'This conceptually vivid book refreshes our vision' - Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive and deeply sociopolitical.
By tracing the illegalised movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions on how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
Show more'This conceptually vivid book refreshes our vision' - Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive and deeply sociopolitical.
By tracing the illegalised movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions on how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
Show moreSeries Preface
Acknowledgements
About the Cover Image
Introduction: To See Like a Smuggler - Mahmoud Keshavarz and
Shahram Khosravi
1. Smuggling as a Collective Enterprise: Ethiopian/Wollo Migration
to Saudi Arabia - Tekalign Ayalew Mengiste
2. Aurelian Dreams: Gold Smuggling and Mobilities across Colonial
and Contemporary Asia - Nichola Khan
3. The Border Merchant - Aliyeh Ataei
4. Smugglers and the State Effect at the Mexico-Guatemala Border -
Rebecca B. Galemba
5. Kolbari: Workers Not Smugglers - Amin Parsa
6. From the Smuggling of Goods to the Smuggling of Drugs in La
Guajira, Colombia - Javier Guerrero-C
7. Contesting Common Sense: Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh
Border - Debdatta Chowdhury
8 The Bus Economy: A 90-day Gateway across Zimbabwe-South Africa -
Kennedy Chikerema
9. Illicit Design Sensibilities: The Material and Infrastructural
Potentialities of Drug Smuggling - Craig Martin
10. A Partial Offering: In and Out of Smuggling - Simon Harvey
Afterword: Seeing Freedom - Nandita Sharma
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Mahmoud Keshavarz is Senior Lecturer in Design Studies at the
University of Gothenburg. He is the author of The Design Politics
of the Passport. He co-edits the journal Design and Culture.
Shahram Khosravi is Professor in Anthropology at Stockholm
University. He is the author of Young and Defiant in Tehran, which
was highly recommended by Choice. He has also contributed to
publications such as The New York Times.
'This conceptually vivid book refreshes our vision. We can see how
vulnerable people combine, innovate, and revise what they do to
make geography from below. There, at the margins, is life in
rehearsal'
*Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of 'Abolition Geography: Essays
Towards Liberation'*
'At last, an urgent and brilliant collection of histories 'from
below', about the people and goods transgressing the borders of
global capitalism. The world economy will never look quite the
same’
*Marcus Rediker, co-author of 'The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden
History of the Revolutionary Atlantic'*
'Tells amazing stories from the ground of how people negotiate with
borders, state, local officials and carry on lives in the midst of
everyday border violence. There is no morality play here.
Migration, clandestine existence and illegal activities like
smuggling - these are not acts to be found in some independent
criminal universe. These are part of society's subterranean
life'
*Ranabir Samaddar, Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced
Migration Studies at the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group*
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