Projet de Thèse / Thesis Proposal

Affective Politics, Effective Borders:

Media Culture and the Discursive Formation of Canadian Immigration Policy

Tamara Vukov
Université de Concordia (3395642)
Doctorat Conjoint en Communication

Final Thesis Proposal

Thesis Proposal Examining Committee: Professor Monika Kin Gagnon,

Professor Brian Massumi, Professor Chantal Nadeau (Supervisor)

April 2003
 1

Table of Contents

1. Mobilizing Contexts and Pertinence 1

1.1 Current Context: The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) 1
1.2 Media Spectacles around Immigration 2
1.3 The Post-September 11th Context 3
1.4 Formations of Immigration Policy 4

2. Problematic (Central Question) 6

3. Theoretical Framework 6

3.1 Immigration and the Borders of the Settler Nation 8

3.2 Population, Policy, Governmentality: The Question of Immigration Policy 14
3.3 Affective Politics and Media Myths: The Question of Media Culture 22

4. Methodology 31

4.1 “Object” of Analysis 31

4.2 Corpus 32
4.3 Methods: Media and Archival Research, Discourse Analysis, Interviews 35

5. Proposed Thesis Structure & Tentative Chapter Breakdown 38

Appendix 1

1.1 Further Research Questions 41

1.2 Elaboration of Chapter Breakdown 42

1.3 Research Timetable 44

Bibliography 45

Appendix 2
 1

1. Mobilizing Contexts and Pertinence of the Project

1.1 The Recent Context: The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA)

and Safe Third Country Agreement

In February 2001, Canadian Minister of Immigration Elinor Caplan tabled Bill C-11, the

proposed new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), in the House of Commons,

declaring that "by saying 'No' more quickly to people who would abuse our rules, we are able to say

'Yes' more often to the immigrants and refugees Canada will need to grow and prosper in the years

ahead” (CIC Feb. 2001). Sixteen months after it’s tabling, the bill was passed by senate and

enshrined into legislation on June 28th, 2002. According to the overview of the new policy, “…the

proposed Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its regulations carry a dual mandate: closing

the back door to criminals and others who would abuse Canada's openness and generosity while

opening the front door to genuine refugees and to the immigrants the country needs” (Bill C-11

2001).

In the wake of the implementation of the new IRPA, the Canadian government took the first

steps towards the proposed creation of a North American security perimeter with the signing of the

Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement in December of 2002. The agreement allows

Canada to refuse the majority of refugee claimants arriving at the Canada-U.S. border, cutting the

number of eligible refugee claimants in half (and making it very difficult for refugees from such

regions as Latin America to make claims, given that few will be able to secure a means of transit to

Canada that doesn’t involve passage through the United States).

Two things are notable at the outset of these two policy vignettes. To begin with, the key

tropes of the open front door and the closed back door, of the welcoming of desirable immigrants

and “genuine” refugees and the exclusion of undesirable, abusive, or inauthentic ones, are key

themes for my project. Secondly, the implicit emphasis of the new Act and the new Agreement on
 2

safety and protection, of the implicit link between immigration and security concerns, is something

that is central both to recent immigration policy discourses, and their wider circulation in media and

public culture.

1.2 Media Spectacles around Immigration

Questions of immigration and asylum are charged with an inordinate visibility and an

affective intensity in media culture. We often hear that the world is facing a global migration crisis,

as matters of immigration are often couched in the language of crisis. While statistics remain a key

political battleground and mode of governmentality over questions of immigration, it is worth

noting that, according to current United Nation’s statistics, only 3% of the world’s population

currently lives outside the nation of its birth. Over the last thirty years, net immigration in countries

of the North has risen only slightly (from 6% to 8%) (Stalker 10). These numbers, though notable,

are relatively insignificant. Yet the impressions we glean from the high visibility and affective

intensity expressed around immigration in much of the media would seem to suggest the opposite.

The relative statistical insignificance of immigration belies its heightened and charged political

significance. I want to suggest that media culture plays a large role in this process of affective

amplification and dramatization.

Canada has a long-standing tradition of media and cultural spectacles around immigration

that are central to the dramatization of questions of exclusion and inclusion in the nation. In 1999

alone, they ranged from the xenophilic media coverage that accompanied the opening of the Pier 21

Immigration Center in 1999 (see Appendix, A1), to the xenophobic spectacle around the landing of

600 Fujian Chinese refugees on the shores of British Columbia (see Appendix, A2-A6). These cases

echo a long tradition of media “panics” around so-called undesirable immigrants, from the landing

of the Komogata Maru in 1914 on the west coast (see Appendix, A7), to the current conjuncture in

which central and South Asians and Middle Easterners are the focus of suspicion and selective
 3

detention policies. At the same time, immigration is also figured as crucial to the nation, both

historically (as a “nation of immigrants’), economically, and for future population growth (see

Appendix, A14).

1.3 The Post-September 11th Context

With the IRPA already hotly contested, the post-September 11th political climate following

the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City rendered these questions all the

more acute. The news media in Canada intensified the focus on immigration and refugee issues,

constantly invoking the prospect of “porous” or “leaky” borders (see Appendix, A8), the so-called

“Canadian Connection” to the terrorist attacks (see Appendix, A9), and the spectre of terrorism

descending onto Canada and Québec. No surprisingly, this led to an immediate call to “plug our

porous borders” and tighten immigration and refugee laws (see Appendix, A10).

Amidst this spectacle of insecurity, the media focused on two cases of former refugee

claimants with links to organized terrorist cells in particular: that of Ahmed Rassam and Nabil al-

Marabh (Appendix A9). The media’s inflation of these two cases to huge proportions was taken as

evidence of the nation’s loss of control of its borders. The cases were made to stand as

representative ones, to show the failings of immigration and refugee policy in particular. The

spectacle of a lax refugee policy and the terrorist menace to the security of the nation contributed to

a climate of fear and national threat that proliferated for several months with great intensity (see

Appendix, A11).

Yet, as was eventually revealed to much less fanfare (and outside the “flow” of spectacular

media coverage), there was no Canadian connection to the September 11th attacks in the United

States. The immigration panic that had been fomented was misdirected, in that the attacks had

nothing to do with Canadian immigration and refugee policy (indeed, all of the attackers had
 4

entered into the United States legitimately through visitor and student visas). As Audrey Macklin

has argued with respect to the Ressam and al-Marabh cases, the failure in those instances did not lie

with refugee policy or the refugee determination system, as both men had in fact been rejected for

refugee status. While there had been a suspension of deportations to Algeria due to increasingly

high levels of violence and instability in that country, the failure largely lay with Canadian

intelligence organizations that chose to allow Ressam to stay in the country for surveillance

purposes (Macklin 2002).

My project seeks to question and examine the social and affective processes behind this rush

to blame refugees and immigrants in times of crisis. The massive and inordinate amount of media

focus on an ostensibly faulty or leaky refugee system after September 11th is particularly

questionable when we consider that refugees make up only 1/10th of 1% of annual migration flows

into Canada (Canadian Council of Refugees). Writing in the context of France, Abdelmalek Sayad

has examined about this rush to blame immigration through what he calls “la double peine

d’immigration.” According to Sayad, any délit committed by an immigrant is compounded by the

latent délit of immigration itself – as evidenced by the ultimate penalty of deportation. Sayad argues

that immigration constitutes a déliquence in national structures of thought (dans nos têtes

nationaux), a disruption that tends to be spectacularized in the media to the extent that immigration

becomes popularly articulated with delinquency. Immigration implicitly disrupts a closed national

order, troubling its boundaries, and denaturalizing the nation-state. Ultimately, Sayad argues that:

“penser l’immigration, c’est penser l’état et … l’état se pense lui-même en pensant l’immigration”

(6).
 5

1.4 Formations of Immigration Policy

In terms of the immigration policy implications of September 11th predictably enough, there

were immediate calls and moves to tighten immigration, refugee and border policies more

generally. Indeed, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) was flooded by hate mail soon after

September 11th, often receiving anti-immigration profanities attached to newspaper clippings along

with furious demands to harshen lax policies (Aubry). This is a key vignette that synthesizes the

trajectory I want to explore between affect around immigration (in this case, anti-immigrant), media

culture, and the governmentality of immigration policy.

At the same time, Bill C-11 was making its way through the parliamentary process. Even a

cursory overview of the proposed bill indicates that the policy is not in fact lax, but to the contrary,

effectively constructs immigration as a security risk. Against the claims of open and closed doors,

the continual linking of immigration and security leads to an almost exclusive emphasis on “closing

the back door” and excluding undesirables. Many have argued that the IRPA codifies an alarmist

criminalization of immigration into official policy (Canadian Council of Refugees 2001), partially

in response to the panic mobilized around the Fujian Chinese refugee landings of 1999. So even

prior to September 11th, immigration policy was becoming centrally articulated to discourses of

security and terrorism (Bigo). This is most evident in the IRPA’s construction of a whole range of

new categories of undesirable immigrants, along with its primary focus on augmenting detention

and interdiction procedures.

Nonetheless, the uproar after September 11th saw many new policy measures rapidly

introduced in order to plug the “porous border.” And most recently of course, this included the

signing and implementation of the Safe Third County Agreement. This need on the part of those

who govern to be seen to be doing something, to be adequately “tough” on migration flows through

the formation of policy measures that keep them “in control,” is another key dimension of the ways
 6

in which immigration is spectacularized through the “mise en spectacle” of immigration policies

that may ultimately be ineffective but appear “tough” (Martinez).

The close link in the current conjuncture between media discourses of porous borders and

the tightening of immigration policies is not new. It is part of an ongoing, mutual articulation

between media and policy discourses of immigration in public culture that work to construct the

effective borders of the nation. This articulation underlies the central concerns of my project and the

formulation of my problematic.

2. Problematic:

Central Question:

Using Canadian immigration policy as a point of departure (particularly policies of selection

and exclusion), how can we account for the relationship between:

1. the discourses and affective intensity of immigration in media culture and

2. the formation of immigration policy in articulating the effective borders of nation-states?

Elaboration of Central Question: How does the political affect generated by media spectacles
around immigration impinge upon the rationalities of governance at work in immigration policy and
its material efficacy in the articulation of national boundaries (and vice versa)? How do the myths
and discourses constructed around immigration in media culture relate to the institutional regulation
and discursive categories of immigration policy? What can a sustained attention to affect bring to an
analysis of governmentality?

3. Theoretical Framework

A bit of a preface to this part of my proposal. Of necessity, I am approaching the elaboration

of my cadrage théorique as a snapshot of my current thinking and research as it nears a mid-point

that is shifting, and that has evolved a great deal since I first wrote the bulk of this text almost a year

ago. Therefore, I want to emphasize the tentative nature of some of the formulations here, to frame

them as matters for discussion with what I hope will be a deliberate open-endedness.
 7

My theoretical framework broadly draws from three interdisciplinary fields: media and

cultural studies, migration studies, and social and political theory. Using these fields as my points of

departure and more general frames of theoretical reference, I will explicitly engage two sets of

specific theoretical literatures that I plan to use to articulate my own approach, questions and stakes

within the larger context I have delineated. However, I also briefly want to call attention to a

broader problematic within cultural studies that, while not an overt subject of inquiry, is an implicit

frame of reference and context for my project.

This broader problematic that informs part of the horizon for my project, as a theoretical

backdrop rather than as a subject of explicit inquiry, is the substantial body of work within cultural

studies on articulation, both as it pertains to the articulation of different social relations (sexuality,

racism, and class for instance), as well as among different fields within social formations (the

discursive, political, and material, for instance) (Hall, Juteau). This broader theoretical backdrop

helps to situate the trajectory of my examination of how immigration policy and politics articulate

different social markers (linguistic, national, economic) in the governmental and popular

construction of desirable and undesirable immigrants.

As far as my more explicit theoretical interventions are concerned, I have specified two

particular sets of literatures and lines of questioning that animate my inquiry. The first is the

problematic of population in the Foucauldian literature on governmentality, biopolitics and political

rationality (Dean, Foucault), which speaks to my foregrounding of questions of regulation in

immigration policy. The second is the emerging literature on affect and sentiment in public culture

(Massumi, Deleuze, Berlant), where I am particularly interested in its political dimensions and

effectivity in media culture. For the purposes of this proposal, I will elaborate this theoretical

framework through the three key terms of my problematic and central question (see above):
 8

immigration and the boundaries of the settler nation (articulation), the question of media culture

(discourse and affect), and the question of immigration policy (governmentality).

3.1 Immigration and the Borders of the Settler Nation

My research draws from social constructivist approaches to the nation in social and political

theory, such as Anderson’s celebrated notion of imagined communities, to frame immigration as a

central symbolic and material form through which nations are institutionally imagined and

constructed.1 In particular, settler nations (nations born of settler colonialism) such as Canada are

especially invested in symbolic and discursive articulations of hierarchies of “desirable” and

“undesirable” immigrants as structuring objects of immigration policy. These ongoing and shifting

articulations of desirable and undesirable markers can be traced through changing policies of

immigration selection and exclusion. As Gérard Noiriel shows, immigration policies in western

nation-states emerged as a key means of marking, setting apart, selecting and separating the ‘fit’

from the ‘unfit’, the ‘desirable’ from the ‘undesirable’ immigrant (56), through social markers that

articulate race and ethnicity, health, class, language, sexuality, and so on.

One of the central myths underpinning Canadian national narratives is that of Canada as “a

nation of immigrants” built from “the centuries-old dream of populating Canada’s vastness”

(Krauss 2002). Given that any retrospective mythology of a primordial or pastoral rootedness in the

land is foreclosed or ‘interrupted’ by colonial settlement,2 settler nations tend to anchor their

mythical origins in the romance of immigration as a historical euphemism for settler colonialism

(Vukov 2000). This constantly invoked desire to “people the nation” is a defining settler impulse

that sustains the trajectory between settler colonialism and contemporary immigration.

1
Immigration policy analyst Alan Simmons also cites Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community that
is generated in part though governmental policies, particularly immigration policies that shape the future construction of
the nation (Simmons 1999).
2
Unlike for instance, French national narratives based on “a fable of primordial, continuous Frenchness” (Noiriel 1996,
vii).
 9

As such, the constant mise-en-spectacle of immigration has to be understood in relation to

the population imperatives of settler postcolonialism in nations that emerged out of colonial

settlement and the constitutive dispossession of native peoples. The continual and shifting social

articulations of the desirable immigrant are historically tied to the necessity of imagining and then

seeking to attract a long-term settler colonial population as a means of sustaining economic and

political projects of nation-building. This settler link between immigration and population

settlement is very explicitly articulated in government policy (see more in Section 3) (Hawkins

1972, 380-381).

It is on this basis that I want to interrogate the Foucauldian governmentality literature to

examine how a governmentality of population emerged in Canada and Québec around the

biopolitical regulation of immigration policy. Foucault argues that policy as a technique of

governance emerged around the central object and constitutive abstraction of “population”,

simultaneously constructed as an object of knowledge and prepared as a target of political

intervention (Bacchi 47, Pasquino 108). In this way, the settler imperative of “populating the

nation,” particularly in the specific forms it has developed in Canada, is at the heart of my analysis

of both the governmentalization of immigration and its mise-en-spectacle.

The biopolitical regulation of immigration that has emerged as a central strategy to populate

and thereby create a desirable nation involves the continual monitoring of “who gets in”

(Greenwald). Hence, the crucial emphasis and central role in settler nations of practices and policies

of selection. Yet while such selection policies involve both inclusion of desirable immigrants and

exclusion of undesirable ones, they tend to be mythified into narratives of national openness and

tolerance that continually elide the very exclusions that they effect (Vukov 2003).

Examining the implications of such elisions for social and political theory, Bonnie Honig

shows how these founding myths of settler nations tend to be expressed as xenophilia, the mythic
 10

inclusion of the “iconic immigrant who once helped build this nation and whose heirs might

contribute to the national future” (1998: 1). Honig argues that such xenophilic spectacles are

inextricably linked and interdependent on their necessary opposite: xenophobia. This translates, in

the practices of governmentality, into policies of exclusion (nonadmission, interdiction, deportation)

that by definition shape policies of selection. Honig concludes that “the iconic good immigrant who

upholds American liberal democracy is not accidentally or coincidentally partnered with the iconic

bad immigrant who threatens to tear it down” (3). Such founding myths also play a constitutive role

in upholding and endowing the institutional and legal structures of nation-states with the ‘mystical’

lineage of legal and political authority that underpin the governmental techniques of inclusion and

exclusion at work in immigration policy (Cover, Derrida).3

Turning from social and political theory to the domain of migration studies (the second of

the three field that I am drawing on for my theoretical framework), James Hollifield has argued

persuasively for the need to “bring the state back in” as a unit of analysis in migration studies. He

claims that the field of migration theory has been dominated by economic and sociological

approaches, leading to an overemphasis on economic and push-pull factors in shaping policy

regimes in the first case, and on transnational social networks and globalization theories that

downplay the role of the state in the second. I interpret this claim, not as a reason to jettison

attention to the economic and social dimensions of migration, nor to reinstate a privileged,

autonomous, or reified status to the state as a bounded entity, but to insist on the continued

centrality of states in the governmentality and regulation of immigration. For Hollifield, this relative

undertheorization of the role of the state can be traced to the marginalization of politics and culture

in traditional migration theory. He argues that the political role of the state in institutionalizing

3
Hence, as I plan to argue in my thesis, the structuring of immigration policy around the legal construct of discretion,
which endows the administrative branches of the immigration bureaucracy with the mystical authority of the nation-
state. This is crystallized in the discretion dispensed to immigration and refugee officers, administrative representatives
endowed with the authority to translate selection policies into the mundane daily practice of selecting and excluding
individual immigrants and refugees.
 11

immigration policy and rights regimes remains a crucial variable in the openness or closure of

nation-states. Furthermore, he goes on to argue that the articulation and formation of these

institutional regimes are closely related to the cultural and symbolic politics of nationhood, i.e. how

immigration becomes politicized or problematized in media and public culture, and the impact these

cultural factors have on the formation of the formal-legal institutions of nationality. It is precisely

this link between cultural and governmental politics that I am interested in investigating in my

thesis.

In this respect, my project responds to the emerging literature in cultural studies (my third

field of reference) that seeks to investigate the largely undertheorized articulations between state

and culture (Steinmetz). McCrone has shown that modern approaches to the state tend to evacuate

or neglect the its cultural dimensions (86). Steinmetz claims that the cultural study of the state has

only recently begun to emerge, with very little prior theoretization of how cultural processes impact

state formation or how states impact cultural practices (3). The tendency has been to relegate culture

to non-Western and pre-modern state formations, while modern Western nation-states are framed as

transcending culture and expressing a fundamentally value-free universal rationality. Such theories

of nation-states also tend to analytically dichotomize the nation as a cultural formation from the

political dimensions of the state – then seek to examine the alignment or disjuncture between the

two (Berezin 362).

My research will examine and question these articulations between the cultural, as the site of

production of public meanings, discourses, and affects (particularly in media culture), and the

politics of state governmentality, from the techniques of governance of populations to the discursive

and institutional ordering of immigration policy, to its articulation with social relations in selection

practices. Throughout the research I have conducted over the past few years, I have been repeatedly

struck by two modes or “discursive genres” through which immigration tends to be framed in public
 12

culture. In relation to governmental policy, there is a highly abstract administrative and bureaucratic

discourse that is often formulated in the governmental vernacular of depersonalized administrative

logics, statistics, and national outputs (see Appendix, A13). There is also a highly pitched and

mythical discourse around immigration, one where public sentiment is foregrounded and political

affect is mobilized, to celebrate and dramatize immigration, or decry and demonize it (see Appendix

1 and A10). My central problematic (Section 2) has been formulated in such a way as to question

the trajectory and relationship between these two registers. I want to examine how spectacles

around immigration in media culture impinge upon the formation of governmental immigration

policy, and on the other hand, how state immigration policies inform cultural practices, political

affect, the common-sense of national belonging,4 while themselves participating in spectacles of

immigration.

Finally, my thesis will acknowledge and open up to the debates being generated around the

status of the post-national (without making it a central theme), specifically as it concerns nation-

state regulation of immigration and the emergence of supranational regimes such as the European

Union (Soysal). With the post-September 11th shift in political climate, the prospective

harmonization of Canadian and U.S. immigration policies in a common North American security

perimeter (of which the Safe Third Country agreement is a starting point) has also been pushed to

the forefront of media attention, constantly referencing the formation of the European Union. At

this point, my preliminary intuition is that these harmonization regimes point to what Aiwha Ong

and others have argued are strategic rearticulations of the nation-state rather than its disappearance.

And certainly, such regional or continental policy regimes as they have thus far been articulated are

not necessarily less exclusivist than their national counterparts.

4
For instance, the common-sense understanding of immigration as a one-generational phenomenon in North America
versus a two-generational definition in Europe is closely tied to each region’s respective institutional structures and
immigration/citizenship policies, and how they have become naturalized in public culture.
 13

While I would argue that national borders are not in fact disappearing (as is so often

proclaimed in the debates and discourses around post-national globalization), the ways in which

national borders are being articulated and made effective appear to be shifting. For instance, the

apparent internal dismantling of traditional territorial borders within the European Union has led, on

the one hand, to the massive strengthening and fortification of external regional ones (through

border construction projects in the East, bilateral trade agreements, readmission accords), and what

some have argued is the redistribution and diffusion of effective borders throughout this

supranational space (via such governmental techniques as the Schengen Information System and the

diffusion of zones d’attente5 in airports, train stations, and police stations throughout the EU). Or to

take another instance, the United Nations adoption of the Palermo Protocol against transnational

crime and the smuggling of migrants in 2000, as François Crépeau has shown, effectively extends

national borders beyond territorial ones through policies of interdiction and exclusion into wider

and wider regional buffer zones (Crépeau 2002). Similarly in Australia in 2002, the so-called

Pacific Solution introduced by the Howard government in response to the intense media spectacle

around the Tampa Crisis saw Australia paying neighboring Papua New Guinea and Nauru to host

Australian detention centers (thereby preventing asylum seekers from ever reaching Australian

territory).

Such supra-national policy regimes, harmonization, and cross-border cooperation accords

then, are not dismantling national borders so much as they are facilitating the diffusion,

redistribution, and extension of exclusionary national borders within and beyond traditional

5
The zones d’attente, or Zapi as they are termed in France, initially referred to the transitional zones in airports between
the place where passengers leave a plane until they go through customs. In France, they were created as a legal fiction in
1992, and framed as international zones so that could be defined as non- French territory and those within them as not
yet admitted into France. As of 1995, they were expanded to railway stations, ports, and other places of international
passage. Their number has proliferated from just a few to 122 zones d’attente to date. They act as sites for the retention
of all those refused entry into a national territory (some 30,000 a year in France). As zones on the margins of the law,
French laws and rights protections do not apply within them. Many have alleged that they have rapidly transformed into
carceral/disciplinary spaces where abuses are common (particularly during forced deportation procedures, in which
there have been numerous incidents of death while in detention) (Rodier, Clochard).
 14

territorial ones. National borders no longer necessarily adhere to a strictly bounded territorial unit,

but are becoming both internally dispersed and extra-territorially extensive in ways that make them

no less effective. Taking the post-national more as a framing inquiry rather than as a central

preoccupation of my thesis, the formation of supra-national regimes of immigration policy, the

media debates that they spark, and the effective borders they are in the process of rearticulating are

all questions I foresee posing in the introduction and conclusion of my dissertation.

3.3 Population, Policy, Governmentality: The Question of Immigration Policy

My project asks how media culture informs the political and discursive processes of

immigration policy formation and vice versa? Here it is worth noting that “advocacy” groups such

as the Canadian Council of Refugees have long maintained that the Canadian government tends to

formulate its policies in response to media discourses and framings of immigration and asylum

issues. I want to foreground this discursive formation of immigration policy as a key institutional

site in the public construction of the nation and its borders, with particular emphasis on policies of

selection and exclusion (deportation, etc.).

According to theories of governmentality that my thesis will engage (Dean), policy operates

through problematization, through the constitution of a ‘problem’ at the level of the ‘population’ (as

a privileged object of governance) in a way that prescribes specific strategies of intervention. Policy

rhetorics claim to describe reality, yet this description is implicitly bound up with prescription.

Analysts of immigration policy commonly argue that a major factor that shapes how immigration

policy is formed and transformed is the way in which the “problem of immigration” is defined and

configured in specific conjunctures (Schain). News discourses are closely bound up with this

discursive framing and problematization process in policy.

 15

Rejecting any clear demarcation between the inside and outside of government institutions,

theories of governmentality focus on the discursive regularities and the dispersion of policy effects

beyond the narrow field of government into the wider culture, on the “transactional relations

between political formations inside and outside the state apparatus” (Allor and Gagnon 27). A key

trajectory of these transactional relations and processes of dispersion runs between media culture

and policy discourses. My thesis will investigate, for instance, how the intensified circulation and

affective amplification of the ‘myth of porous borders’ in news culture might create the political

impetus for problematization at the level of policy discourses when it is conjoined with the

successful mobilization of an affective sense of threat to the population.

Turning more specifically to the Foucaultian governmentality literature, population is the

key object of emergence on which the biopolitics of life intervene and act. Foucault’s concern with

the question of population must be situated in his larger argument about the emergence of biopower

as a transformation of the classical model of sovereign power, based on the right to inflict death, to

a post-sovereign power, that takes the management and extension of life as its political target

(Foucault 1997, 218-9). Foucault accounts for the new regime of biopower in the late 18th century

through the “apparition of a new “personnage,” the population as both a biological and political

problem (Foucault 1997, 218-9). The governmental imagining of the population as a mass,

biologized body put into place a whole set of regulatory mechanisms charged with its maintenance

and health. In addition to the policy technologies that emerged to regulate the life of the population,

ranging from statistics, to public hygiene, to intervention into birth and mortality rates, immigration

policy constitutes a key regulatory mechanism of the population in modern liberal nation-states

(Bigo 2002, Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002). Regulation operates through micro-measures of

modification, optimization, and calibration aimed at maximizing the life of the population by
 16

separating, identifying, marking out and selecting the fit over the unfit, the desirable over the

undesirable.

Much of the established governmentality literature tends to focus on the classical concerns

of political economy and policy (Dean 1999), while tending to background questions of sexuality

and racism (with notable exceptions, such as Valverde and Stoler 1995). My thesis will argue that

the articulated inscription of neoliberal economics, racism, and sexuality into the mechanisms of the

state is crucial to the contemporary biopolitical regulation of immigration.

In the well-known final chapter of the History of Sexuality 1, Foucault focuses on sexuality

as a critical point of articulation between the disciplinary regime of individualized bodies and the

biopolitics of the “massified” population, a central locus of biopolitical regulation at the juncture of

the “body” and the “population.” Yet in one of his lesser know lectures from Il faut défendre la

société (Foucault 1997), Foucault also frames racism, specifically what he calls state racism, as

indispensable to postsovereign societies of normalization. Amidst the technologies of regulation

focused on improving the life of the population (or more accurately, faire vivre la population),

racism introduces a “coupure” or gap in the biological continuum or species being of the population

between those who must live and those who must die. Racism reinscribes the sovereign right to

death into postsovereign governmentality through a logic of security, securing the life of the

population by seeking the death of specified others. Those who are racialized either as an external

threat or an internal enemy, who hold out the threat of pollution or degeneracy, must be killed or

contained in order to assure the life of the population. The emphasis on the security of the

population,6 combined with a generalized security logic dictating that “pour vivre, il faut tuer,” has

become central to the contemporary governmental regulation of immigration.7

6
For a detailed analysis of the governmentalization of security in relation to national imaginings and state practices, see
Burke, and Walker.
7
For a comprehensive elaboration of the securitisation of migration, see Bigo, MacDonald, and Ceyhan and Tsoukala.
 17

Such an interrogation of the Foucauldian literature on governmentality with respect to

sexuality and “state racism” will be very productive in engaging both the historical and

contemporary dimensions of my analysis of Canadian immigration policy. For instance, despite the

fact that the Canadian government has never succeeded in passing an explicit population policy, the

strong articulation of immigration with population has existed in governmental policy since settler

colonial times. Ever since the Green Paper on Immigration and Population (1975), immigration has

been explicitly framed as playing a compensatory sexual role in “replenishing” a population

“besieged” by falling fertility rates (so-called “deficit fertility”). This biopolitical articulation of

immigration with fertility forms the basis for the elaboration of a series of techniques of

governmental regulation into the population. The Green Paper led to the implementation of the last

Immigration Act in 1978, which introduced a set of techniques of population management and new

form of regulation through immigration policy, such as the introduction of annual levels planning to

calibrate the number of immigrants accepted according to projected population needs. It is no

accident that this was introduced at a time when fertility rates were falling dramatically throughout

the Western world. A corresponding sexualization of immigration emerged, through the discourse

of immigration as a means to replenish the population with low fertility levels. Indeed, such a

demographic discourse is pervasive to this day as witnessed with the release of the latest Census

(March 2002), accompanied by the continual twinning of immigration and fertility in both

governmental policy discourse and the media (see Appendix, A12-15). In my thesis, I hope to

examine how the biopolitical regulation of immigration seeks a sexualized securing of the national

population through a racialized, heteronormative reproductive ideal of desirable population growth

(as the pre-condition economic nation-building).

Accompanying the postsovereign injunction to “faire vivre la population” through this

sexualized biopolitics of immigration however, the “faire mourir” of state racism reinscribes the
 18

sovereign right to death through a discourse of security, of “securing” the population, that has

become the flipside of the contemporary governmental regulation of immigration. Security is

perhaps the central innovation of the new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA).

Framing immigration as an implicit security concern, the policy articulates a whole new series of

categories of “undesirable immigrants,” particularly the very broad and undefined category of

terrorism. The accelerated production of these new categories of “undesirables” is a highly

racialized endeavor, currently constructed around Middle Eastern, west Asian, and Muslim peoples

as implicit objects of suspicion and potential threat. The emergence of new forms of biopolitical

regulation of “terrorism” has resulted in a logic of preemptive security that has been used to

legitimate a range of screening practices that rely on the systematic targeting of all peoples

belonging to designated groups.

In this way, I want to argue that immigration is posed as both key to the life of the

population and population growth (including the economy), and at the same time as a threat to the

population that must be constantly regulated and contained through the monitoring of security,

health, sexuality, language (particularly in Québec) and race and ethnicity. This tension underlies

the oscillation in settler nations between a xenophilic, pro-immigration discourse of economic

nationalism and population growth, and a xenophobic, anti-immigrant cultural nationalism. To

return to the media framing of the new IRPA with which I opened my proposal, the terms used to

introduce the act to the public encapsulates Canada’s long-standing biopolitical regulation of the

population through an immigration policy that implicitly links the welcoming xenophilia of the

open front door (as a strategic national interest) to the unwelcoming xenophobia of the closed back

door. Caplan repeatedly emphasized a domestic figuring of the nation with its open front door

“welcoming” genuine refugees and the immigrants the country needs and the closed back doors

barricaded against intruders and abusers of Canada’s generosity. Yet it appears to be the closing of
 19

the back door and the fear of “abuse” of Canada as a “generous” host by threatening outsiders that

animate the governmental techniques the act has implemented. In welcoming imagined “desirable”

immigrants while simultaneously repelling “undesirable” immigrants, these articulations together

shape an effective politics of immigration that seeks to produce and regulate the population while

securing the state and its national borders against a whole range of “undesirable” others.

Immigration policy is posed as the means to navigate and regulate this tension between

xenophilia and xenophobia in settler nations. As a discursive genre (genre implying the ends and

ontological claims of a form of discourse), modern policy discourses of the rational choice or

political rationalist variety (Bacchi) are formulated through a procedural rationalism and realism.

Yet they seek to translate their procedures into a contingent and highly situated context of practice.

As intermediate discourses, they attempt to impose an abstract, rational representation of order onto

a situated and unruly cultural context by ordering this context according to its own realist models.

Immigration policy seeks to present a rational means to regulate “irrational” affective forces,

offering a systemic marking and ‘rational’ selection of desirable and undesirable traits through the

point system. As suggested in the many media tropes of flood or invasion that pose immigration as

an uncontrollable threat, it is often presented as a rational set of techniques to tame uncontrollable

flows of immigration and the affective outbursts they arouse (Chock).

Yet despites its denotative pretensions, interpretive practice is key to the translation of

policy discourses into practice. Currently, Canadian immigration policy is organized around three

discursive categories: independent class, family class, and refugee class immigration. Independent

class immigration is based on the selection of “skilled immigrants” and investors with capital who

are deemed to be economically productive and therefore desirable to the nation. As a discursive

category that serves to implement the economic regulation of immigration (combined with the

temporary worker category of short-term labour migration), it predominantly processes young,

 20

highly skilled men. The family class policy category discursively organizes the sexual regulation of

immigration, and it is unsurprising that it predominantly processes women and children (Thobani

1999). Policy interpretation requires moving from the rational discursive orderings of policy

categories to the multiplicity of meanings at play in the field policies seek to order. In the interviews

I have conducted thus far, one immigration lawyer spoke of her work as a matter of “finding a way

to fit people into categories.”

In this sense, immigration policy involves the translation of policy discourses into

administrative practices. The interpretive authority for immigration policy is dispensed to

administrative officials through the legal construct of discretion. The discretionary authority

bestowed upon immigration officers (which has been further strengthened in the new Immigration

Act) gives them the authority to translate policy discourses into selection practice. As I will show

in the second chapter of my thesis, the legal construct of discretion was first made central to

Canadian immigration policy at the turn of the twentieth century, in the era when immigration

policy became explicitly racialized and articulated as a governmental means of restricting

undesirable classes of immigration (The Immigration Acts of 1906 and 1908). This conversion of

the highly political and politicized field of immigration, replete with symbolic meaning and

mythical tensions for nation-states, into the administrative domain of bureaucracy acts as a

depoliticizing gesture. For instance, immigration law in Canada is a branch of administrative (rather

than human rights) law. As Harriman argues, the bureaucratic rhetorical style of administrative

institutions privileges the rational rule of law over the political and the affective in a manner that

seeks to exempt them from political commentary (171).

As I will spell out in further detail in Section 5, I propose to tentatively structure the second

part of my thesis around four ‘moments’ in the trajectory that traces the dispersion between media

spectacles, policy discourses, and administrative practices (in Chapters 4-7). The relationship I am
 21

seeking to articulate between news and policy discourses of immigration is not an effects model,

nor am I prepared to adopt the dispositif as a kind of master analytic structure (for reasons at least

partly tied to my own admitted resistance to embracing a kind of “add and stir” Foucaultian

framework that risks becoming a mechanical exercise in plugging the ingredients into the

dispositif). I am interested in the “relations of reciprocity” between the two (Hall 74-75), to the

critical definitional work media do in public framing, to the affective force they can produce to

propel certain issues, and to the discursive regularities between media and policy discourses.

To understand how this dispersion occurs, how, for instance, the recent governmental

articulation of security and immigration operates and becomes publicly normalized beyond the

immediate sphere of governmental policy however, we need to extend our analysis beyond the

logics of governance to consider the wider mediation and public circulation of political affect in

relation to immigration. Governmentality theory suggests that the posing and dramatization of

threats to the population serves a strategic role in the biopolitical interventions of state racism.

However, such a strategic biopolitical process does not work through a strictly instrumental logic, a

disembodied governmental rationality, or a top-down process of mass suasion. Foucault, along with

much of the governmentality literature produced in his wake, takes the liberal governmental claims

of a privileged political rationality at face value (at the same time that he deconstructs their realist

status). A strict focus on political rationality and the governmental logics of policy discourse in

much governmentality theory tends to neglect the affective dimensions of biopolitical regulation

and its dispersion through media culture into the everyday common sense of national belonging. I

will argue that the affective dimensions of governance are crucial to effective regulation and the

cohesion of politics with the social.

 22

The increasing amplification of a sense of threat tends to culminate in a sort of affective

spiral that further demands a governmental response. This leads to the mise-en-spectacle of a whole

set of governmental techniques and policy measures, so that governmental agencies can be seen to

be “doing something” and effectively responding to a crisis event. Herein is how we arrive at the

sometimes disturbing display and mise-en-spectacle of a proliferation of immigration policies that

are seen to be “cracking down” on “illegal” immigration or fraudulent claims, that appear to be

“tough” and reassert control in response to these amplified threats in public culture, even when the

policies in practice are extremely ineffective in halting migration flows.

Governmentality theory has tended to neglect the ways in which “the State, like any

regulatory apparatus, follows that which it regulates” (Massumi 83). If governmental regulation is

always retrospective, governmentality theory has been tended to focus exclusively on the

retrospective, and neglect or evacuate the processes that it chases: affect comes first, regulation

afterwards. And media culture is a key site for the circulation and emergence of affect.

3.3 Affective Politics and Media Myths: The Question of Media Culture

Strongly informing the affective modalities of desirability and undesirability in national

myths around immigration, settler nations have highly developed traditions of media spectacles

around immigration that are central to the dramatization of national borders and questions of

exclusion and inclusion in the nation. Canada has a long history of both xenophilic and xenophobic

spectacles around immigration, of the spectacular mediatisation of events and crises provoked by

immigration. In 1999 alone, they ranged from the xenophilic media coverage that accompanied the

opening of the Pier 21 Immigration Center in 1999 (Vukov 2000), to the xenophobic spectacle

around the landing of 600 Fujian Chinese refugees on the shores of British Columbia. These cases

echo a long tradition of so-called media “panics,” from the landing of the Komogata Maru in 1914
 23

on the west coast to the current conjuncture in which central Asians, Middle Easterners and

Muslims are being targeted (Biles).

In this sense, I see immigration spectacles, from “panics” to celebrations of immigration, as

crucial to how nations are culturally imagined and popularly defined. The dramatic debates that

emerge in media culture are key sites for the articulation of structures of feeling around national

belonging and borders (Williams). They are sites where affect is evoked, mobilized, and circulated

in ways that seem to give social force to particular policy discourses and governmental agendas,

where the national belonging of some is naturalized (as the “public” at large), and where popular

myths of immigration circulate. One example among many would be the uproar around the Fujian

Chinese landings, and the imagery of ‘flood’ and invasion that was emphatically circulated (Biles).8

I want to question how this mobilizing affective power of media culture operates. At the same time,

our governmental and policy structures naturalize and shape some of our most basic “common

sense” popular notions of immigration, becoming flashpoints of debate in public culture, as well as

objects of a certain kind of political staging and mise-en-spectacle of “toughness” on immigration

(as in the Howard government’s Pacific Solution to the Tamp Crisis in Australia).

The focal media site through which these processes take place is unquestionably that of the

news media. This is the primary site (or ensemble of sites) I will focus on for both my contemporary

and historical research. My use of the term “media culture” here is a strategic choice, as I am

interested in analyzing news coverage less according to its successful objectivity, “facticity”, or

realism (as it tends to be understood in traditional journalism and mass communications analysis),

but as a discursive genre that is situated in a cultural circuit of meaning producing cultural myths

and affective resonances that are key to its public effectivity. By discursive genre, I am not so much

invoking a style of discourse (as in a Hollywood genre), but a consideration of the different

8
This despite the fact that many more “non-nationals” arrive at Canadian airports on a daily basis than did so in this
single event, which was minor in terms of numbers but much more dramatic as a mode of arrival.
 24

teleological ends or ontological status that different forms of discourse claim for themselves.9

Among others, Stuart Allan has analyzed the historical construction of objectivity (and the

fact/value distinction) in Western journalistic practices. News as a discursive genre claims a

privileged relation to “reality” and a privileged role in setting political agendas and defining public

culture. Against a purely realist conception of news, Allan highlights the discursive framing and

critical role of news values at work in producing public news culture.

While some works in cultural studies have examined the cultural dimensions of media

events and media spectacles (Wark, Garber et al.), there has been little consideration of their

political impacts and role in the practices, policies, and techniques of governmentality. There has

also been a surprising lack of attention to questions of immigration per se in both communication

and cultural studies, as Ono and Sloop have recently noted (186, note 11). Part of my task in the

literature review phase of my research will be to consider the few works that specifically address

the construction of immigration in news media in more depth (Ono and Sloop, Chavez, Bonnafous).

There does exist an earlier, more traditional set of literatures that address the productive

relations between media spectacles and governmental policy. These range from traditional

sociological analysis of moral panics (Jenkins), to the classic cultural studies work, Policing the

Crisis (Hall et. al) which examines the social history of a moral panic around mugging that erupted

in Thatcher’s Britain, to recent works in sexuality and queer studies that look at sexual panics

(Valverde, Shah, Warner). Several of these examine the role of news discourses in what Hall calls

the “amplification spiral” that results in the powerful discursive effects such events and spectacles

can have on social policy. David Altheide has also examined the impact of news formats on social

policy, based on the ways that news formats generate a sense of urgency in media events. I will

consider some of these works in the literature review phase of my research, though they will not

9
For instance, legal discourses claim a different ontological status or relationship to reality than do cultural or literary
ones. See also Charland.
 25

likely be explicitly addressed in the final thesis. My preliminary assessment of this kind of literature

concurs with critiques of the moral panics approach, and that respond by shifting the terrain of

analysis away from exceptional panics to a wider and less functionalist emphasis on affect

(Massumi, Grossberg).

Seigworth frames affect as the “other language” cultural forms draw upon, “something

more” than the linguistic markers of signification tied to discursive language. Affect is tied to

variations and passages of intensities, specific physical and sensory effects that act on the entire

body. Whereas emotions tend to refer to discrete states that are experienced as subjective moments

of interiority, affect refers to a less subjective, a-signifying set of embodied resonances, sensations,

and intensities that circulate socially between bodies and accumulate to form a kind of backdrop,

tone, or climate. It is both embodied and social. Affect travels between and amongst bodies and

populations, it is a process that cements the feel of everyday life. In everyday language, we speak of

affect as a vibe, something that moves people and social processes (to engage, respond, react),

something that takes off, catches on, that is (or can be) “contagious”. Several theorists have argued

that the effectivity of contemporary media cultures and forms reside not only in their discursive

contents, but their operation through affect (Massumi, Marks). Media culture, particularly the

highly networked nature of contemporary news media and its emphasis on immediacy, liveness, and

instantaneity, is central to the intensified, accelerated, and amplified circulation of affect.

Against a strictly deliberative model of journalistic discourse as an idealized rational public

sphere, I will draw on this emerging literature on affect to examine the affective dimensions of news

culture, particularly in terms of some of the qualititative modalities that are characteristic of media

spectacles: repetition, pervasion, intensity, amplification, and the flow (Williams) of “ambient

news.” The mobilization of a media spectacle around a particular event brings about an intensified

circulation and proliferation in public culture to the point where it tends to from a pervasive,
 26

ambient environment. Anecdotally, most of us have experienced days where we walk out onto the

street (if we haven’t already tuned into the media at home), and an event is everywhere - whether it

be photos of five Middle Eastern men with the words “suspected terrorists” (even if they later turn

out not to be, as in January of this year), or the latest death of a Trudeau or other “corps nationals”

(Clermont). Everywhere we go, the event hits us in the face, at newsstands, in the metro, televison,

radio, it soon suffuses daily conversations, it resonates and amplifies, we feel it all around us and

“in the air” wherever we go, it follows us in daily life (even when we do our best to ignore it).

The pervasiveness and intensity of these ambient news events is particularly amplified in

media spectacles, and will constitute the basis of my questioning and analytic approach to media

events around immigration. I am interested in analyzing these media discourses, not as they are

manifested in static and isolated texts, or only according to the political stripe of the news

organization that produces particular texts (a “schools of journalism” approach, or a focus on

journalistic practices), but within the context of a more phenomenological emphasis on the ways in

which they participate in a spectacular moment, an ambient flow and an affective momentum in

public culture. Any particular media spectacle involves a range of conflicting and competing

interpretations, but certain key momentums and framings tend to emerge that carry a structuring

force. These are key to the ways in which media myths and discourses become events, how they

“happen” or become effective, how they translate into practices. There is much to unpack in my

future research regarding this mobilizing power of affect, how it might be understood to cement

certain kinds of articulations (for example, how a racialized fear is mobilized in such a way as to

articulate immigration and terrorism), the role it plays in activating discourses and turning media

myths into events.

In other words, a crucial dimension of affect that I want to explore and develop in my own

project is its political and mobilizing social power, the political force it can carry in media culture
 27

and its impact on the regulatory and structural ‘rationalities’ of governance. Paraphrasing Gramsci,

the affective dimensions of popular cultural responses may at times have the same energy as a

material force (Barrett 236). I want to investigate the extent to which political affect is an element in

the circulation of news discourses deriving from the sense of urgency (Altheide) and amplification

(Hall) that mass news cultures produce. This question of political affect elicited in media culture

and its relationship to the regulation and governance of immigration is central to my project.

In his reformulation of the moral panics approach to the notion of “affective epidemics,”

Grossberg foregrounds this question of affect as a social and political force, how it is elicited

through what he calls popular “mattering maps” - the affective investments, from mood, to desire,

to passion or will, that anchor people’s experiences in social and political formations. He argues that

affect is mobilized politically through “affective epidemics,” sites of disproportionate investment

and affective excess in a social formation that proliferate to the point of becoming socially

pervasive. Such epidemics have the power to politically redirect these investments. Media culture

clearly plays a central role in this process.

While Grossberg’s approach can be faulted for an overly discursive rendering of affect (ie.

not recognizing the extent to which discourses and affect operate through different registers), his

emphasis on the social and political force of affect in such media events is something that strikes me

as important for my project. This emphasis on affect allows a move away from some of the

limitations of the notion of moral panic, by regarding such events less as disruptive and exceptional

crises, and more as moments of affective excess that are central to the recuperation of state

regulation and the governmental formation of policy.

The extent to which immigration is constantly evoked as a “question sensible” (Lochak), the

intensities it incites, and the media myths and policy problematizations it can unleash, are very

much tied to its articulation within particular social and political formations. Immigration evokes
 28

strong political affect around common sense notions of national belonging, of who should be

included and excluded. As Danièle Lochak put it, “Que l’immigration soit une question sensible,

cela paraît relever de l’évidence. Mais elle peut être sensible [ou potentiellement explosive] pour

des raisons variable, selon le conjoncture politique, selon les époques, et susciter de la part des

gouvernants des réponses différentes.” Affective ‘epidemics’ around immigration have been and

continue to be central to the governmental construction of national boundaries and the surveillance

of migrant bodies.

In this way, I propose two examine at least two key roles that media spectacles around

immigration play in the governmentality of immigration in public culture. The first is their role in

shaping and reshaping the public problematization of immigration, the discursive and definitional

work they do in configuring immigration as a particular kind of problem to be solved (whether as a

problem of crime, security, health, trafficking, welfare burden, lingustic, racial, or cultural conflict),

or as the solution to particular problems (low fertility rates, demographics, labour shortages, the

graying of the baby boomers and the support of social security programs, cultural enrichment). My

hypothesis is that media spectacles around immigration indicate and play a key role in shaping

governmental processes of problematization. The second role relates to the affective dimensions I

have been delineating – how the affective dimensions of the “amplification spiral” in news media

(to cite Policing the Crisis) create political momentum around specific problematizations to make

them into the “urgent issues of the day” demanding a particular kind of governmental action or

response.

Finally, the emergence of specific media myths and discourses around immigration through

the amplification spirals of news culture seem to be a key means of problematization. Media

spectacles of immigration evoke recurrent cultural tropes, such as the framing of immigration as a

‘flood’ or ‘invasion,’ or of an open and/or closed door. At this early stage in my theoretical
 29

formulations, I want to tentatively situate and think through these tropes as media myths. By myths I

am not invoking the conventional semiotic or anthropological/archetypal understandings of the

term, nor am I passing judgments of validity with respect to truth and falsehood as a primary

project. Instead, I understand myths as culturally resonant, affectively charged tropes that become

sites of articulation for social tensions and conflicting values, as focal points of popular and political

affect, and as key strategies of problematization. In the news media, myths also work though

processes of inflation and amplification, by taking a single case and intensifying it until it takes on

some kind of representative or overpowering realist status (such as the Ressam case, where one

former refugee claimant turned “terrorist” came to stand in for the dangers all refugees potentially

pose). Through media spectacles, myths become discursive events that have social effectivity.

Myths around immigration such as ‘porous borders,’ or ‘flood’ serve to suggest specific strategies

of policy intervention.

So in response to my central question (Section 2), one line of analysis I will pursue is the

degree to which these myths that emerge from media spectacles become the basis for explicit

problematizations in policy processes, giving momentum to specific policy agendas and

governmental regulation through political affect. For instance, several lawyers I have interviewed

argue that the “myth of the lying refugee” that circulates so prominently in the news media is a

crucial construct around which the entire refugee determination system is discursively ordered.

Unlike independent class immigration, which is determined through a more “mechanical” slotting

of skills and attributes into points in the point system (although criteria such as “personal

suitability” leave much room for discretion), the refugee determination process is structured around

a highly personal narrative (presented in the PIF, or personal information form). It ultimately

depends upon the perceived credibility of the claimant, based on both the narrative and the

affective performance delivered as a testimonial at the hearing. I want to examine whether and
 30

how the myths that emerge from media spectacles around immigration, such as the “myth of the

lying refugee,” might inform the framing and problematization process in policy formation, such as

the discursive ordering of the refugee determination system around the establishment of the

credibility of refugee testimony (and the separation of “real” refugees from “fake” claimants

(Barsky)). This link between immigration myths as media events and policy problematization is a

crucial one to be further investigated in my research.

At the same time, while I want to deepen my analysis of the ways in which affective

epidemics give force to regressive or exclusionary governmental agendas around immigration,

affect cannot be reduced to a strictly regressive force (as deliberative political theories often do). It

is also a crucial resource in political and social change, because attention to the “something else” at

work in political affect (Seigworth 1999) may reveal emergent forms and potentialities that elude

the rationalities of governance and the attempts of systematic political power or state bureaucracies

to capture them. These sources of emergence and newness in social and cultural formations, the

potential ‘lines of flight or becoming,’ also present crucial resources and occasions for political

change (Deleuze 1989). While they will not be the central focus of my thesis, I want to open up to

and acknowledge in my conclusion some of the social movements and activist campaigns that

directly challenge the current models of escalating closure. The sans-papiers movements in France,

the newly emerging sans-statut and No One Is Illegal campaigns in Québec and Canada, and

activist campaigns such as the transnational No Border network offer radical re-imaginings of the

post-national based on the belief that “no one is illegal” and a principal of freedom of movement for

all. They participate in the recent emergence of what Partha Chatterjee calls movements for the

“rights of the governed,” movements of peoples who are on the receiving end of governmental

regimes of power, too often depersonalized in the biopolitical techniques of those who govern as

biologized masses and abstract populations to be classified, targeted and administered. As critical
 31

sites for the cultivation of political strategies that contest the emerging supra-national models of

interdiction, security, and detention, such movements open up critical lines of becoming and

affective interventions into new imaginings of what post-national communities could be.

4. Methodology

While I endeavor in this section to specify some of the strategies and methods I will pursue

in my research and rédaction, a brief note on my approach to the question of methodology is in

order. I have tried to be specific in terms of the methods I will privilege, but I also do not adhere to

an “add and stir” approach to methodology. In other words, the methods I discuss are not pre-given

grids or grille d’analyse that I will adopt a priori and then simply apply to or impose on my object

of analysis. For the purposes of my dissertation, my approach to methodology is more along the

lines of an art de faire – privileging certain methods, but developing them inductively and

contextually to my object of analysis as my research evolves, while remaining attentive to the

emergent categories and approaches that may unfold along the way.

4.1 “Object” of Analysis

Following along the lines of my approach to methodology, I am not proposing to specify a

fixed and rigidly defined object of analysis in the classical sense. I am more interested in delineating

a strategic object of analysis to help focus and anchor my research as it unfolds, based on the

following strategies of delimitation.

I propose to delimit my object of analysis to Canadian immigration policy and the strong

tradition of media spectacles that inform it. As I have indicated, I specifically want to examine such

events with respect to the formation of policies of selection and exclusion, and how these relate to

the cultural modalities of desirable and undesirable immigrants and refugees.

 32

As far as my choice of periodization is concerned, as outlined in Section 5, I will center the

main part of my analysis (Chapters 4-7) on the current conjuncture and the imminent passage of the

new Immigration Act (Bill C-11), including the rapid shifts in policy that have followed September

11th. However, I also want to include consideration of the social and historical context of the

current conjuncture by building a diachronic dimension into my analysis – hence the opening three

chapters of my thesis, and my periodization of the three major “moments” of prior immigrations

history that are crucial to understanding the current conjuncture (see Section 5).

I envision selecting one key event or instance of immigration spectacle in each of these

three moments and offering an abbreviated contextualization of each event in relation to the

specifics of each policy conjuncture (e.g. the Komogata Maru controversy in relation to the

institutionalization of racially restrictive policies). Rather than a historical case study or chronology,

I want to recount these moments retrospectively from the standpoint of a present with temporal

depth, analyzing these moments as active traces and sedimentations that continue to inform the

conditions of emergence of current policy and media discourses.

4.2 Corpus
While I am aware of and sympathetic to critiques of the notion of the “corpus” in discourse

analysis as an overly technical and closed one (Allor), I am nonetheless adopting it as a provisional

working term. For one thing, it has the merits of a concreteness that I hope to attain in constituting a

specific body of texts for my research. Secondly (and more frivolously), I like its proximity to the

word corps, and the notion that the texts assembled will form a body of sorts, if nothing more than a

body of research.

The process of selecting the specific events and documents that will make up my corpus

require further research, reading, and historical perspective on my part. However, I can specify how

I envision conducting this process of corpus selection and constitution. I am currently embarking on
 33

an exploratory period of research and reading that will lead me to pinpoint my final choices. In this

phase of groundwork, I will review a body of readings in Canadian and Québecois immigration

policy history (approximately 5-6 key books, see Bibliography, Section B). I also plan to further

research and review the more recent and still small body of work emerging around immigration in

media and cultural studies (Ono and Sloop, Chavez. Bonnafous). This will allow me to gain a

deeper perspective on the evolution of immigration policy over the last hundred years or so. Once I

have reconstructed and incorporated this broader diachronic perspective, I hope to gain the insight

necessary to make choices around key events of immigration spectacle that have been critically

articulated with shifts in policy formation in each of these three moments. At the same time, I

continue to research the current conjuncture and the new Immigration Act (the IRPA) and Safe

Third County Agreement.

Once I have settled on the key events in each conjuncture, I can then move into the next

phase of research in which I go about constructing my corpus based on these chosen focal points.

My primary focus will obviously be on news media and policy texts. In terms of policy texts, the

crucial pieces will be the new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and Safe Third Country

Agreement, along with the accompanying regulations, and other key policy documents around

them. As for my earlier moments, policy texts such as the Green Paper on Immigration and

Population (1975), the Immigration Acts of 1978, 1952, and 1908 (particularly Section 38 that

defined racial and ethnic restrictions) will be of particular interest – though these will be decided

upon and finalized once I pinpoint my key focal events.

In terms of my analysis of historical media texts, I will of necessity focus on print media as a

point of departure (newspapers and magazines), particularly for the historical conjunctures that

make up Part I where this was generally the main and only media form of the day that persists.

Media database and archival research (National Archives of Canada and the Archives Nationales du
 34

Québec) of the print media (both anglophone and francophone) will be my primary research de base

from which I hope to construct a significant portion of my corpus.

However, I do not intend to restrict myself to print media in Part II, and it remains

something of a dilemma as to how I can trace other dimensions of these media spectacles through

media forms that are not as durable or comprehensively archived. In certain instances, these other

forms persist, as in the early immigration advertising that is archived at the National Archives of

Canada in the form of posters, pamphlets and lantern slides (see Appendix, A16-A18). In other

cases, the print media themselves offer clues and traces of other sites to pursue (for instance, an

article about the deluge of hate mail received by CIC after September 11th indicates that much of

furor emerged in radio call-in shows (Aubry)). Unfortunately to my knowledge, there exist no

systematic televisual or radio archives of Canadian and Québécois news programs (if there are,

please inform me!) equivalent to the kinds of archives that are maintained at the Institut National

Audiovisuel in Paris, or the Vanderbilt Television News Archives in Nashville. The televisual

dimensions of these media spectacles are crucial, and I have yet to determine a way around this

lacuna (other than the unsystematic but consistent home video-taping I have been consistently doing

over the last few years). My only admittedly inadequate response is to regard all of my sources,

including the print media, as traces of a larger set of affective events rather than reified

archeological ‘fossils’ in and of themselves. This is a methodological dilemma I leave open for

further discussion at the defense, particularly since it also relates to larger questions I have

regarding how to analyze the ephemeral and ambient nature of media events and their affective

intensities.

One other provisional strategy that I may adopt would be to consider other kinds of media

texts, particularly documentaries, films, and videos that are relevant to the questions at stake in my

thesis. While I want to emphasize that news media texts remain the privileged object of my
 35

analysis, several films and videos directly speak to my project in ways that may be useful to

incorporate d’une manière ponctuelle. These include several documentaries that directly treat the

selection process of immigrants and refugees (Greenwald’s Who Gets In, Camerini and Robertson’s

Well-Founded Fear), recent Québécois films that treat the question of immigration papers and the

regulation of status (Denis Chouinard’s Clandestin, and L’Ange Goudron), and independent videos

of the past ten years that address the historical silences and continued contradictions of Canadian

immigration practices (Sheila James’ Unmapping Desire in particular, as well as works by Sujir,

Fung, Wong). However, I want to make it clear that such media texts will not be the subject of any

systematic research, nor will they be incorporated into my main object of analysis which remains

centered on news media texts.

Through media and archival research, I will build up a substantial but manageable corpus for

analysis around each of the key events I’ve selected.

4.3 Methods
4.3.1 Media and Archival Research

I have largely dealt with this in the previous section on the constitution of my corpus. Based

on the key events I choose, this will include research in media databases and archives (for

contemporary documents), newspaper indexes (for historical news documents), government

documents, and archival research at such places as the National Archives of Canada and the

Archives Nationales du Québec (for historical policy documents, media texts, and early

immigration advertising).

4.3.2 Discourse Analysis

I am still in the process of elaborating my own approach to discourse analysis, since my

inclinations as I’ve pursued them thus far in Axe 2 don’t “fit” into one strict paradigm or approach
 36

to discourse. Elements of Foucauldian approaches to social discourse analysis speak to my interest

in analyzing the institutional contexts of discursive regimes, the dispersion of discursive regularities

between media and policy discourses, knowledge/power in the problematization and emergence of

objects of policy intervention, and the emphasis on discursive events and effects as read through

practices. However, I am also interested in the interpretive dimensions of discourse, their cultural

resonances and meanings, which Foucauldian approaches to discourse tend to evacuate. This

involves attention to the myths and narrative tropes that organize media and policy discourses,

considering the connotative dimensions of their cultural resonances and how they are mobilized by

various social actors.

Another key question I face is how to go about analyzing the affective dimensions of the

media spectacles and policy formations I choose to treat. A preliminary, if inadequate, strategy is to

focus on the affective of these discourses. Their affective traces, whether in the connotative

resonances of tropes and myths, appeals to cultural memory, or through an explicit vocabulary of

senses and sentiments that activate affective responses – are critical to the political effectivity of

specific discourses. As such, my approach to discourse analysis will pay specific attention to the

affective resonances of these discourses (even and especially in the realist, rationalist tones of

policy discourses, since they too seem to have their own affective modalities). For instance, the

heightened sense of outrage and threat generated in such events as the British Columbia landing of

Fujian Chinese migrants in 1999 relies on the circulation of political affect that says much about

whose belonging to the nation is naturalized and whose presence is posed as external to the nation.

My choice to focus on key media spectacles is apropos in this sense, since such heightened media

events necessarily involve affective intensities and amplifications that isolated media texts tend not

to.
 37

Yet questions remain for me about how to go about examining the non-discursive workings

of affect in these events, and what analytic strategies are available or might be developed. And how

to convey and communicate these affective dimensions in my own writing in the dissertation? In

discussing these questions, some colleagues have suggested I try out a more experimental register

when it comes to the writing phase of my thesis, by including parallel or interstitial fragments

within my larger analysis that seek to explore these affective dimensions in a different register. I

have yet to determine whether and how this would work for me.

Finally, my insistence on the interpretive dimensions of discourse also implies an inductive

approach to the discourse analysis phase of my research. At this point however, I can delineate key

elements that are central to the strategies of discourse analysis I will employ: these include the

myths, discursive regularities and events that surface primae facie in the corpus; followed by the

institutional contexts, policy problematizations, discursive categories and formations that emerge

through a broader mapping of the material.

4.3.3 Auxiliary Triangulation: Qualitative Interviews

As an auxiliary research practice that I find extremely useful for engagement with the

practical dimensions of my subject, I plan to continue to conduct qualitative interviews with

lawyers, practitioners, and individuals engaged in immigrant and refugee “advocacy”. Having

already conducted two such interviews, I have found them to be an invaluable means of engaging

with and thinking through the practical workings and effects of media and policy discourses of

immigration, along with the everyday practices and, indeed, the affective processes at play in the

questions I am treating.

However, this practice will be a complementary but a minor and auxiliary form of research,

productive for my research process but not constituting an autonomous element of my final
 38

analysis. I do not intend to write it into my final dissertation text in a substantial way, as I do not see

my project as one of “writing ethnography.” I may cite specific quotes from interviews in the way I

would cite a text. Hence, I stress that this is a strictly auxiliary form of research triangulation, a

means of drawing on a different site of knowledge production.

5. Proposed Thesis Structure and Tentative Chapter Breakdown

I have tentatively structured my proposed dissertation into two parts: analytics and

diagnostics (to draw provisionally on Deleuze’s distinction between historical lines of

sedimentation and actual/future lines of newness and becoming). The second part of my thesis will

focus on the current conjuncture and the new formation of the Immigration Act (IRPA) and Safe

Third Country Agreement, including the rapid shifts in policy that followed September 11th, 2001.

However, the introductory chapters of my dissertation will consider three major “moments” in the

emergence of prior Canadian immigration policy that are crucial to understanding the current

conjuncture of immigration policy and its cultural and discursive ordering. This first part, (very

tentatively) titled “analytics: traces, residues, sedimentations”, engages with these three earlier

formations in immigration policy and the key myths that emerged that continue to carry effective

force. Part II, “diagnostics: formations, dispersions, effects,” deals with the current conjuncture of

the IRPA and Safe Third Country Agreement. As I have indicated in section 3.1, I plan to open and

close my dissertation with an introduction and conclusion on the question of the post-national and

the current shifts and rearticulations of national borders that are taking place. To see a more

extensive elaboration of my proposed thesis structure, see Appendix 1.2.

Part I: analytics: traces, residues, sedimentations

Introduction: Questioning the Post-National

Chapter 1. The Open Door: Xenophilia of the Desirable Immigrant and the Peopling of the Settler
Nation
 39

Chapter 2. The Closed Door: Xenophobia and the Threat of the “Undesirable” Immigrant
Chapter 3. Population and the Point System: The Sexualization of Immigration and New of
Techniques of Regulation

The three opening chapters of my dissertation will consider three major “moments” of prior

Canadian immigration policy that are crucial to understanding the current conjuncture: the “pre-

history” of immigration policy in the era of immigration advertising directed at “desirable

immigrants” (1850s-1910) (see Appendix A14-16), the formation of a formal immigration policy

and exclusionary measures directed at “undesirable immigrants” (1900-1960s), and the policy

reforms of the 1960s that led to the abolition of overt racial/ethnic criteria and an explicit focus on

regulating the population (through the point system). Each moment produced key myths and

discourses of Canadian immigration that emerged alongside the policy formations that were

implemented in each period, and which continue to have an effectivity in the present in terms of

both policy sedimentation and contemporary myths of immigration in media culture: the xenophilic

myth of the open door (Chapter 1), the xenophobic myth of the closed door (Chapter 2), and the

sexualized articulation of population, immigration, and the point system (Chapter 3). This will

allow me to turn to the contemporary context of the new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in

Chapters 4-7.

Part II: diagnostics: formations, dispersions, effects

Chapter 4. Affective Politics: Media Spectacles and Immigration Myths in Public Culture
Chapter 5. Governmental Formations of Immigration Policy: Biopolitical Regulation, the
Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, and the Safe Third Country Agreement
Chapter 6. Who Gets In: From Policy Discourses to Selection Practices
Chapter 7. Effective Borders: Identity Papers, Deportation, and the Materialization of Policy
Discourses
Conclusion: Closing Reflections on the Post-National
 40

As indicated in Section 3.2, I will tentatively structure the second part of my thesis dealing

with the actual formations of immigration policy around four key ‘moments’ along a trajectory that

traces the governmental dispersion between media spectacles, policy discourses, administrative

practices, and effective borders (Chapters 4-7). The first point in the trajectory relates to the media

myths and articulated notions of desirable and undesirable immigrants that emerge in specific media

events and spectacles, and to the affective and political force they acquire when amplified in media

spectacles (Chapter 4), with a focus on at least two specific media spectacles.

Secondly, I will consider the way in which these articulations and media myths mutually

inform and are informed by the articulation of discursive policy categories through the biopolitical

regulation of immigration policy (in terms of the independent class, family class, and refugee

categories) (Chapter 5). Thirdly, the translation of these discourses into administrative practices is

effected through the institutional process of selection (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the

MCRI in Québec, the Immigration and Refugee Board), using a range of policy techniques from

legal deiiscretion of immigration officers, application forms, and immigration manuals, to

immigration interviews, and refugee hearings (as captured in documentaries such as Who Gets In,

and Well-Founded Fear, that I may consider) (Chapter 6).

