Geographies of violence: island prisons, prison islands, black sites
Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese
Abstract
This article draws on the findings of the Deathscapes project, a transnational research project funded by the Australian Research Council that aims to map racialised deaths in custody across several settler states, and their points of origin in the European metropolis. What is distinctive about the research is its grounding of anti-refugee and anti-migrant violence in the logic of the settler-colonial state and its foundational and continuing violence against Indigenous sovereignty. From their very different positions, refugee and Indigenous bodies are limit-figures that exceed the spatial and temporal bounds of the settler state and are thus subject to shared technologies of state violence. What follows focuses on refugee and migrant bodies as they die in their myriad ways across the deathscape, from the desert borders of the United States to the waters of the Mediterranean and offshore detention sites in Australia. It discusses some of the key analytical concepts developed through the research and offers an overview of the Deathscapes website, demonstrating how the site functions as a counter-site to popular media and acts as an interface for diverse forms of engagement and exchange among communities, activists, artists, and researchers.
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Deathscapes, Australia, United States, the Mediterranean, popular media, counter-site
Pages
85-97