Please note copyright ©Charlotte Bailey images & @ImogenTyler words. Please do not reproduce any images from this page without proper citation: Charlotte Bailey & Imogen Tyler, 2018 “From Stigma Power to Black Power” Graphic Essay.

One of the outcomes of my research project on stigma is a collaboration with the graphic artist Charlotte Bailey . Together we have been transforming my article on Goffman – a paper which puts Goffman’s stigma concept into critical dialogue with Black Sociological and Political thought (mainly but not only from the US) .

Charlotte has been interpreting my essay visually through her ink drawings- and I have been working on the words, and “the story” the essay tells. The final version of our graphic essay will be available to download for free (but please make sure to credit the artist and writer when distributing!). It will also be available to buy in a limited edition paper copy (when we have worked out the best way to publish it).

One of things which has guided our collaboration is a concern with making rich historical lines of Black critical thought about stigma visible. The original essay attempts to do this through its citational politics –  a very long list of references is intended both as a resource for others, and to make a statement about how Black thinking continues to be ignored and marginalised. Indeed, one of the main arguments I make is that despite the sophisticated understanding of racial stigma developed over a hundred years of black sociological thought, the conceptualisation of stigma in sociology has largely been ‘structured by the absence of an address’ to this tradition (Bhambra, 2014, p. 12).* This is why in seeking to historically resituate Goffman’s original account, I drew on such a long and wide range of interlocutors working in a Black critical, political and sociological tradition, including: Mario Biondi, James Boggs, Stokley Carmichael, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, Kimberley Dotson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Roderick Ferguson, Frantz Fanon, the Greensboro Four, Paul Gilroy, Lewis Gordon, Charles Hamilton, Harry Haywood, Robin Kelley, Joyce Lamont, Manning Marable, Zine Magubane, Anne Moody, Cedric Robinson, Hortense Spillers, Cornell West, Patricia Williams and Gary Younge. One of the many things which has been wonderful things about working with Charlotte is how she has animated these Black thinkers through her ink drawings. 

The account of racism as stigma which emerges through this Black genealogy of stigma-thinking challenges the individualism of psychological approaches to social problems, exposes the limits of “white normative perspectives”, and troubles “race neutral” forms of interactional analysis. What this graphic essay also seeks to highlight are existing rich historical, political and economic conceptualisations of stigma as technologies of dehumanisation, stigma as forms of power which have been collectively resisted from below.

 

For example, of central importance to Black freedom struggles was (and continues to be) Carmichael and Hamilton’s anti-stigma concept of ‘Black Power’ which reconfigured racial stigma into ‘a revolutionary emotion’:

We hope this graphic essay will help bring racism and anti-racist scholarship and (activism) to the front and centre of sociological understandings of stigma.

*(I am glad to report that more recent scholarship suggests a new sociological interest in the relationship between racism, stigma and power: see Loury, 2003; Howarth, 2006; Matory, 2015; Lamont et. al., 2016).

 

Please note copyright ©Charlotte Bailey images & @ImogenTyler words. Please do not reproduce any images from this page without proper citation: Charlotte Bailey & Imogen Tyler, 2018 “From Stigma Power to Black Power” Graphic Essay.

At the end of this post is an abstract for an article I am currently finishing called ‘Deportation Nation’. I first developed this paper as a talk at BritCult: The German Association for the Study of British Culture, Dortmund, 2017. This paper develops my longstanding research on deportation, immigration detention and the scapegoating of migrants in public culture, but focuses on Theresa’s May tenure as Home Secretary (and subsequently Prime-Minister), and considers how the institution of ‘Hostile Environment’ policies characterise “Mayism”. I have been documenting May’s tenure as Home Secretary since 2010, and this paper and article presented an first opportunity to draw on some of the materials I have been collating — and particularly to begin to map out the ways in which newspaper journalists and television news companies collaborated with the Home Office in propaganda campaigns ostensibly designed to encourage ‘voluntary departures’ of non-citizens from Britain. As Stuart Hall puts it, “What is significant for the present moment is how this … demonstrates the crafting of collective consent to increased state repression, which appears to be spontaneous, through various cultural and ideological channels’.

In The Deportation Machine (2005), Liz Fekete examines earlier collaborations between the British Government and news organisations in the production of border enforcement propaganda. As Feteke details, it was under Tony Blair’s New Labour Government (1997-2007) that the British state began to deport unwanted migrants on any significant scale: in 1999 about 9,000 deportations took place, by 2010 this had risen to 70,000. In the same period, the Government first set itself numerical targets for the removal of “failed asylum seekers” and “immigration offenders” (Weber & Bowling 2008: 361). In 2001, the Home Office began to charter commercial planes to undertake mass deportations of failed asylum seekers, a practice which over the course of the following decade was extended to other categories of unwanted migrants, and is now commonplace (Miller 2018). The use of charter flights enabled the Home Office to remove “from the public gaze the spectacle of bound and struggling men and women” on commercial flights (Weber & Bowling 2008: 361). This was a strategic decision for, as Antje Ellermann has argued, when confronted with “the human face of deportation” the public “often become far more sensitive to the claims of those the state is attempting to expel” (2006: 296). However, the Home Office also recognised that these ‘shadow flights’ might act as a deterrent to future refugees. In 2004, they contracted an Associated Press Television News team to “video the forced deportation of approximately two dozen Afghans from Gatwick airport so that the film could subsequently be broadcast in Afghanistan as part of a programme warning” those considering coming to Britain that they could face a similar fate (Fekete 2005: 20).

In Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies (2017) Hannah Jones, Yasmin Gunarathnam, Gargi Bhattacharyya, William Davies, Sucwant Dahaliwl, Kirsteen Forket, Emma Jackson and Roiyah Saltus further mapped the genealogy of this deportation propaganda machine. As they detail, in 2006 Tony Blair appointed a new ‘hard-line’ Home Secretary, John Reid (2006-2007), in response to a series of scandals around perceived failures to deport foreign criminals and control levels of ‘illegal migration’. Reid immediately launched a new communications strategy designed to demonstrate “a visibly tough approach to controlling borders and movement” (Jones et al. 2017: 13). This included “getting more images of immigration raids into the media” by “inviting journalists along to witness raids” in order to garner “media attention to the physical ‘toughness’ of the border” (ibid.). Whilst this deportation publicity ostensibly targeted “immigration offenders”, it now also had “an audience of the law-abiding and taxpaying public in mind” (ibid.). This shift in audience was made explicit in 2008, when the Home Office funded an independent television production company to develop a reality television programme called UK Border Force (Steadfast/Sky, 2008-2009). This programme was advertised as “a revealing new documentary series which takes you behind the scenes at Heathrow Terminal 3, Calais, Dover and out and about with diligent enforcement teams – all cracking down on illegal immigrants” (Burnett 2009). UK Border Force established a set of aesthetic and dramatic conventions for border enforcement which remained in evidence in ITN’s production of ‘immigration raid action sequences’ in Slough in 2014 – (which I explore in my article). Indeed, by the time of David Cameron’s televised appearance alongside an immigration ‘snatch squad’, the British public were primed in a televisual aesthetic of enforcement in which border officials appear as patriotic citizen-soldiers on the front-line of ‘the immigration invasion’. In 2010,  when Theresa May was appointed Home Secretary, the now established political use of deportation “to send a signal – to a nation-state’s citizens as well as its ‘outsiders'” significantly intensified (De Genova & Peutz 2010: 28).

This paper was also an opportunity to engage with Nicholas De Genova’s important theoretical work on ‘deportability”, and to consider the ways in which regimes of deportability — and the tentacle-like spread of internal borders within the state this entails — are increasingly entangled with forms of disposability. Policies which make increasing numbers of people ‘deportable’ through, for example, increasing governmental checks on legibility to work, study or live in Britain; and policies which make other unwanted people ‘disposable’, for example state-led practices of gentrification which expel social housing tenants from affluent cities, are underpinned by the same governmental logic. By emphasising the dual axis of deportability and disposability this paper begins to address the intertwined classed and racist character of authoritarian neoliberal state forms. I don’t develop this dual axis of deportability and disposability much further in this paper (but will do in my forthcoming book Stigma Machines).

It is the contention of my current research that we need to develop conceptual tools that enable intersectional analysis of the underlying logic of late neoliberal forms of state power. In particular, this requires an understanding of class and racism as structures of power which function in concert. For example, as Robin Kelley argues, in his account of the historical development of ‘racial capitalism’, it is precisely “the capacity of capital in the state to capture the white working class and tie its identity to race– that is to whiteness and masculinity” which enables neoliberal capitalism to reproduce itself—even at the moment of its own generated crisis. The media and political spectacle of deportation I examine in this paper is designed precisely to engender the forms of ‘capture’ and ‘division’ which Kelley describes.

 

‘Deportation Nation’ begins with the highly-publicised appearance of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his (then) Home Secretary Theresa May, at the scene of an immigration raid in Slough in 2014. Since the 1990s, deportation has been “routinely capitalized on in governmental rhetoric” as a means of demonstrating effective control over borders and immigration (Tyler 2013: 71). As Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz argue, “deportation is not only a technique by which governments exert their sovereign power over bodies, space, and ‘the nation’; it has become a mechanism by which governments measure and signal their own effectiveness” (2010: 5). However, while the symbolism of deportation is increasingly invoked as a threat in political rhetoric, the actual practices of deportation, including dawn raids on homes and properties, arrests, detentions and the physical removal of people from British territory, are distressing and sometimes violent procedures. Indeed, these are kinds of activities which senior politicians would ordinarily seek to visually distance themselves from. Given this, the high-profile, if carefully curated, appearance of the British Prime Minister and his Home Secretary at an immigration raid is unusual. Indeed, stepping back from the scene at Slough, there is something extraordinary about the media spectacle of Britain’s most senior politicians at the scene of a deportation. Using events in Slough as a point of entry, this article examines a British Government initiative designed to create what May described in a speech to Parliament in 2012 as “a really hostile environment for illegal migrants in Britain”. It considers the subsequent implementation of this hostile environment and the intensification of deportation as a technology of government which it involved. It also examines how this politics of deportability came to characterise the 2015 Brexit campaign and the racist violence which followed in its wake. It argues that the “production of deportability” has been a defining feature of Theresa May’s tenure as Home Secretary (2010-2016) and Prime-Minister (2016-current) (De Genova & Peutz 2010: 17). It concludes by considering migrant deportability, and associated forms of citizen disposability, as central components of late neoliberal forms of state power. It is the argument of this article that thinking with and through deportation (and crucially resistance to this) can further our understanding of the relationship between the increasing precarity of migrant lives and the current intensification of ‘legalised expulsions’ “at home” (Walters, 2002).

This abstract below is taken from the introduction (written by myself and Tom Slater) to a special issue Monograph of the Sociological Review on The Sociology of Stigma. The full introduction, and full issue is online here and can be purchased in hardcopy here for £10. [If you would like a PDF of this introduction but cannot access please contact me].

Stigma is not a self-evident phenomenon but like all concepts has a history. The conceptual understanding of stigma which underpins most sociological research has its roots in the ground-breaking account penned by Erving Goffman in his best-selling book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). In the 50 years since its publication, Goffman’s account of stigma has proved a productive concept, in terms of furthering research on social stigma and its effects, on widening public understandings of stigma, and in the development of anti-stigma campaigns. However, this introductory article argues that the conceptual understanding of stigma inherited from Goffman, along with the use of micro-sociological and/or psychological research methods in stigma research, often side-lines questions about where stigma is produced, by whom and for what purposes. As Simon Parker and Robert Aggleton argue, what is frequently missing is social and political questions, such as ‘how stigma is used by individuals, communities and the state to produce and reproduce social inequality’. This article expands on Parker and Aggleton’s critique of the limitations of existing conceptual understandings of stigma, through an examination of the anti-stigma campaign Heads Together. This high-profile campaign launched in 2016 seeks to ‘end the stigma around mental health’ and is fronted by members of the British Royal Family. By thinking critically with and about this campaign, this article seeks to both delineate the limitations of existing conceptual understandings of stigma and to begin to develop a supplementary account of how stigma functions as a form of power. We argue that in order to grasp the role and function of stigma in society, scholarship must develop a richer and fuller understanding of stigma as a cultural and political economy. The final part of this introduction details the articles to follow, and the contribution they collectively make to the project of rethinking the sociology of stigma. This collection has been specifically motivated by: (1) how reconceptualising stigma might assist in developing better understandings of pressing contemporary problems of social decomposition, inequality and injustice; (2) a concern to decolonise the discipline of sociology by interrogating its major theorists and concepts; and (3) a desire to put class struggle and racism at the centre of understandings of stigma as a classificatory form of power.

Drawing by Charlotte Bailey (from a forthcoming Graphic Essay based on this article). Please do not reproduce this images without proper citation: Charlotte Bailey & Imogen Tyler, 2018 “From Stigma Power to Black Power” Graphic Essay.

In “Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power”, a recent article published from my ongoing Stigma research project (link to full article here but please contact me for a PDF if you can’t access it), I offer a critical re-reading of the understanding of stigma forged by the North American sociologist Erving Goffman in his influential Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). One of the most widely read and cited sociologists in history, Goffman was already famous when Stigmawas published in 1963. His previous books were best-sellers and Stigma alone has sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in the 50 years since its publication. Given its considerable influence, it is surprising how little sustained engagement there has been with the historicity of Goffman’s account. This article resituates Goffman’s conceptualisation of stigma within the historical context of Jim Crow and the Black freedom struggles that were shaking ‘the social interaction order’ to its foundations at the very moment he crafted his account. It is the contention of this article that these explosive political movements against the ‘humiliations of racial discrimination’ invite revision of Goffman’s decidedly apolitical account of stigma. This historical revision of Goffman’s stigma concept builds on an existing body of critical work on the relationship between race, segregation and the epistemology of sociology within the USA. Throughout, it reads Goffman’s Stigma through the lens of ‘Black Sociology’, a field of knowledge that here designates not only formal sociological scholarship, but political manifestos, journalism, creative writing, oral histories and memoirs. It is the argument of this article that placing Goffman’s concept of stigma into critical dialogue with Black epistemologies of stigma allows for a timely reconceptualisation of stigma as governmental technologies of dehumanisation that have long been collectively resisted from below.