World of Borders: Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

• Published in: American literary history 2022-08, Vol.34 (3), p.1076-1083
• Main Author: Watson, Jini Kim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0896-7148; 1468-4365
• DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajac077

This essay analyses Harsha Walia’s 2021 book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. It discusses the way Walia boldly recasts today’s “migration crisis” less as a problem “at the border,” and more in terms of its enmeshment with the logics of neoliberal capitalism. Deploying a framework of global comparativity and interdisciplinarity—and written in a steady tone of outrage—Walia reads the operations of contemporary border regimes through, on the one hand, global histories of racial exclusions and, on the other, modes of neoliberal labor exploitation. While valuable for its global scope and the synthetic labor of its analyses, Walia’s study devotes less attention to the nature of resistances and solidarities needed to combat the interlocking regimes of bordering, citizenship exclusions, extractive violence, ecofascisms, and renovated racisms. Nevertheless, Walia raises pertinent questions for literary studies about how different disciplines make the figure of the migrant appear or disappear.