Instituting the global: The racial analytics of migration

Abstract In this article, we regard concepts of inclusion and exclusion as epistemological obstacles for a political (rather than a critical) analysis of migration. Working with the rich conceptual innovations and scientific and philosophical genealogies developed by Denise Ferreira Da Silva in Toward a Global Idea of Race, we seek to show how concepts of inclusion and exclusion, as well as equations between migration and mobility fortify what Da Silva has called ‘globality’ and ‘raciality’. Either explicitly or implicitly according primacy to inclusion means that what Da Silva calls ‘the logic of exclusion’ ultimately folds into what she terms ‘the logic of obliteration’, which revolves around the necessary assimilation of the European other to the Euro-white subject. As we argue, today, the racial institution of the global operates to a large extent by way of the conceptual, classificatory and ocular practices that make up what is known as ‘migration’, which continues to be understood (falsely but constitutively) as cross-border mobility. We seek to show how ‘migration’, and its concomitant binary analytic of inclusion and exclusion, has become an apparatus separating what Da Silva calls the ‘transcendental I’, that is, the universal, self-determining, Euro-white subject, from those primarily characterized and known by what Da Silva calls ‘affectability’, that is, external determination. In the hierarchy of humans that ensues, migrants become recognizable as racially inferior, affectable not-quite-subjects.