Fourthly, the materialization of immigration policy discourses and their discursive

categories into effective borders is realized through the governmental techniques of identity papers,

regulation of status (which includes the maintenance of certain groups in temporary or non-status

conditions), deportation practices, and institutional enforcement (including the enforcement division

of CIC) (Chapter 7). Finally, my conclusion will return to the question of the post-national in light

of emerging supranational regimes of closure (the European Union and proposed North American

Security Perimeter), and the lines of flight and affective interventions proposed by recent campaigns

contesting the legitimacy of governmental regulation of immigration.

 41

Appendix 1

1.1 Further Research and Discussion Questions

• What are some of the recurrent myths and discourses around immigration and refugees that
emerge in media and public culture at key conjunctures or shifts in immigration policy? How do
they circulate and gain affective resonance? How might these media myths be productive of
discursive events in relation to policy discourses and political regulation?

• Are there links between predominant media myths and discourses of immigration and the
problematization or problem definition of immigration policy discourses?

• With respect to discourse analysis, how does one go about analyzing affect in relation to (media
and policy) discourses? How to think through the relation between the professed neutrality and
abstracting governmental rationalities of policy discourses (as any quick perusal through most
statistically-laden policy texts will reveal), and the embodied, material and affective dimensions of
the everyday effects of immigration policies? Given that affect and discourse work in different and
disjunctive registers, one an embodied mode of sensation and intensity, the other a signifying mode
of language and meaning, how do they work together in media events (e.g. affects as a “fuel” or
“mobilizer” of discourses? As a kind of cementing or linking agent in social processes of
articulation? As the means through which a discursive ‘habitus’ is created?) How is affect
recuperated by governmental power, and how to analyze the lines of flight that escape such attempts
by political power to capture it? What is the political effectivity of affective processes in relation to
governmental regulation?

• How does one analyze or reconstruct different events of media spectacle? While print media tends
to be the most lasting trace (and most easily researched a posteriori), how to access the traces of
other forms of media that contribute to such ‘spectacles’ but aren’t preserved or archived to the
same degree (for instance radio call-in shows, television news, etc.)? How to reconstruct and
analyze the ephemeral, ambient dimensions of such amplified media events?
 42

1.2 Elaboration of Chapter Breakdown

Introduction: Questioning the Post-National

• founding myths of the nation: Canada as a nation of immigrants

• frame the thesis by questioning the celebration of the post-national – revisit immigration policy as
key means of articulating boundaries of nation
• present the problematic, offer opening reflections on Theory and Method
• Governmental Policies of Population, Affective Politics of Media Spectacles

Part I. analytics: traces, residues, sedimentations

Chapter 1. The Open Door: Xenophilia of the Desirable Immigrant and the Peopling of the Settler
Nation

• analyze celebratory discourses of immigration and population, consider media and policy
constructions of the desirable immigrant (affective dimensions)
• population and the settler nation (introduce Foucault on population)
• revisit the late 19th and early 20th century Immigration Advertising as a critical legacy of
xenophilic spectacles, as well as the earliest trace of immigration policy (see Appendix, A16-A18)

Chapter 2. The Closed Door: Xenophobia and the Threat of the “Undesirable” Immigrant

• focus on xenophobic discourse of immigration, media and policy constructions of the undesirable
immigrant (Komogata Maru panic, Chinese Exclusion Act, etc.) – affective epidemics/panics
around undesirable immigration (myths of flood, invasion, etc.)
• the governmental articulation of policy through restrictions on undesirable immigration –
regulation of the population through policy, institutional formations of immigration policy
• revisit the emergence of Canadian immigration policy: emergence of formal immigration
bureaucracy and policy apparatus, Section 8 of the 1906 and 1908 Immigration Acts (formal racial
and ethnic hierarchies and restrictions, introduction of the policy model of framework legislation
that persists to this day as a means to regulate undesirable immigration, eugenicist formation of
immigration policy as key articulation of race/ethnicity, sexuality, and medical selection)

Chapter 3. Selection, Population and the Point System: The Sexualization of Immigration and New
Techniques of Regulation

• explicit articulations of immigration and population policy (Green Paper), particularly since
1970s with fall in fertility rates – sexualization of immigration vis-à-vis fertility rates in media
• revisit the removal of explicit racial hierarchies in policy, the introduction of the point system and
refugee policy (IRB), and the emergence of the Québec Ministry in the 1960s and ‘70s
• new governmentalization of selection practices through three policy categories, the point system,
levels planning
 43

Part II: diagnostics: formations, dispersions, effects

Chapter 4. Affective Politics: Media Spectacles and Immigration Myths in Public Culture

• elaborate question of political affect in relation to media culture and immigration myths
• discourse analysis of recent key media events and immigration myths in relation to recent policy
shifts (the IRPA, Sage Third Country Agreement)
• the 1993 Just Desserts shooting in Toronto (criminality), Fujian Chinese refugee landings
(trafficking) – new articulations of immigration with security as of 1993

Chapter 5. Governmental Formations of Immigration Policy: Biopolitical Regulation, the

Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, and the Safe Third Country Agreement

• IRPA as framework legislation (how this is tied to Chapter 2)

• articulation of discursive categories of immigration: independent class and economic regulation
(recent controversy over regulations), family class and sexual regulation, refugees and
determinations of credibility
• articulation of new categories of inadmissibility for ‘undesirables’
• media treatment of IRPA, especially after post-September 11th affective epidemic of security

Chapter 6. Who Gets In: From Policy Discourse to Selection Practices

• consider two documentaries, Well-Founded Fear (Camerini and Robertson), and Who Gets In?
(Greenwald), both of which offer media representations of immigration and refugee selection
• translation of policy discourses into selection practices in the administrative field (via
immigration interviews, refugee hearings, manuals, regulations, forms, the PIF)
• the interpretative authority/practices of immigration officials via legal construct of discretion
• immigration and refugee interviews (Immigration Refugee Board) and appeals, role of affect in
interview process
• media construction of immigration bureaucracy and processing as lax, “porous”

Chapter 7. Effective Borders: Identity Papers, Deportation, and the Materialization of Policy
Discourses

• identity papers as a materialization of policy discourse, retrace emergence of regimes of

documentation (Torpey’s Invention of the Passport, Chouinard’s Clandestin, L’Ange Goudron ??)
• media panics around fake papers and undesirable immigrants
• undocumented migrants & the regulated maintenance of non-status (consider STATUS coalition,
Sans-Statut campaign media coverage)
• IRPA and the crackdown on identity papers, enhancement of deportation and detention apparatus
(buldining of new detention centers)

Conclusion: Closing Reflections on the Post-National

• return to opening question of the post-national with respect to the move to supranational
migrations regimes in the European Union and the US-Canada security perimeter
• question whether supranational regimes are less exclusionary in their rearticulation of borders
(Sangatte) - close with activist responses to the post-national by groups such as the No Borders
 44

network (Europe, NA, and Australia), Sans-Statut/Sans-Papier, and No One Is Illegal campaigns –
outlaw discourses of the post-national (Ono and Sloop)

1.3 Research Timetable

The coming two years are organized around four phases of research and writing:

1. In the first phase (during my third year), I am reviewing a body of secondary literature on
Canadian and Québecois immigration policy history (Hawkins, Helly, Kelley), continue my
research into the new IRPA, as well as engage the very small existing body of work on immigration
in media and cultural studies (Ono and Sloop, Chavez, Bonnafous). This phase will allow me to
pinpoint key media events that have accompanied the critical shifts in policy formation I want to
focus on in each of the four moments delineated above. In the winter of 2003, I am undertaking an
FQRSC visiting research fellowship at the Unité de Recherche Migration et Société (URMIS)
migration studies research team at the Université de Paris 7.

2. My second phase of research (summer and fall of 2003) will be largely devoted to archival
research of news media and policy documents related to the key events I have chosen to address in
my thesis, at such sites as the National Archives of Canada and the Archives Nationales du Québec.
I will also conduct some of the interviews

3. In the third analytic phase of my research (fall 2003 and winter 2004), I will draw on
methods of interpretive and discourse analysis to evaluate and analyze my assembled corpus.

4. The final phase (2004) involves the writing and rédaction of my dissertation, along with the
presentation of my research results at relevant conferences. My projected date of thesis submission
is towards the end of 2004.
 45

Bibliography

A. General Bibliography

Allan, Stuart. News Culture. Buckingham: Open UP, 1999.

Allor, Martin and Michelle Gagnon. L'État de Culture: Généologie Discursive des
Politiques Culturelles Québécoises. (Montréal: Grecc, 1994; second edition
1997).

Altheide, David. “The Impact of Television News Formats on Social Policy. Journal of
Broadcasting and Electronic Media 35.1 (Winter 1991): 3-21

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 1991.

Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Aubry, Jack. “Caplan flooded by 'ugly' hate mail: Racist letters blame minister for
immigration policies.” Ottawa Citizen. 7 December 2001: A3.

Bacchi, Carol Lee. Women, Policy, and Politics: The Construction of Policy Problems.
London: Sage, 1999.

Barrett, Michele. “Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Mouffe.”
Mapping Ideology. Ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Verso, 1994: 235-264.

Barsky, Robert. Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse Theory and the Convention Refugee
Hearing. John Benjamins, 1994.

Berezin, Mabel. “Political Belonging: Emotion, Nation, and Identity in Fascist Italy.”
State/Culture: State-Formation After the Cultural Turn. Ed. George Steinmetz. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1999: 321-354.

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Essays on Sex and
Citizenship. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997.

Biles, John. “A Ship Off the Old Block: A Comparison of Popular Reaction to the
Komogata Maru and the Arrival of Chinese Refugee Claimants in 1999.” Association of
Canadian Studies Annual Conference. Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities
(Québec City, Québec). May 25, 2001.

Bigo, Didier (2002) “Security and Immigration: Towards a Critique of the

Governmentality of Unease.” Alternatives: Global Local Political 27 (Special Supplement
to Volume 1, February): 63-93.

Bill C-11, Immigration and Refugee Protection Act Overview. Citizenship and
 46

Immigration Canada. Government of Canada. June 2001.

<http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/about/policy/c11-overview.html>.

Bonnafous, Simone. L’Immigration prise aux mots: Les immigrés dans la presse au
tournant des années 80. Paris: Editions Kimé, 1991.

Burke, Anthony (2002) “Aporias of Security”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political

27.1: 1-27.

Camerini, Michael and Shari Robertson, directors. Well-Founded Fear. Video. PBS,
2000.

Canadian Council of Refugees. “Statement in Response to the Attacks on the U.S.”

14 September 2001. Canadian Council of Refugees. April 7, 2002.
<http://www.web.net/~ccr/attack01.html>.

Castonguay, Charles. “La langue parlée au foyer: mesure, tendance et signification pour
l’avenir du français.” Présentation aux Journées Thématiques sur les Enjeux
Démographiques et l’Intégration des Immigrants. États Généraux sur la Situation
et l’Avenir de la Langue Française. Université de Montréal. 25 janvier 2001.

