Description
This paper analyses the so-called 'zero-anchor point' migration policy that has become prevalent in Calais (France) after 2016, following the destruction of the notorious migrant camp dubbed 'the Jungle'. In sharp contrast to the previous policy of concentrating migrants in a camp and ensuring their immobility, this new strategy is designed to make sure that migrants are continually en route, on the move, so to speak. This is carried out through the combination of myriad methods, inter alia, consistent violent evictions or the threat thereof, food-bans, confiscation of personal belongings, and even deforestation of areas wherein migrants could potentially hide from authorities.
Borrowing from authors such as Iman Jackson, Sylvia Wynter, and Katherine McKittrick, and Julietta Singh, I unearth the links between the zero-anchor point policy in Calais with colonial tactics of racialisation primarily based on dispossession. In particular, I show how such policy mimics processes of territorial, bodily and material dispossession faced by the black slave and the native in settler colonial projects. My argument is that the politics of extreme mobility in Calais, coupled with the continual precarisation of the migrants’ lives and the incessant confiscation and/or destruction of their belongings, operates as a racializing device that co-produces the borders of the human (the white European master) vis-à-vis the non/sub-human figure of the migrant. I dub this process ‘the politics of (de)materialisation’. Such politics, on one hand, is premised upon the ‘dematerialisation’ of the migrant, that is, its ceaseless detachment from ‘physical’ forms of existence, namely, land, body, and belongings. And, on the other hand, this politics ‘materialises’ the migrant in a different way, that is, by making the migrants into objects, mere bodies at the mercy of the colonial power. Such policy, I show, ensures the so-called global colour lines are continually redrawn and strengthened in Calais.
