The Download of the Week is Family Separation As Slow Death by Stephen Lee. Here is the abstract:
During the Trump Administration, disturbing images of immigration officials forcibly separating parents from their children at the U.S.–Mexico border have rightly invited an onslaught of criticism. Voices across the political spectrum have called these actions immoral and insisted that this is not who we are. The underlying moral imperative of this critique is correct, but this Essay argues that it rests on a mischaracterization of our immigration system. In fact, the principle of “family separation” pervasively defines our entire immigration system. The law governing admissions, enforcement, adjustment of status, and remittances routinely leaves noncitizens waiting, marooned, left out, and helpless in their efforts to remain or reunite with their family members. In other words, a legal system predicated on principles of family separation captures precisely who we are. To make this argument, I borrow insights developed by scholars in the humanities and social sciences who have developed the theory of “slow death” or “slow violence.” Unlike acts of “spectacular violence” (a label for which border apprehensions and forcible separations certainly qualify) the process of slow death happens over time, offering no signs of impending ruination, a reality that frustrates the ability to generate momentum for change. Reframing the experience of migrants in terms of slow death can help recontextualize immigrant suffering in terms of family separation thereby drawing the public’s attention to the need for systemic, and not just episodic, change.
And from the paper:
As a body of work, slow death scholarship does not arise from a single, cohesive discussion. Rather, it is comprised of at least two overlapping conversations. One can trace its starting point to Lauren Berlant’s powerful essay, Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).22 A humanist by training, Berlant focuses on the condition of obesity, which she observes is often a function of poverty and economic insecurity. This link to poverty helps to explain why obese people are blamed for their own obesity or, as she explains, “provide[s] an alibi for normative governmentality and justified moralizing against inconvenient human activity.”23 The concept of slow death, as Berlant explains it, refers to harms that are not only or even mostly caused by bad individual choices but stem from broader structural conditions leading to “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.”24
And from a bit further on:
A second thread to this conversation comes from Rob Nixon, a humanist and an environmentalist, who uses the concept of slow violence to explain why it is so hard to amass the political will and emotional fortitude to stave off environmental disasters like climate change. We have short attention spans, Nixon explains straightforwardly enough. This is a relatively modern phenomenon, he posits, one that possesses some connection to the 9/11 attacks and the string of crises that have followed. With so many “bad” things swirling around in the news—many real, some manufactured—the public has difficulty focusing on any one particular type of crisis. But the larger impact, according to Nixon, is that information registers with the public only when it provides “a spectacular, immediately sensational, and instantly hypervisible image of what constitutes a violent threat.”31
Very interesting and recommended.