Ceyhan, Ayse and Anastassia Tsoukala (2002) “The Securitization of Migration in

Western Societies: Ambivalent Discourses and Policies.” Alternatives: Global Local
Political 27 (Special Supplement to Volume 1, February): 21-39.

Charland, Maurice. “Property and Propriety: Rhetoric, Justice, and Lyotard’s Différend.”
Judgement Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, Indeterminacy. Eds. John Sloop and James P.
McDaniel. Boulder: Westview, 1998.

Chatterjee, Partha, “The Rights of the Governed.” The Third South Asian Human Rights and Peace
Studies Course. Nepal, 2002.

Chavez, Leo R. Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation.
Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.

Chock, Phyllis Pease.  “Porous Borders: Discourses of Difference in Congressional

Hearings on Immigration.” Democracy and Ethnography: Constructing Identities in
Multicultural Liberal States. Eds. Carol J. Greenhouse and Roshanak Kheshti. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1998: 143-162.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada. “New Immigration and Refugee Protection Act
Introduced.” News Release. 21February 2001. Citizenship and Immigration
Canada. April 7, 2002. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/press/01/0103-pre.html.

---------. “Strengthened Immigration Measures to Counter Terrorism.” News Release. 12

October 2001. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. April 7, 2002.
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/press/01/0119-pre.html.
 47

Constable, Marianne. “Sovereignty and Governmentality in Modern American

Immigration Law.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 13 (1993): 249-271.

Crépeau, François (2002) “The Fight against Migrant Smuggling: Migration Containment
over Refugee Protection.” Black Richard, Nadig Aninia, Van Selm Joanne, eds.
The Refugee Convention at 50. Oxford: Oxford University Press (to be
published).

Dean, Mitchell. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage,
1999.

Deleuze, Gilles (1989) “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” in Michel Foucault philosophe.

Paris: Éditions du seuil.

----------------. “Deleuze-Spinoza.” (Conférence Originale 24 janvier 1978). Web Deleuze. 20

janvier 2002. http://www.webdeleuze.com/TXT/240178.html.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1978 1st ed. New York: Vintage Books,
1990.

------. “Governmentality.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Eds. Graham

Burchill, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991: 87-105.

-------. “Cours du 17 mars 1976.” "Il Faut Défendre La Société" : Cours Au Collège De
France (1975-1976). Hautes Études. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997: 213-244.

Garant, Élisabeth. “L’immigration-spectacle: Les médias contribuent trop souvent à

alimenter un climat d’insecurité face aux immigrants et aux réfugiés.” Relations
669: Juin 2001.

Garber, Marjorie, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds. Media Spectacles. New
York: Routledge, 1993.

Greenwald, Barry. Who Gets In? Video. NFB, 1989.

Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and
Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, Law and Order.
London: MacMillan, 1978.

Harriman, Robert. Political Style: The Artistry of Power. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1995.

Hayter, Theresa. Open Borders. London: Pluto Press, 2000

Helly, Denise. L’Immigration pour quoi faire? Institut québécois de recherche sur la
culture: Québec, 1993.
 48

Hollifield, James. “The Politics of International Migration: How Can We ‘Bring the
State Back In?’” Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines. Eds. Caroline Bretell and
James Hollifield. London: Routledge, 2000: 97-136.

Honig, Bonnie. “Immigrant America? How Foreignness ‘Solves’ Democracy’s Problems.” Social
Text 56 (16.3, Fall 1998): 1-17.

---------. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

Jenkins, Philip. Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain. New
York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992.

Juteau, Danielle. “De la fragmentation à l’unité: Vers l’articulation des rapports

sociaux.” L’ethnicité et ses frontières. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de
Montréal, 1998: 103-131.

Krauss, Clifford. (2002) “Canada Courts Migrant Families to Revive a Declining

Hinterland.” New York Times (2 October).

Macklin, Audrey. “The refugee scapegoat: Refugee policies are now blamed for Canada's
porous border when the real culprit is liberal trade rules.” Ottawa Citizen. 22
November 2001: A19.

Manpower and Immigration. Highlights from the Green Paper on Immigration and
Population. Ottawa: Information Canada, 1975.

Marcovich, Anne. À quoi rêvent les sociétés? Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001.

Massumi, Brian. "The Autonomy of Affect." Cultural Critique 3 (1995): 83-109.

McDonald, Matt (2002) “Fear Security and the Politics of Representing Asylum Seekers.”
M/C: A Journal of media & culture 5.1. [Accessed October 7, 2002].
http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/security.html.

McCrone, David. Sociology of Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1998.

Morris, Meaghan. Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1998.

Noiriel, Gérard. Le Creuset Français: Histoire de l’Immigration XIXe-XXe siècles. Paris:

Seuil, 1988.

Ong, Aiwha. “Flexible Citizenship.” Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of

Transnationality. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

Ono, Kent A. and John M. Sloop. Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and
California's Proposition 187. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002.

Pasquino, Pasquale. “Theatrum politicum: the genealogy of capital.” The Foucault Effect:
 49

Studies in Governmentality. Eds. Burchill, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991: 105-118.

Perera, Suvendrini (2002) “What is a Camp?” Borderphobias: the Politics of Insecurity

Post-9/11. borderlands e-journal 1.1. [Accessed October 7, 2002].
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html.

Pickering, Sharon. “Common Sense and Original Deviancy: News Discourses and Asylum Seekers
in Australia.” Journal of Refugee Studies 14.2 (2001).

Richardson, Laurel. “Writing as a Method of Inquiry.” N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln, Eds. Handbook of
Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994: 516-529.

Sayad, Abdelmalek. “Immigration et pensée d’État.” Actes de la recherché en sciences

socials 129 (Septembre 1999): 5-14.

Seigworth, Gregory J. “Sound Affects.” Cultstud-L (Column). Ed. Gilbert Rodman.

5 September 1999. University of South Florida. <http://www.cas.usf.edu/ communication/
odman/cultstud/columns/gs-05-09-99.html>.

Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides : Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown.
American Crossroads ; 7. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Sharma, Nandita Rani. “The social organization of 'difference' and capitalist restructuring in
Canada: The making of 'migrant workers' through the 1973 Non-Immigrant Employment
Authorization Program (NIEAP).” Doctoral Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2000.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl. "The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies." Stuart Hall:
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London:
Routledge, 1996, 112-127.

Smith, Anna-Marie. New Right Discourses on Race and Sexuality in Britain, 1968-1990.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Simmons, Alan B. “Immigration Policy: Imagined Futures.” Eds. Shiva S. Hall and Leo Driedger.
Immigrant Canada: Demographic, Economic, and Social Challenges. Toronto: U of Toronto
P, 1999:21-50.

Soysal, Yasemin N. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in

Europe. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Stalker, Peter. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration. Toronto: Between the
Lines, 2001.

Steinmetz, George, ed. State/Culture: State-Formation After the Cultural Turn. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1999.
 50

Thobani, Sunera. “Sponsoring Immigrant Women’s Inequalities.” Canadian Woman

Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme 19.3 (Fall 1999): 11-16.

Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-
1925. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991.

Vukov, Tamara. “Imagining Canada, Imagining the Desirable Immigrant: Immigration

Spectacle as Settler Postcolonialism.” Mémoire de Maîtrise (Communication),
Université Concordia: 2000.

----------. “Pier 21's Dirty Laundry: Politics and Counterpolitics in the Memorialization of
Canadian Immigration.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, forthcoming (2003).

Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1994.

R. B. J. Walker (1997) “The Subject of Security.” in Michael C. Williams and Keith

Krause (eds). Critical Security Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Warner, Michael. The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life.
New York: Free Press,1999.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.

B. Key Texts on Canadian/Québecois Immigration Policy

Foster, Lorne. Turnstile Immigration: Multiculturalism, Social Order, and Social Justice
in Canada. Thompson: Toronto, 1998.

Galloway, Donald. Essentials of Canadian Law: Immigration Law. Concorde, Ontario: Irwin,
1997.

Hawkins, Freda. Canada and Immigration: Public Policy and Public Concern. Montreal:
McGill-Queen's UP, 1972.

-------------------. Critical Years in Immigration: Canada and Australia Compared. 1989. Montreal:
McGill-Queen's UP, 1991.

Helly, Denise. L’Immigration pour quoi faire? Institut québécois de recherche sur la
culture: Québec, 1993.

Jakubowski, Lisa Marie. Immigration and the Legalization of Racism. Halifax:

Fernwood, 1997.

Kelley, Ninette and Michael Trebilcock. The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian
Immigration Policy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998.
 51

Post-Thesis Defense Revised Chapter Breakdown

Introduction

Chapter 1. Ambient News & the Affective Biopolitics of Immigration: Ghost Ships and Human
Cargo as News Media Events
Chapter 2. The Open Door, the Closed Door, and the Biopolitics of Population: The Emergence of
a Sexualized Biopolitics of Security in contemporary Immigration Policy
Chapter 3. Securing the ‘Crisis’ State: New Governmental Formations in the Immigration and
Refugee Protection Act and Safe Third Country Agreement
Chapter 4. Who Gets In: From Policy Discourse to Selection Practices
Chapter 5. Effective Borders and the Counter-Politics of the Sans-Statut: Identity Papers,
Deportation, and Emerging Challenges to the Biopolitical Regulation of Status

Conclusion

Elaboration of Revised Chapter Breakdown

Introduction

Chapter 1. Ambient News & the Affective Biopolitics of Immigration: Ghost Ships and Human
Cargo as News Media Events

Pose the 1999 News Media Spectacle around the Fujian Chinese landings in British Columbia as
my key opening case for the thesis (including both a “discursive” and affective” analysis of the
event and its policy implications)

Chapter 2. The Open Door, the Closed Door, and the Biopolitics of Population: The Emergence of
a Sexualized Biopolitics of Security in contemporary Immigration Policy

Canada as a Settler Nation and the Biopolitics of Population: 3 earlier eras of Canadian immigration
policy and the accompanying shifts in the biopolitical regulation of immigration (from colonizing
population settlement, to eugenics, to a contemporary sexualized/racialized biopolitics of security)

Chapter 3. Securing the ‘Crisis’ State: New Governmental Formations in the Immigration and
Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) and Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA)

The Governmentalization of Insecurity in the new IRPA and STCA, through the lens of the post-
September 11th, 2001 news media “panic”/affective epidemic around immigration
 52

Chapter 4. Who Gets In: From Policy Discourse to Selection Practices to Everyday Effects

The effects of immigration policy in everyday life: the governmentality of immigration officials
who determine the translation of policy discourses into selection practices in the administrative field
(based on two documentaries, Well-Founded Fear and Who Gets In); Immigration and refugee
interviews as a discursive and affective encounter (the interpretive play of “fitting people into
policy categories”); news media constructions of immigration processing as lax, “porous”

Chapter 5. Effective Borders and the Counter-Politics of the Sans-Statut: Identity Papers,
Deportation, and Emerging Challenges to the Biopolitical Regulation of Status

Examine News Media Events around the emerging counter-politics of Sans-Statut campaigns in
Canada (the STATUS coalition, Comité des Sans-Status, No One Is illegal), in particular the
sanctuary cases of the Sans-Status Algerians in 2002

Conclusion