Precarious Crossings

Front matter

Immigration, Neoliberalism, and the Atlantic

ALEXANDRA PERISIC

PRECARIOUS CROSSINGS

Index

The Atlantic Revisited The Indebted Immigrant

“How to Get Away with Murder”: Multinational Corporations and Atlantic Crimes

Trans-Atlantic Opacity Atlantic Undercommons vii

183 199

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I envisioned Precarious Crossings as a dialogue between authors, languages, and disciplines. This conversation became conceivable only because my friends and colleagues shared their expertise in their specific fields, pushing me to refine my arguments. Over the past five years, University of Miami has been my home, and without the support I received there, I would not have been able to finish this book. My mentor Gema Pérez-Sanchez was always incredibly generous with her time and advice. Joel Nickels was one of my first intellectual interlocutors at UM, and his comments resonate throughout chapter 1. Lillian Manzor helped me conceptualize the anti-detective novel in chapter 3, while Ralph Heyndels helped refine the theoretical framework of chapter 4. George Yudice and Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel offered judicious advice on the book's proposal and the publishing process. Logan Connors, a colleague who has also become a close friend, held down the fort, leaving me time to write.

I can only hope that over the past five years, my graduate students have learned from me as much as I have from them. I continue to be inspired by the conversations I have in and outside of the classroom with Salim Ayoub, Zayer Baazaoui, Fély Catan, Helen Hernández Hormilla, Elizabeth Langley, Lilianne Lugo Herrera, Hicham Mazouz, Nadia Naami, Nicholas Sheets, Jordan Rogers, and many others. Thank you also to Sarah-Louise Raillard, who helped with the translations; as a nonnative speaker of English, I desperately needed her translating prowess.

vii viii e. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Faculty Fellowship at The Center for the Humanities was an invaluable experience. My gratitude goes to Mihoko Suzuki, Mary Lindemann, and all the other fellows who were a part of our intellectual community: Kathryn Freeman, John Kirby, Karen Mathews, Martin Nesvig, Jessica Rosenberg, Robyn Walsh, Ashli White, Alok Amatya, Allison Harris, and Drewry Wofford. Without the Provost Research Award, I would not have been able to complete the book in due time. I would also like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami for supporting the book’s publication.

So many other mentors, scholars, and colleagues shaped my ideas and writing. Madeleine Dobie expanded my knowledge of Francophone literature and postcolonial studies, continually exemplifying academic rigor. Souleymane Bachir Diagne was always available to share his infinite wisdom and precious life advice. Graciela Montaldo ensured that I feel confident venturing into Latin American Studies, while Kaiama Glover guided my readings of Francophone women writers. Michael Dash and Renée Larrier provided vital advice at a crucial moment. During a very difficult year, Joanna Stalnaker offered much needed support. Hakim Abderrezak’s work was a theoretical and methodological inspiration, and I am incredibly grateful for his insightful suggestions.

My time in New York would not have been the same without the input, support, and friendship of Nijah Cunningham, Casiana Ionita, Sarah Lazur, Mehammed Mack, Elizabeth Marcus, Noémie Ndiaye, Leanne Tyler, Erin Twohig, Paul Wimmer, and many others. The late Philip Watts was a reassuring presence and a wonderful interlocutor. I owe special gratitude to Pascale Hubert-Leibler whose pedagogical advice I remember every time I enter the classroom.

My friends and comrades from Occupy Wall Street, Strike Debt, and the Miami Committee on State Violence have tremendously influenced not only the way I think but also the way I live. Christopher “Winter” Casuccio continues to remind me that theory must return to practice. Jason Wozniak, who helped me theorize debt, is also the incarnation of unconditional hospitality. David Backer has transformed the way I understand and practice pedagogy. Joe North is living proof that brilliance and humbleness can coexist. He has also been the most comprehensive, generous, and supportive reader of my work. So many others need to be thanked: Laura Hanna, Ann Larson, Astra Taylor, and Thomas Gokey for being a force to be reckoned with; Andrew Ross and George Caffentzis for proving that public intellectuals still exist; Max Cohen, Ohyoon Kim, Zane Mackin, Chelsea Szendi Schieder, and Conor Tomas Reed for being my coconspirators on so many occasions; Rebecca Wood and Tim Ryan for making Miami feel like home; Tanya Zakrison for

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS œ ix feeding me on innumerable occasions and taking me in when I needed a place to live. During my last summer of writing, my parents were hugely helpful; my mother read my work multiple times and my father took care of my canine friend while I traveled. N'Zinga, the friend in question, with her rebellious spirit and unconditional love, made sure that I went on multiple daily walks whenever I was around.

Thank you also to my editor Kristen Elias Rowley, who was supportive of the project from the moment she received the proposal, and to Rebecca Bostock for all her help during the editorial process.

Parts of chapters 2 and 3 were initially published in Research in African Literatures and the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, respectively, while an excerpt from chapter 1 appeared in Francosphéres. I would like to thank the journals and Indiana University Press for allowing me to reproduce this material.

Finally, infinite gratitude goes to Jacques Laroche for his unlimited patience, generosity, and kindness. Everything I know about building a life together (and cooking), I've learnt from him.

Introduction

In “Trans-Atlantic Trade and Its Discontents,’ published in the New York Times in 2013, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and Pierpaolo Barbieri praise the achievements of the nearly twenty-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, as they urge a similar agreement between the US and the EU. Given that the title of the article refers to Joseph Stiglitzs now canonical book, Globalization and Its Discontents, which in turn borrows its title from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, tacit continuity is established between civilization, globalization, and the trans-Atlantic—convergences further framed by the notion of discontent.’ Discontent is not, as the reader might assume, related to the widespread consequences of two decades of free trade, but to the fact that EU countries are still reluctant to fully open up their markets.

The measure of NAFTA’s unquestionable success is Mexico, “now a manufacturing powerhouse,’ claim the two authors—a former German defense minister and an Ernest May Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Conveniently absent from this story are the labor conditions in Mexican maquiladoras, the destruction of communal agricultural land known as the ejido, and rising social inequalities within the country.” NAFTA’s accomplishments could spread into Europe, the argument continues, if not for the EU's—and in particular Frances—resistance to a free-trade agreement with the United States. France, in fact, has threatened to block the negotiations if the EU does not preserve its “cultural exception,” which protects audiovisual arts. This is supposedly another example of politics standing in the way of the market. The authors hope that this hurdle will be overcome, allowing for “a US-EU trade deal eventually to serve as a platform for the inclusion of regions with which both parties have negotiations or agreements, in Latin America and a wider Atlantic basin.” This outcome, the article concludes, “is worth fighting—and waiting—for" The moment worth fighting for is, thus, the complete neoliberalization of the wider Atlantic, which could subsequently serve as a model for regional free trade. This scenario is blocked—somewhat ironically—by France, who along with other former colonial powers is responsible for the initial spread of capitalism across the Atlantic.

The Atlantic, including all the countries touched by the triangular trade and marked by a history of population displacement and cultural mixing inaugurated through colonialism and slavery, has always been a crucial site for the development of capitalism. Without the free labor generated through slavery, the plantation economy, and the production of sugar and coffee, capitalism would not have developed as it has.’ If the Atlantic trade instated capitalism, NAFTA represents one of the milestones of its neoliberal stage. The history of capitalism and the history of the Atlantic are thus intertwined. And, as we can see from “Trans-Atlantic Trade and Its Discontents,” so are their futures. The future of global neoliberalization, it seems, depends on yet another Atlantic agreement, one in which only countries of the Global North are participating. The authors, in fact, take it for granted that two Northern powers should decide upon the future of the wider Atlantic. Would global neoliberalization generate equal enthusiasm if the story were told from the perspective of the Global South?

In Precarious Crossings, through a comparative study of contemporary trans-Atlantic immigrant narratives in French, Spanish, and English, I offer a literary account of a multilingual Atlantic under neoliberalism. Contemporary authors from the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America have reconceptualized the Atlantic from a triangular into a multipolar space, introducing new destinations for contemporary immigrants and establishing new Atlantic connections. In traveling beyond the postcolonial route that connects the formerly colonized and the former colonizer, they also shift focus from cultural difference and national belonging to precarity—a condition characterized by a lack of economic and social stability and protection—as a shared characteristic under global neoliberalization. The vision of the present that emerges from these works is very different from the one offered by the New York Times article, as discontent is related to the global spread of neoliberalism, rather than its incomplete implementation. Contemporary Atlantic narratives underline the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology and strain against the demands of a neoliberal subject. They further participate in Atlantic literary and cultural dialogues, pushing against literary conventions of various genre, as they explore the complexities of a globalized Atlantic.

Moving between multiple national frameworks, these narratives underscore the ethical and political stakes of comparative thinking. Given its global extent, only a multiracial and multilingual approach can challenge neoliberalism. Different forms of multiculturalism within specific national frameworks are insufficient, as they do not account adequately for the transnational dimensions of neoliberal production and subjectivation. Nor are monolingual and monoracial transnational approaches adequate, because neoliberal governance mobilizes racialized and gendered modes of marginalization to prevent solidarity between groups, forcing them to compete for state (and international) protection that is only ever extended in limited and conditional ways. Challenging this logic, contemporary trans-Atlantic narratives consider how precarity operates in differential yet complementary ways across race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging to sustain global neoliberalization.

They thus invite a cross-cultural analysis of neoliberal precarity, which would not lead to cultural conflation. This challenge exists on multiple levels. Within the novels, as they travel between various locations, characters attempt (and often fail) to build various forms of interethnic and interracial solidarity. At the formal level, the focus on a multilingual Atlantic allows authors to experiment with different literary genres including detective fiction, the travelogue, and the epic. At the level of Precarious Crossings, I propose a comparative Atlantic framework, which identifies aesthetic and political similarities across different national contexts while remaining attentive to local differences as well as racialized and gendered modes of marginalization. I would like to begin with a personal story that might clarify the ethical and political stakes, as I conceive them, of a comparative, multilingual approach to global neoliberalization.

I come from the Balkans, from the area now commonly known as ex- Yugoslavia (though I still refer to myself as Yugoslav). I lived in France when I was younger, and I pursued most of my studies in the United States, graduating with a PhD in Francophone studies and a comparative focus on Latin America. I often have to justify my “strange and unusual” choice: why would someone from the Balkans be interested in the Francophone Caribbean? My students are often surprised and perplexed. They would be more comfortable with a professor from the Caribbean, because then they could rely on their cultural authenticity; someone from the United States would also be acceptable, since Americans have an imperial duty to study the rest of the world. Those of us from the Global South have two options: work on our own regions and serve as contemporary versions of a native informant, or study Western literature and culture, due to its assumed universality. This is of course not a rule, and there are plenty of exceptions aside from myself, but it is nonetheless, as many readers will recognize, often the case. It is significantly less common for individuals from the Global South to show interest and have knowledge of other countries of the Global South. Even though our contexts share similarities because we occupy a similar position in the current organization of capital because most of us have gone through structural adjustment programs and are familiar with neoliberalism, austerity, deregulation, and privatization. In this book, I support these lateral interests and lateral connections. As much as I support the choice that someone from the Balkans be interested in the Francophone Caribbean, I advocate for a dialogue between Latin American, African, and Caribbean writers. These interchanges have important ethical and political implications.

Beginning in the 1990s, Yugoslavia went through a brutal civil war and a violent economic restructuring guided by forced privatizations, austerity measures, market liberalization, and heightened unemployment. When I was visiting what was no longer Yugoslavia, sometime in the mid-2000s, I had an interesting conversation with a friend who was appalled that the “transition” government would raise taxes on local materials and lower taxes on imports, eventually destroying local production in favor of foreign products. She was perplexed by this decision and asked me whether I could believe it. I, in fact, could. Because I was very familiar with structural adjustment programs and neoliberal policies in other countries of the Global South. I knew what Mexico, Jamaica, Senegal, and so many other countries had gone through, and it was analogous. Had we in the Balkans had the opportunity to learn about these countries, maybe we could have predicted our future. However, the pervading assumption is that because of cultural differences, we do not have much in common (even though historically, this is not true). The works in my corpus move against this assumption, as they identify precarity to be an increasingly trans-Atlantic condition. Following these narratives, I strive to build a multilingual Atlantic framework. Precarious Crossings exists at the intersection of Francophone, Anglophone, Latin American, postcolonial, and economic studies. I ask the reader for some patience as I weave between these different fields to tell the story of a globalized, literary Atlantic.

GLOBALIZATION, AN OUTDATED TERM?

Most scholarly writings on globalization attempt to answer, in one form or another, the following three questions: Is globalization happening at all (or are nation-states still the main loci of power)? Is globalization something new or has it been happening for centuries? Does the deterritorialization we see today differ only in degree or also in form from deterritorializations that accompanied previous stages of capitalism? Following Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems approach, I consider that the economic interconnectedness and interdependence of the world is not a recent development, and that the emergence of the modern world economy (characterized by market trade, a single division of labor but multiple cultures) has existed in various forms since the sixteenth century." Yet, the latest phase of globalization has been sustained by a specific political and economic ideology: neoliberalism. I contend that the term globalization needs to be qualified as we are currently in the era of neoliberal globalization or, as I prefer to call it, global neoliberalization. I favor the second option because it underscores that neoliberalization is a process, one that does not go unchallenged and that remains incomplete.

International financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank exemplify the combination of dispersal and centralization that characterizes global neoliberalization. Since the 1970s, the politics of structural adjustment programs, austerity measures, privatization, and precarity have created a common social context across various Atlantic rim nations, so that we can establish new points of comparison that support a multilingual study of the Atlantic world. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices"? Neoliberal creed could be further expressed through one word: flexibility. Proponents of neoliberalism insist that competition as well as the deregulation and flexibilization of labor are necessary for a healthy economy. Labor unions have thus become the biggest obstacle to progress, and short-term contracts the only solution. The system maintains worker control through performance reviews, peer evaluations, individual "merit" -based salaries, and looming unemployment.

As an economic model, neoliberalism prioritizes "financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of domestic and international economies." This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, given that capitalism has always oscillated between periods of material and financial expansion.” However, since the 1990s, financial speculation in secondary markets—like the derivatives market—has significantly increased. Annie McClanahan, following Harvey, argues that globalization and financialization operate conjointly: whereas the former is a "spatial fix"

that extends the space of commodity production and circulation, the latter functions as a “temporal fix, allowing “capital to treat an anticipated realization of value as if it has already happened?" Constantly assessing its investments, the finance industry, Étienne Balibar notes, has “the ability to decide which industries to enhance and which to suppress (together with their installations, accumulated experience, and employees): But how did neoliberalism become the dominant ideology?

The era of Keynesianism or “embedded liberalism,” which supported government investment and higher wages as means of lowering unemployment and increasing consumer demand, faced "stagflation" —a combination of high inflation and rising unemployment—in the 1970s. The explanations for the crisis vary dramatically, including the high cost of the Vietnam War, the unpegging of the dollar from the gold standard, and rising oil prices. According to David Harvey, this was the perfect moment for the wealthy class, whose assets diminished in postwar decades, to dismantle Keynesianism. In fact, neoliberal economists insisted that high taxes— particularly on the wealthy—and economic regulation had caused the crisis.

The rise to power of several political figures, according to Harvey, facilitated the spread of neoliberalism: in China, Deng Xiaoping undertook the liberalization of the communist economy in 1978." On a different continent, as he became chairman of the US Federal Reserve in 1979, Paul Volcker implemented a new monetary policy, known as the “Volcker Shock? Volcker raised interest rates in order to place inflation under control and end the crisis. Massive recession and unemployment rates of over ten percent ensued, weakening the power of organized labor." Soon thereafter, in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. As a proponent of “trickle-down” economics, Reagan argued that lowering taxes for the wealthy would incentivize them to invest in society and generate economic growth. The benefits would ultimately trickle-down to everyone. Reagan cut the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50% at first, and then to 28% in 1986. He further reduced the maximum tax rate on capital gains to 2096, the lowest since the Great Depression (he then raised it to 28% in 1986).^ Around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of Britain, emulating Reagans policies.

Even before the arrival of Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberal experiments were conducted in Latin America. The democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende came to power in Chile in 1970, only to be deposed by General Pinochet in the violent coup of 1973. With the backing of "the Chicago boys,’ a group of US economists headed by Milton Friedman, Pinochet undertook large-scale privatizations, cut tariffs and government programs, and deregulated the labor market, turning Chile into one the first tests of neoliberal governance.”

Throughout the 1970s, in Latin America, and in Mexico in particular, national debt became one of the primary tools of neoliberalization. After the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, oil-producing Arab States began to recycle their petrodollars through Wall Street investment banks. Due to stagflation within the US, the banks found it more lucrative to issue high-interest loans to developing countries affected by the global financial crisis than to invest at home. Unfortunately, as the loans were in dollars, in the aftermath of the Volcker Shock and the jump in interest rates, countries like Mexico faced crisis. In fact, in 1982, Mexico announced it was no longer able to pay its sovereign debt, setting in motion the “Third World debt crisis” A default would have been detrimental to the US investment banks that held the debt; an intervention was necessary: “Internationally, the core neoliberal states gave the IMF and the World Bank full authority in 1982 to negotiate debt relief, which meant in effect to protect the world’s main financial institutions from the threat of default" The IMF and the World Bank renegotiated Mexico's debt, in exchange for a series of rapidly implemented neoliberal reforms, including privatization of state-owned companies, a dismantling of labor unions, and cuts to public programs and subsidies related to food, healthcare, transportation, and education. Mexico also committed to keeping inflation low, thus guaranteeing that the value of its debt would not diminish. What could have posed a problem for Wall Street turned into a great opportunity: debt, it turns out, is a great tool of global neoliberalization.

A similar set of reforms was implemented throughout the 1980s and '9os across Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Harvey explains that “by 1994 some eighteen countries (including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Uruguay) had agreed to deals that forgave them some $60 billion in debt.” In order to repay their outstanding national debts, governments have had to procure foreign currencies; as a result, in many countries subsistence crops have been abandoned in favor of export programs, cash crops, and monocultures, creating dependency on transnational corporations that control the market." Jason Hickel asserts that global neoliberalization created “a widespread race-to-the-bottom,” where in order to attract foreign investment, countries of the Global South compete to offer the cheapest labor and resources, and the highest tax exemptions." Whereas these measures are conducted in the name of development, "the number of Africans living in basic poverty has more than doubled since 1980."

Contemporary globalization and neoliberalism are thus for me inseparable. This economic shift has relied on technological innovation and the development of communication networks.” These networks have a strong cultural and economic dimension involving the transmission of advertising and television programs, as well as transfers of capital and computerization of labor.” The two cannot be separated, cultural globalization cannot be analyzed independently from economic globalization." As Paul Jay argues: “No contemporary approach to economic flows of power under the forces of globalization can do without a clear historical understanding of how cultures and commodities are embedded within each other?”

Speaking about global neoliberalization from a literary standpoint is an important task because as a governing regime, neoliberalism relies on the formation of a neoliberal subject. The characters in my corpus explore the contradictions and failings of this subject, as they point to linguistic, aesthetic, and interpersonal experiences that exceed the neoliberal logic. Wendy Brown, in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, maintains that in the neoliberal era, the primary and sole purpose of the government is to enhance economic growth. All other concerns (except for national security) are secondary.” Values such as equality, liberty, and inclusion have become subordinate to capital enhancement, and social justice and social equality are pursued only to the extent that they support and encourage economic growth.” They are valued so long as they attract consumers and investors, but no longer in their own right. Thus, neoliberalism cannot simply be characterized as a system that creates wealth disparities through privatization, deregulation, and austerity. It is also insufficient to claim that neoliberalism converts every human desire or endeavor into a profitable business (though it does all of the above). Even more importantly, neoliberalism is “an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life"? The model of the market extends to all spheres of human activity. In addition to looking to maximize her profits, the neoliberal subject has become human capital. She does not generate profit solely through her activity; she is the activity that generates profit. The neoliberal subject is thus continuously looking to "strengthen its competitive positioning and appreciate its value?” within structures “that produce insecurity and...a reserve army of employees rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations precarious.”” Precarity upholds neoliberalism.

