Designed to fail: A biopolitics of British citizenship
Designed to fail: A biopolitics of British citizenship
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注定会失败：英国公民身份的生命政治
DOI：
10.1080/13621020903466357
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发表时间：
2010
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Imogen Tyler
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Imogen Tyler
这篇文章追溯了最近英国公民身份的“丑陋历史”，提出了两个核心主张。首先，英国公民身份的设计让特定群体和人群失望。它认为，失败是英国公民身份的设计原则，是“设计”这个动词最积极、最激烈的意义：标记、指示、指定。其次，英国公民身份是一种生命政治——一种技术和实践（法律的、社会的、道德的）领域，通过这种技术和实践控制和塑造人口。本文从1981年的《国籍法》以及伴随着该法案在英国议会通过而发生的布里克斯顿警察与黑人社区之间的暴力冲突开始。采用米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）的国家种族主义概念，它认为1981年的《国籍法》（Nationality Act）标志着英国公民身份设计的关键时刻，并成为后来大量国籍法的模板，这些立法决定了谁可以获得公民身份。其核心论点是，英国内部存在大量的失败公民并非设计缺陷造成的意外，而是英国公民身份的基础。对于许多“少数民族”来说，生物政治公民身份的生活现实与当代政府对公民身份的描述形成鲜明对比，后者强调社区凝聚力、政治参与、社会责任、权利和共同民族归属感的自豪感。
Tracing a route through the recent ‘ugly history’ of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics – a field of techniques and practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many ‘national minorities’ the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging.