American Literary History

I keep thinking about this story. Ten Arab students at the University of Dnipro were on a bus with other foreign nationals escaping the advancing Russian army, and, as they approached the border, Ukrainian soldiers stopped them, told everyone to get out and walk, and then allowed Ukrainians to board. The students received no aid from those living along their now pedestrian route. They were forced to wait until others finished their shopping to buy necessities like food and water. At the border, they were told to stand inside a rectangle drawn on the ground. Violence awaited anyone who stepped outside the line. One Moroccan student, whose version of this journey was reported in Al Jazeera, observed, “The army differentiated between people depending on their skin color and gender . . . Women were allowed to proceed within hours, while men could wait for four or five days. Also, the darker your skin the worse and longer the wait” (Ibrahim).

The crudity of such difference-making and the stark disparity of the treatment these students received based on their perceived differences illustrate in a painfully salient way Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism, which was first published in an essay entitled “Race and Globalization”: “[T]he state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies” (261).¹ Surely, the soldiers produced group differences as much as they exploited them; they decided by looking that the people on this bus were not like the other people desperate to escape a warzone. Their lives were not as important. They were more deserving of being made vulnerable to “premature death.” Gratefully, the ten students did not die, but they were without a doubt made much [End Page 1041] more vulnerable to an early demise than the people who took their place on the bus. For the soldiers, whose very uniforms made them representatives of the state, the calculation must have been easy to make and came to them lightning fast: the people already on the bus deserved to live less than the people outside.

But what do we do with the last part of Gilmore’s definition (“in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies”), which insists on distinction and interconnectedness in the geographies that politics makes? In order to respond to this question, I find it necessary to turn to the historian Cedric Robinson’s use of the term racial capitalism, which many of the contributors to this special issue prominently reference as a way to make sense of the long history, and current experience, of migration. Let me, then, say more about this concept before I turn attention back to the border and the role it plays in the production and maintenance of the refugee as a figure. Refugees are never just Other but are always part of a greater whole, connected as they are to a system that must, because of this kind of intimacy, insist on keeping them apart.²