Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sovereign Exclusions and States of Exception: US Immigration and Refugee Policy Towards Haiti

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AbstractThis project seeks to explore the relationship between nation-state sovereignty and practices of exclusion by addressing the recent history of Haitian detention camps on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The establishment of these camps on Guantanamo in the early 1990s (and their later dismantling) provides a unique window into the policing of sovereign nation-state borders for two primary reasons. First, the logic underlying the institutionalization of the camps relied on the creation of a space beyond nation-state legal regimes but subject to nation-state authority, permitting a mode of intervention unhindered by constitutional constraints. Second, among the many camps constructed on Guantanamo was the world's first HIV interment camp. The establishment of this quarantine camp in the anomalouszone of Guantanamo and the prolonged detention of itsresidents signaled a growing concern with protecting U.S.citizenries from what were perceived to be diseased populations. The intersection of Guantanamo's extra-legal status and the policing and exclusion of diseased Haitians in the camps make it a key site for understanding new forms of sovereign power and border regulation.Through media analysis, archival research, and collection of oral histories of camp survivors, staff, and visitors, this study will engage the following general questions. What were the tactical legal maneuvers that the U.S. government deployed in engineering this spatialization of exception from legal protections? How were such tactics of exclusion related to regulatory practices designed to fortify sovereign borders against what was perceived to be a potential infiltration of a healthy, normative public by disease-bearing bodies? What kind of experiences, subjectivities, and practices did such sovereign exclusions produce in the confinement of nonnormative subjects in the Guantanamo Naval Base? And finally, to what extent is the production of such "states of exception" a feature of sovereign power generally?In grappling with the aforementioned questions, this project will contribute to current debates in anthropology, law, sociology, and political philosophy on the relation between sovereignty, "states of exception," and the rule of law. By examining the specific case of U.S. detention of Haitians on the Guantanamo Bay Naval base, the research will shed light on policies of exclusion and the concrete regulatory practices that such policies engender at sites of sovereign intervention, e.g., borders, refugee camps, detention facilities. In so doing, this study attempts to better understand the history of U.S. immigration and refugee policy towards Haiti specifically and the contemporary intersection of law, public health, and policing in performing sovereign power more generally.Through an ethnographically rich historical investigation into the effects of legally institutionalized spaces of exception and border policing practices, this interdisciplinary project will illuminate the ways in which nation-states attempt to isolate and control disorder at the frontiers of sovereign territory. It relies on the narratives of individuals whose stories are normally the targets of state regulatory control and exclusion. By focusing on the experiences of the excluded and framing them in terms of detailed legal and political histories, the study will highlight the consequences of immigration and refugee policy decisions that rely on the retraction of legal protections from particular spaces and populations.