Sarah S. Willen Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins. Pennsylvania University Press, 344 pp., 6X9, 18 illus
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Adriana Kemp |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12797 |
Book Review: Sarah S. Willen Fighting for
Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins.
Pennsylvania University Press, 344 pp., 6X9,
18 illus
Adriana Kemp*
Deportation, perhaps one of the most extreme forms of socio-political exclusion based on the phys-
ical expulsion of people, has become a ubiquitous policy instrument in the global anti-immigration
climate. Usually preceded by the crafting of the legal and political conditions that makes illegal sta-
tus an intolerable offence and criminalizes migrants, deportation is perhaps one of the most signifi-
cant acts of sovereignty to which states can legitimately cling to in a global age.
But if deportation is the performative act through which nations project their unsolved identity
struggles and anxieties onto “others”, deportability refers to the socio-political condition generated
through migrant “illegalization”(De Genova, 2002). Sarah S. Willen’s rich ethnography on the life-
worlds and everyday struggles of global migrants in Israel on the brink of deportation brings
together a thick description of both dimensions but goes further to unravel the phenomenological
dimension of “illegality”and the experiential realm of “abjectivity”that it catalyses. This concept,
which Willen developed in the pages of IM (Willen, 2007), prefigured a shift in the anthropological
gaze from illegality as a social determinant and socially generated process, to illegality as a way of
being in the world: “a particular way of orienting oneself in time and space, to other people, and to
one’s moral commitments and life aims”(Willen, 2019, p. 12).
Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in the welcoming and not so welcoming spaces of inhabi-
tance of global migrants in Israel, the book sets out “to give issues of existential power the same
value as issues of political power”(ibid). This shift sets the possibility for a new set of questions
about the imprint of socio-political abjection on individual’s and group’s sense of dignity; the exis-
tential, moral and embodied indignities that it imposes; and the ability of people facing socio-politi-
cal abjection to fight for dignity and remake their worlds. As Willen convincingly shows
throughout the book, these questions do not sidestep the “political”or obviate the need to unearth
the anatomy and mechanics of political power, but they are of crucial complementarity if we aim
to uncover the inner workings of deportation, namely how it interpellates individuals and permeates
their “inward”being and embodied experience.
As such, Fighting for Dignity is an exemplary addition to the current state of the art in migration
and deportation studies (Coutin, 2015) and indeed a much-awaited contribution to the ethnographic
shelf of studies questioning state-centric assumptions on deportation and illegality, and reasserting
the emotional, somatic and experiential elements inherent to deportation policies and practices.
The book is structured around two main analytical axes: a critical phenomenological and a con-
textual axis. The phenomenological analysis is developed in chapters 2, 3 and 5, focusing on how
deportation and deportability are lived and experienced. Willen takes as her starting point a
*Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
doi: 10.1111/imig.12797
©2020 The Authors
International Migration ©2020 IOM
International Migration Vol. 58 (6) 2020
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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