Prefiguration and the post-representational politics of anti-deportation activism

ABSTRACT

This article addresses a familiar dilemma in discussions of experimental forms of political practice in the context of state racism. On one hand, the predominant modes of engaging with state power through strategically representing claims to state actors often re-affirm the categories of state domination, mimic the hierarchies that radical actors intend to overcome, and tend to become invested in a reformism that limits the horizon of change. On the other, prefigurative politics seeks to craft resistance practices that instantiate desired future relations in ways that can seem hopeless against the institutional power of the state and the investments in racial dominance that underpins its actions, with the danger of producing an unstrategic and naïve inversion of the state logics that activists want to oppose. Drawing on interviews and participation with grassroots anti-deportation activist groups, this article argues that a third concept, that of post-representational politics, is a necessary tool for recognising and engaging with experimental forms of political practice that oppose state racism. It argues that both the practice and the notion of post-representational politics sensitise us to important aspects of radical political praxis in ways that enable responses to critics of prefigurative politics without ever-expanding the boundaries of that concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Prefigurative politics
• immigration detention
• migrant solidarity
• Post-Representational politics
• border abolition
• state racism

Acknowledgments

This paper would not have been possible without the ideas and support of Davina Cooper, Rosie Mack, Koshka Duff, Joel White and Helen Brewer. I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful contributions to this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. As Gordon (2018) and Raekstad and Gradin (2020) note, prefiguration is a way of experimenting in the present with a view to establishing practices and institutions out of which a more desirable world will be built. However, what is desirable is not established by the concept of prefiguration itself and, as such, it can come in right wing and racist forms. Indeed, these may be the more common forms of prefiguration.

2. As Levitas (2011) and Cooper (2014) argue, utopianism can be partial, imperfect, uncertain and practical, and it is in this sense that I use this word. Prefigurative politics is experimenting to enact something that reflects a sense of a desired future; in this sense it is utopian even if prefiguration is opposed to abstract blueprints of an ideal future.

3. That is, rather than focusing on the politics of belonging and citizenship, as is more common when discussing the creativity of migrant solidarity organising (McNevin, 2006; Mensink, 2020). The reason for this shift may be to do with the far more limited means of creating community across within the confines of extended detention and imminent deportation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Kemp

Tom Kemp is a researcher in law and criminology at the University of Nottingham focusing on the law and politics of immigration detention, policing, and imprisonment. He is interested in social movements that oppose spaces of incarceration as locations of theory making and knowledge production about the nature of state power and the politics of solidarity. He writes about the connections between border policing and criminal justice and the ways law and coloniality come together in these institutions and in efforts to resist them.