« Alien frontiers: Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Neda Atanasoski, ‘Unsettling Alien Land’, American Quarterly, 78, 3, 2026, pp. 677-703

Deportation is a form of incarceration: Monisha Das Gupta, ‘Carcerality and Abolition: Settler Politics and Migrant Organizing’, American Quarterly, 78, 3, 2026, pp. 801-825

15Sep26

Abstract: This essay corrects the tendency in critical transnational migration studies to evacuate the significance of land and its relationship to Indigenous sovereignty. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s attention to the agency of land in her conceptualization of borderlands as a starting point, I apply the theoretical orientations offered by settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies to reexamine central analytics in migration studies. I frame deportation as a form of settler carcerality. The combination of crime and immigration controls naturalizes the United States’ territorial power to obscure Indigenous landcentered presence and politics. I argue that the abolitionist segment of the antideportation movement, by refusing to abandon im/migrants with criminal records, confronts settler carcerality. The organizers provide new frameworks to instigate decarceral and decolonial action amid a massive expansion of the carceral state, which threatens Indigenous land and self-determination.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed