The Politics of Cramped Space: Dilemmas of Action, Containment and Mobility

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue oriented to the theme of cramped space. We look to cramped space to advance critical understanding of the relationship between space, mobility and politics. Cramped space registers degrees of deprivation, constriction, and obstruction, but always and simultaneously a concern for the ways in which such limits operate to stimulate and incite movements of becoming and remaking. With this point in mind we argue that the idea of cramped space promises to foster a fruitful dialogue between two lines of research that have hitherto unfolded separately. The first of these is the recent shift within globalization theories and mobility studies away from the initial overly-optimistic focus on unbounded flows, and towards questions of friction, containment, blockage, mediation and infrastructure. The second is Deleuze and Guattari's argument for minor politics (from where the idea of cramped space originates). Addressing an age when talk of fences and walls saturates public rhetoric, the essays collected here think through cramped space to imagine new vistas of the politics of mobility.

Kidnapping migrants as a tactic of border enforcement

“…Drawing attention to the various operations of migrant kidnapping enables rethinking border violence beyond the spectacular scenes of death and rescue. Indeed, migrants are violently obstructed, confined, cramped, entrapped, and injured in numerous ways (Altin and Minca, 2017; Coutin, 2010; De Genova, 2017b; Tazzioli and Garelli, 2018; Walters and Lüthi, 2016). Such a heterogeneity of political technologies highlights the inadequacy of a conceit of violence developed in exclusively necropolitical terms, focused narrowly on migrants’ deaths while crossing borders, or according to the minimalist biopolitical opposition of ‘making live/letting die’.…”

Undocumented Activism and Minor Politics: Inside the Cramped Political Spaces of Deportation Defense Campaigns

“…Yet as much as we recognize disruption and conformism at work, we also find these concepts limiting when it comes to theorizing DDCs as a strategy and analyzing the evolution of campaigns on the ground because, by themselves, they cannot account for the highly circumscribed or “cramped” political spaces (Walters and Lüthi 2016) in which DDCs emerge, particularly as it relates to ICE’s use of discretion. Indeed, as a result of the “asymmetric power relations” between undocumented activists and ICE (Prieto 2018:11), strategic decisions about how to deploy personal narratives, which elected officials to target, or where and when to protest are not made freely.…”

“…Rather than theorize DDCs as either disruptive or conformist, a dualistic framework we’ve struggled to apply in a satisfactory way, we argue for the relevance of “minor politics” for understanding undocumented activism and, in particular, DDCs. Proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1986) and taken up by critical scholars (Aroles 2018; Katz 1996, 2017; Secor and Linz 2017), the “minor” allows us to account for the highly circumscribed or “cramped” political spaces (Walters and Lüthi 2016) in which DDCs emerge amid highly unequal power relations as we think through the ways in which DDCs simultaneously exploit and subvert dominant discourses of belonging.…”

Biopolitics Multiple: Migration, Extraction, Subtraction

“…90 Taking terrain away from migrants also entails that migrants are not only hampered in their mobility; more than that, their their movements are accelerated, but in 'cramped spaces'. 91 On the one hand, these subtractive technologies concern the very possibility to move on, as well as to remain in a given place without being 'illegalised'. On the other, the erratic geographies that migrants are forced to undertake in order to reach a certain place, as well as the multiple 'bounces' migrants are subjected to at the internal borders of Europe show that mobility is used as a technology of biopolitical control that subtracts the autonomy of movement.…”