The institutionalization of right-wing populism and proto fascism in the United States over the past 6 months has created a dynamic where each day brings another act that causes observers, particularly those outside of the U.S.A., to shake their heads in dismay.
Whether it is the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the ‘Gulf of America’,ice r the upending of established diplomatic and trade relationships, or the widespread arrests and terrorization of undocumented workers and migrants by the Department of Homeland Security, the United States is rapidly become a space that is hostile to free speech, free movement, and broader human rights. The recent opening of a federal holding facility in the Florida Everglades, dubbed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, is yet another moment where we are forced to stop and ask ourselves, “How in the hell did we get to this point?”
Critiques of the facility, designed to hold detained undocumented people before they are removed from the United States, are widespread and vivid in the mental imagery created. Many have referred to it as a concentration camp. Again, many who are witnessing this in real time are asking themselves how we came to this point. They draw parallels with Dachau and Auschwitz, and all of the horrors that accompany those names and spaces.
However, if one looks at American history, this is just one of a long series of uses of space to marginalize and exclude those who are viewed as “undesirable” inhabitants in the United States.
To begin, we need to dive into a bit of spatial theory, particularly that of Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe. Agamben’s theory of “states of exception” and homo sacer explain the ways in which individuals can have the protection of the sovereign/the state pulled away from them, leaving them in a figurative space where their rights, and even their lives, can be taken away from them. Mbembe brings Agambenian theory further into his analysis of the American War on Terror, and how the state can further this state of exception into figurative and literal space where the state is empowered to force individuals into spaces where they can be neglected, or killed at any moment in the name of preserving the safety and security of the state.
Mbembe portrays many of the most maligned spaces on Earth, such as favelas, banlieues, less prosperous suburbs, urban areas, and yes, prisons, as examples of this space where the state can wield its ability to kill/take away life from the inhabitants with abandon.
The gleeful promises of American political figures such as President Donald Trump and right wing agitators such as Laura Loomer that the siting of Alligator Alcatraz will ensure no escape, under the threat of devourment by the local wildlife, aligns with this broader theoretical framing—they hope that Alligator Alcatraz will kill—either by sheer neglect and conditions, or via the killing of the person by environmental factors in a bid to escape, a grim hearkening to Laurent Berlant’s theory of ‘cruel optimism’.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, it can be very easy to express dismay and shock over the fact that a concentration camp is open in the United States, and that political parties such as the Florida Republican Party are even selling merchandise to profit off the idea. The common refrain when something bad happens in the United States, “This is not who we are”, can be seen and heard in utterances surrounding the entire fiasco.
However, simply dismissing this phenomenon as “un-American” is to ignore the fact that over many points in the country’s history, the United States, whether via governmental act or via socio-economic pressures, has marginalized entire groups of people using the concept of space, or access to space, as a weapon.
Speaking as an Indigenous person, I can point to several examples of this in American history without even thinking too deeply about it. Is the current reservation system, which was designed to spatially confine Indigenous peoples to a certain parcel of land (in many cases, land that was deemed to be of no value to the settler population), not a version of open-air captivity, much like a concentration camp? In 1862-63, nearly 2000 Dakota women, children, and elders were kept in captivity on an island near Fort Snelling, Minnesota, ahead of their expulsion from the state in the aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Is that not a version of a concentration camp?
Is the systematic destruction of prosperous Black economic spaces in the United States during the 20th century, followed by the exodus of white Americans and economic power out of urban cores during the mid 20th century, leaving behind spaces of neglect and disinvestment like a concentration camp? This is to say nothing of the rapid gentrification of these formerly undesirable spaces, pricing long-time residents out of their homes, to be replaced by Whole Foods locations and hot yoga studios.
Did the United States not relocate Japanese-Americans away from the West Coast during the Second World War, and place them in internment camps over fears that they were disloyal to the United States? Those camps look an awful lot like concentration camps.
In fact, if one looks back at American history, one will find that this sort of thing has been happening all along.
And, if this has been happening over the entire history of the United States, it becomes indefensible to stand back and disavow current actions, because it becomes painfully clear that the United States has always used space in punitive and destructive ways towards those individuals not viewed as fully “American”.
This raises one more question—what exactly are we to do about this?
The answer to this, I argue, lies in space as well, but this time in the resurgent and liberatory nature of reclaiming space, whether that is figurative, or physical space. If we can confront the fact that spatial marginalization is as American as apple pie and baseball, we can then create new openings within figurative space to understand the true relationships to space that many peoples, including those currently in “Alligator Alcatraz” possess.
It becomes easier to create real spaces where fascism is not allowed to take root, and it becomes easier to create the intellectual space necessary to resist the attempts of the current American administration to further entrench settler colonial domination on these lands. By recognising that spatial states of exception, such as Alligator Alcatraz, are part of how the United States has interacted with space, we can create new futures that view space in a different, more liberatory way.
Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, Ph.D. 