Description
Since the 1990s the number of dedicated immigration detention facilities around the globe has proliferated, and while the rate of expansion has fluctuated in recent years the Global Detention Project currently maps 1377 immigration detention centres that collectively detain tens of thousands of people. These regimes of population management link sites in an archipelago of camps that share information and resources, replicate colonial logics, and forcibly mobilise or immobilise people between ‘islands’ of imprisonment.
This paper interrogates the transdisciplinary concept of the ‘archipelago’ that has been used in different contexts as both a figure of carcerality and as a way of thinking new forms of solidarity and connection. The carceral archipelago describes a dispersed, yet interlinked, system of exclusion and enforcement. It also captures the violent fragmentation and dispossession inflicted through histories of (neo)colonialism. Drawing on acts of art, literature and resistance that have emerged from the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in PNG, this paper explores how people in detention and their supporters resist the carceral archipelago through another kind of archipelagic thinking. Their acts create new modes of relation, collaboration and resistance that subvert the logics of the nation-state and the scalar traps of the local or global.
