Deporting Black Britons

Deporting ‘Black Britons’ exposes the relationship between racism, borders and citizenship by telling the painful stories of four men who have been exiled to Jamaica. It examines processes of criminalisation, illegalisation and racialisation as they interact to construct deportable subjects in contemporary Britain and offers new ways of thinking about race and citizenship at different scales.

Deporting 'Black Britons' exposes the relationship between racism, borders and citizenship by telling the painful stories of four men who have been exiled to Jamaica. It examines processes of criminalisation, illegalisation and racialisation as they interact to construct deportable subjects in contemporary Britain and offers new ways of thinking about race and citizenship at different scales.

(B)ordering Britain argues that Britain is the spoils of empire, its immigration law is colonial violence and irregular immigration is anti-colonial resistance. In announcing itself as postcolonial through immigration and nationality laws passed in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Britain cut itself off symbolically and physically from its colonies and the Commonwealth, taking with it what it had plundered. This imperial vanishing act cast Britain's colonial history into the shadows. The British Empire, about which Britons know little, can be remembered fondly as a moment of past glory, as a gift once given to the world. Meanwhile immigration laws are justified on the basis that they keep the undeserving hordes out. In fact, immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence. They obstruct the vast majority of racialised people from accessing colonial wealth amassed in the course of colonial conquest. Regardless of what the law, media and political discourse dictate, people with personal, ancestral or geographical links to colonialism, or those existing under the weight of its legacy of race and racism, have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.

A powerful manifesto for a world without borders from two immigration policy experts and activists Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished. Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, which impact migrants and citizens both. Bradley and de Noronha tell what should by now be a simple truth: borders are not only at the edges of national territory, in airports, or at border walls. Borders are everyday and everywhere; they follow people around and get between us, and disrupt our collective safety, freedom and flourishing. Against Borders is a passionate manifesto for border abolition, arguing that we must transform society and our relationships to one another, and build a world in which everyone has the freedom to move and to stay.

'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

Moving Difference demonstrates how differences between migrants who share the same nationality travel with them and can impact on every aspect of their ‘mobile lives’. Analysing the lived experiences and narratives of Brazilians in London, it adds an in-depth ethnographic understanding of the specific contours of difference to studies of migration by demonstrating how social differences, rooted in colonial legacies, are constantly being re-created and negotiated in the everyday making of the global world. By using ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, in addition to historical and contextual analyses, the book allows us to understand how people speak of, engage with and negotiate difference in their everyday lives and how this is shaped by the macro-political and -social contexts of immigration and emigration. Giving attention to the complex interrelations between ‘here’ and ‘there’, past and present, this book allows us to go beyond the proliferated homogenised stereotypes of ‘the migrant’ and ‘the migrant community’ often reproduced by academics as well as by the media and politicians, whether with a view to pathologising or romanticising the ‘migrant other’. This title will appeal to students, scholars, community workers and general readers interested in migration, social class, gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity, colonialism and slavery, social exclusion, globalisation and urban sociology.

Based on interviews and workshops with refugees in both countries, the book develops the concept of "migrantification" - in which people are made into migrants by the state, the media and members of society.

This book employs critical race theory as a theoretical and analytical framework to unveil how racial stratification shapes the socioeconomic outcomes and racial inequality in the labour market. The pages guide students interested in CRT and investigating racism, discrimination and inequality.

We are in a moment of profound overlapping crises. The landscape of politics and entitlement is being rapidly and unpredictably remade. As movements against colonial legacies and state violence coincide with the rise of new authoritarian regimes, it is the analytical lens of racism, and the politics of race, that offers the sharpest focus.In Empire's Endgame, eight leading scholars make a powerful collective intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in the British context. While the 'Hostile Environment' policy and Brexit Referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual attitudes and behaviours. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors of Empire's Endgame trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state.Engaging with contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, Empire's Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a vision of a political infrastructure that might include rather than expel in the face of crisis.

The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Sao Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informed by her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband was incarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the period of Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Sao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than 90 percent of Sao Paulo's 147 prison facilities. Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of the PCC illuminates how the organization operates inside and outside of prison, creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reaching command system. This system challenges both the police forces against which the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionally employed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration, and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence," a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomous from, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation to redemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as well as to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.