Everyday Exceptions

In this article I examine the applicability of James Procter’s argument for a renewed concept of the ‘postcolonial everyday’ to the context of asylum. Procter states that postcolonial studies has typically preferred the extraordinary to the quotidian, viewing the everyday as only worth consideration when it is defamiliarised or invested with the exceptional. The ‘everydayness of the everyday’ is, he suggests, the real ‘“beyond” of diasporic multiculture’. Procter argues for a rehabilitation of Ato Quayson’s sense of the everyday as an ethical imperative within postcolonial studies, as both an intellectual engagement and critical practice. However, without disputing Procter’s prescience, it is evident that, regarding asylum, the incursion of a politics of the exception into the everyday fundamentally problematizes this sense of the everyday. I argue that asylum seekers today are made, in effect, to incarnate the ban—the relation of inclusive exclusion that characterizes the politics of exception—and that this is realised in even the most prosaic details of daily life in the asylum system. Through a reading of Sonja Linden’s Asylum Monologues (2006) and Asylum Dialogues (2008), and their surrounding contexts (especially the anti-removal protests on the Kingsway estate in Glasgow between 2006 and 2008), I address the extent to which Procter’s sense of the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ in the postcolonial everyday can be mapped onto asylum experience, and suggest that the incursions of a politics of the exception into asylum seekers’ everyday life necessitates a postcolonial response that can conjure even-handedly with the exception(al) and the quotidian without recourse to the defamiliarizing strategies that would cast the asylum seeker as irredeemably other.