‘Welcome to Britain’

Abstract

Questions of asylum and immigration have taken centre stage in national and international debate and figure prominently in the domestic political agendas of wealthy states and nations. In Australia, Europe and the US, harsh and punitive asylum and immigration laws are being enacted incrementally and asylum-seekers are subject increasingly to detention. Through a focus on the detention of asylum-seekers in the UK, this article makes a critical intervention in current theoretical debates around asylum.Focusing on the writing of Giorgio Agamben, this article suggests that within political and cultural theory, there has been a turn to the figure of the asylum-seeker (and the refugee) as a trope for theorizing the political constitution of the present. By opening up a critical dialogue between humanitarian, media studies and abstract theoretical accounts of immigration detention, this article produces a critique of the ways in which theory appropriates the figure of the asylum-seeker.