NEOLIBERAL PRECARITIES

Literary criticism has still not fully engaged an aesthetics and ethics of contemporary precarity. Within the context of contemporary immigrant narratives, precarity permits us to move beyond the framework of nation, integration, and assimilation. A theoretical focus based on precarity challenges the assumption that immigration is just a domestic issue, positing instead that domestic concerns are related to the reconfiguration of the global economy. Within this framework, immigration can be theorized from an earlier point in the process, from the vantage point of global forces that are pushing people to emigrate. This is, furthermore, an opportunity to move beyond multiculturalism as the main solution for social conflict: “Precarity cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense?”

Following Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, I believe that the desire to help marginalized groups—a position that ultimately furthers the interests of the helper—is not sufficient to sustain coalitions fighting against neoliberal precarity. On the other hand, the recognition that the system is killing everyone, though some people “much more softly” than others, can serve as grounds for solidarity.” Precarity can be at the basis of such a coalition, one that challenges every instance of the devaluation of life while engaging in a serious analysis of why and how certain lives are more devalued than others are. I thus do not mobilize precarity in order to ignore or supersede differences. Rather, I consider it as a characteristic differentially assigned according to race, gender, class, and as a site of possible solidarity. As such, it can become a “promising site for coalitional exchange?"

Economic reforms brought by global neoliberalization, particularly the fetishization of flexibility as a precondition for economic growth, have deepened precarity." Guy Standing, in his revealing book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, explains that neoliberal flexibility includes multiple components: adapting remuneration to the demands of the market (mainly by lowering wages), easily hiring and firing workers, moving employees between positions, changing company structures, and finally, adjusting workers’ skills. As more risks are displaced from the state and employers onto workers, insecurity, anxiety, and fear become the norm.

Members of the precariat are, however, not always easy to identify. In fact, one of the precariat’s primary characteristics (and the reason why, according to Standing, it still doesn't form a distinct class), is its heterogeneity. Precarious workers include refugees and migrants, care workers, service workers as well as the new “creative freelancer.” These disparate groups share a few characteristics, nonetheless. First, the precariat is not part of the working class because it no longer has "long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionisation and collective agreements?” Unlike the proletariat, the precariat “has minimal trust relationships with capital or the state"? Furthermore, while some workers may still be advancing in their respective fields, the precariat suffers from a “lack of a secure workbased identity:’** Most importantly, precarious workers have no prospects for a career, as they are employed in jobs “without traditions of social memory, a feeling they belong to an occupational community steeped in stable practices, codes of ethics and norms of behavior, reciprocity and fraternity?” Precarization extends beyond work; it “embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation? Isabell Lorey notes. No longer relying (exclusively) on direct domination, neoliberalism is “governing through insecurity.” The withdrawal of social protection, increased uncertainty, and the impending realization of the unforeseeable, generate fear, and ultimately obedience.

Precarity creates fearful, anxious bodies, relentlessly competing against one another to escape their life of contingency. As a political condition, precarity intersects with ontological precariousness. Everyone experiences precariousness, as all human beings are prone to suffering, violence, and death. However, the unequal distribution of precariousness across categories of gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality creates precarity. According to Judith Butler: “The more or less existential conception of 'precariousness' is thus linked with a more specifically political notion of ‘precarity? And it is the differential allocation of precarity that, in my view, forms the point of departure for both a rethinking of bodily ontology and for progressive or left politics in ways that continue to exceed and traverse the categories of identity?” All life is precarious and in need of protection. However, political, economic, and social institutions assign this protection differentially, based on nationality, class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability. Precarity thus designates "that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death"? While exposed to arbitrary state violence, these populations also have no choice but to seek protection from those very states. The rise of police states and surveillance mechanisms in the aftermath of 9/11, claims Butler, was precisely an attempt to deny precariousness, asserting sovereignty in the face of others." This sovereignty can be avowed only at the expense of others, whose lives become less grievable. That some lives are less grievable than others became discernible during the recent refugee crisis and terrorist attacks. The image of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned off the coast of Turkey in 2015 as his family was trying to reach Greece, is now engraved in the public imagination, mostly a result of social media campaigns. This was a moment of pause during a crisis that began long before Alan's death and has continued in its aftermath. This tragedy also underscored the power of media in allocating, and by extension withdrawing, grievability.