The Design Politics of the Passport by Mahmoud Keshavarz

The Design Politics of the Passport by Mahmoud Keshavarz

Author:Mahmoud Keshavarz [Keshavarz, Mahmoud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-12-13T08:00:00+00:00


Translating

I: Where Does This Passport Come From?

Passporting through its materialities distributes certain regimes of senses that define who takes which part in such relations. This is done through acts of translating the presentation of things to an interpretation of their meanings based on the assumption that is desired, which is set and designed by power relations and articulations. Furthermore, if technical practices carried out by passports such as writing and reading are central to passporting, then translating is at stake every time such practices are exercised in situations between individuals, as well as between individuals and sovereign powers. The concept of translating in the context of passports can be approached from various perspectives. Here, I try to discuss it from the perspective of representation by continuing Sajjad’s story. After he came back from his trip, Sajjad recalled his experience of the airport in Tehran:

“Once I approached the passport control, the officer looked at my passport, looked at me and asked in Farsi, ‘Where does this passport come from? Is it Chinese?’”

“‘No! It is from Pakistan’, I replied. The officer became furious and asked me to behave, otherwise he would send me off to another room for interrogation.”

He is Hazara, an ethnic minority group from Afghanistan with a similar appearance to East Asians in the narrow system of ethnic translation that many of us use. The officer surely knew that the Swedish authorities had issued his passport, but he did not want to believe that he could be Swedish rather than Chinese. He preferred to read Sajjad according to symbolic ethnic translation rather than the legal translation demanded by his profession.

Similarly, but within the national borders of a territory, in 2013 during one of the biggest police stop-and-search operations to find undocumented migrants in Sweden, REVA, many non-white Swedish citizens were asked to show their passports or ID cards in subway stations, streets, and other public spaces. These instances of racial profiling show the racialized aspect of being undocumented: that being without documentation, besides being an economic and legal issue for the authorities, is indeed a fundamentally racialized condition, which produces frameworks for state racism. The police have to reinforce racialization in order to define who is legal and who is not. Consequently, the police tend to check those whose appearances do not match the normative image of legal bodies: that is, white bodies on the move.

It is clear from an account given by Yamina in an interview with Swedish Radio (2013) that the police in Stockholm in asking for her passport took her Swedishness away from her based on her appearance. The police asked her if her passport was real, or if she had bought it in Botkyrka, a suburb where she was born in south of Stockholm inhabited mostly by migrant residents. “No! It is made in Solna [where the Swedish police issue passports], but thank you for your racist comment. Can I get my passport back?” she replied to them.

When borders are enacted legally on those who are



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