Necro-subjection: On Borders, Asylum, and Making Dead to Let Live

I draw on the experiences of those that lack the privilege of citizenship in this anti-immigrant age, as they make themselves dead in order to live. They rely on experts in asylum and related immigration proceedings to cast their homelands as hopeless, full of despair, and dominated by monstrous and imminent racialized and gendered oppression and violence. Necro-subjection also speaks more complexly to the politics of human sacrifice evident in dangerous kinds of border-crossing. The concept animates a neglected history of the subject, those that are subordinated to the politics of death, but who are nevertheless ushering in refusals at the level of life itself.