Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below

Description

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. Series Preface Acknowledgments 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