sittlichkeit that does not rely upon reciprocal recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• Hegel
• captive maternals
• Joy James
• slavery
• incarceration

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Profs. Corina Stan, Toril Moi, Rey Chow, and Shai Ginsburg, along with the anonymous reviewers of this journal, for their insightful comments on various drafts of this paper, and/or related philosophical discussions. My work wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Prof. Julianne Werlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. James uses the terms ‘chora’ and ‘womb’ to reference the generative powers of the Captive Maternals. She argues that these powers are stolen by the State which uses their labour to stabilise itself: ‘In transitioning a colony through a republic into a representative democracy with imperial might, the emergent United States grew a womb, it took on the generative properties of maternals it held captive’ (James, 2016, p. 256).

2. Here, I mourn those hundreds of Captive Maternals, including around 100 children, who drowned after their boat capsized off the coast of Greece right in front of the Greek coast guard in June 2023 (Saifi et al., 2023; emphasis added).