I'm really excited for the @LSFRC_ conference Beyond Borders today. We are beginning with a keynote speech from @NadineElEnany ! So exciting! #LSFRC20

She is discussing her book Bordering Britain. I have a copy and you could get one too! #LSFRC20 https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526145420/ 

Dr El-Enancy discusses how Britain's legal history is based on science and fiction - race science and legal fiction. Dr El-Enany challenges the fantasy of European sovereignty upon which law is based #LSFRC20

She argues that Britain's legal system is constructed as a justification for British wealth and its foundation in colonial violence. In order for colonists to conquer entire civilizations they needed to be classified under terms understandable to the coloniser #LSFRC20

A prime criteria for conducting this colonial translation - or insistence on translatability - was race. Race became an ordering principle, building on the Enlightenment obsession with ordering, taxonomy, classification #LSFRC20

El-Enany explores the ties between the continual threat of colonial violence and the policing of the borders to the Human, understood as white and European #LSFRC20

This is also tied to an Anglo-American model of linear time with indigenous peoples positioned as a primitive and 'early' example of humanity #LSFRC20

El-Enany discusses Edward Said's theory of the 'monstrous chain of command' following Rudyard Kipling's terrifying portrayal of a neat line of progress (and thus apparently justifiable subjection) moving from animals through military ranks and 'up' to the Empress #LSFRC20

She goes on to discuss how this history of imperial control feeds into contemporary discussions and policing of migration #LSFRC20

Where white people can travel easily across the world, national borders are used to police the movements of the racialised poor who frequently struggle to get visas, afford travel tickets and are frequently racially profiled while travelling #LSFRC20

El-Enany also discusses the internalisation of borders which racialised people are made to feel keenly while white people move through them unthinkingly #LSFRC20

She cites Sara Ahmed who writes: "Bodies remember histories of colonialism even when we forget them". These legacies are continually felt in the present #LSFRC20

She encourages us to see the categories of human, race, law and the border as fictions but as fictions that are keenly felt and fiercely policed #LSFRC20

El-Enany now takes us on a time travelling journey back to the 1981 British Nationality Act. This was the end of the myth of a unified, homogenous empire where the island of Britain was legally cut off from its former colonies #LSFRC20

This built on the 1971 Immigration Act which had made Britishness commensurate with whiteness. These were not ways to end colonialism but rather were colonial acts of theft where colonised subjects were legally cut off from the wealth stolen from Britain's colonies #LSFRC20

El-Enany suggests that seeing immigration law as an act of colonial theft troubles the distinction between settler and non settler colonialism. Britain's colonial past is hidden and divorced from (eg) American and Australian occupation of unceded indigenous lands #LSFRC20

Rather than protecting people, El-Enany argues that the legal categories of 'subject', 'Commonwealth citizen', 'migrant', 'refugee' etc are themselves colonial tools, ways to define as alien or demand loyalty from racialised peoples, whatever is convenient to the British state

This history feeds into an understanding of immigration law as the differentiation of human worth where racialised subjects are presumed not to be 'really' British - views expressed in the veiled racism of 'where are you really from?' or the out right racism of 'go home'

She posits postcolonial studies as offering another framework which challenges that of the law, following Stuart Hall's understanding of postcolonial thought as intervention and critique in Western narratives of history, nation and law #LSFRC20

Rather than fighting for more legal recognition, El-Enany offers a politics of migrant solidarity which resists the categories of legal recognition and seeks to make visible the connection between past and future racial fictions #LSFRC20

She goes on to discuss how David Cameron refused to apologise or engage with questions of reparations on a visit to Jamaica, instead discussing neo-colonial future building (in this instance building prisons) which demonstrate the ties between imperialism and capital #LSFRC20

Concluding she speaks of the idea of coevalness, insisting on the contemporaneity of colonised and colonising nations and subjects and acknowledging the continuing histories of colonial (and legal) fictions (I am mangling this a bit trying to keep up) #LSFRC20

While Britain may appear to be an island it is in fact everywhere, it's tentacles still extending out into all the places it has touched. In this way the rebuke 'go home' paradoxically becomes an invitation to stay within this nebulous state which is Britain #LSFRC20

I am now chairing Panel 1A, Collective Struggles, Collective Joy beginning with Carolyn Lau's paper Generative Powers of the Limited Present in which she is discussing Laura Grace Ford's, Savage Messiah #LSFRC20

Written in response to the gentrification involved in the build up to the 2012 Olympics Carolyn discusses the inequalities inherent to neoliberal capital, particularly after policies of austerity which served only to worsen the subjection of people living in poverty #LSFRC20

Her graphic work uses the methods of psychogeography and the derive to wander through various times in London, marking the enclosure of land, the 1981 'race riots', the continual protests of activists in squats, occupying territory and being brutally beaten by the police #LSFRC20

Carolyn situates Ford within the historical resistance of capitalism, resisting the ahistorical timelessness of neoliberalism by historicising the present. Her semi-autobiographical protagonist is described as 'a person whose fate is to never be content with the present' #LSFRC20

Ford rejects the mainstream of psychogeography, tying it to the myth of the white, colonial explorer and setting it against her own wanderings through and with those who reject the homogeny of the neoliberal present #LSFRC20

Carolyn moves to a discussion of how Ford purposely alienates readers who do not share her rage. The dystopian setting is pierced by moments of euphoria as people reject the alienation and atomisation of the present #LSFRC20

She cites Elizabeth Grosz, who writes: 'freedom is not an activity of mind but one primarily of the body' - Grosz writes of the 'struggle of bodies' as the only means of achieving this freedom #LSFRC20

She connects this to Fred Moten and Harney's work on hapticality 'the touch of the undercommons - the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you' #LSFRC20

Carolyn reads this zine as a counter history of moments that may not have happened. This is tied to an imaginary of fabulation which rejects any mapping, a truly unthinkable future #LSFRC20

This mode of resistance is trans-individualist. All subjects are only understood in how they touch one another. This is what Karen Barad has called 'quantum entanglements', a fundamentally collective mode of resistance Ah what a rich talk I definitely haven't done it justice here

The second paper of this panel is being given by Joel White which is excitingly titled Imagining Abolition. He speaks as an 'outsider' to SF, an anti-borders activist and someone interested in the role of imagination in abolition #LSFRC20

This paper is in conversation with Jackie Wang's argument that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of prisons as well as Angela Davis' discussion of the connection between the rise of the novel and the rise of the prison penitentiary system #LSFRC20

Joel discusses Jeremy Bentham's panopticon as an experiment in repressive speculation. He argues that Foucault downplays the fact that these prisons were actually built, for example by the British Raj in India #LSFRC20

He notes that prison reform was always a project of racial control. The prison is framed as the prototypical colonial building #LSFRC20

Joel discusses Giovanni Piranesi's La Carceri d'Invenzione as discussed by Edward Said. An imaginary appears or emerges founded on the fear of being confined. One which we are still very much feeling #LSFRC20

Joel now draws a connection between this carceral vision and depictions of prison planets in SF - perhaps most famously in Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress #LSFRC20

He reads SF as pushing these ideas to their most fantastical limits, moving now to a discussion of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination in which the prison is imagined as womb and tomb, an explicitly orientalised confinement #LSFRC20

There are various carceral imaginaries here in this proto-cyberpunk romp which follows the revenge of Alexander Dumas who is variously imprisoned across the galaxy #LSFRC20

Joel discusses the move between a reformist rebuke of imprisonment as a marker of 'backwardness' and appeals to the redemptive potential of prisons #LSFRC20

A rare example of abolitionist feminism might be Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed where Le Guin imagines how you could describe prisons to a child who had never heard of them. She speaks of the brutalising effect on prisoners on the imprisoner as well as the imprisoned #LSFRC20

However, Joel argues that this vision is limited, thinking only in terms of interplanetary borders rather than on the level of the interpersoal, with Anarres always in opposition to Urras #LSFRC20

Against this he offers the visionary fiction of Octavia's Brood and efforts to reimagine how communities function engaged in by activists using SF as an organising tool #LSFRC20

He also speaks about Sister's Uncut's occupation of Holloway Prison and the demand that public land is used for public good - interestingly linking to Carolyn's talk about the decay of the commons #LSFRC20

Somewhat optimistically Joel discusses the lack of creativity in imagining what the prisons of the future would look like, noting the marked similarities between Piranesi's drawings and the Guardians of the Galaxy eg. #LSFRC20

Visionary fiction is described as a chipping away at the realism of the present which remains stuck in and on the prisons of the past. He ends by citing Lola Olufemi's question: 'How can we render prisons impossible?' #LSFRC20

This panel was truly a delight to chair. Thank you so much to Joel and Carolyn and definitely check out their work! #LSFRC20