Abstract
‘We need to make the waiting room look more uncomfortable’. This statement was made during the fieldwork for Sanctuary City: A Suspended State by a participant of a theatre play, written and performed by refugees and asylum seekers in Glasgow. It reminds us how places that are supposed to be comforting are often unsettling and powerful tools, forcing people to wait, and wait, and wait . . . Therefore, Bagelman poignantly shows in her book, how the contemporary asylum regime enacts a hostile politics by holding some people in an indefinite state of waiting and keeps deferring the rights of asylum seekers.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a genealogical reading of sanctuary, the book argues that this dimension of deferral is often overlooked when it is not exercised through violent practices of the state but through different forms of hospitality. Addressing this absence, Bagelman’s detailed ethnography traces, how being forced to wait indefinitely becomes entangled with well-intended forms of support by urban sanctuary movements, which have increasingly been positioned as alternatives to an exclusionary statist regime. There is a twofold strength to this work: first, her contribution shows that sanctuary is about both spatial and temporal politics and, second, it continues an important debate that with regard to the governing of migrants, neither sanctuary nor ‘the urban’ are as innocent as they seem.
The book begins by showing how the sanctuary city is framed as an alternative to the state. For example, it is not associated with spatial enclosure but a range of open practices, intended to create a culture of hospitality. Bagelman then invites the reader to consider two ethnographic scenes. The first scene situates the reader in the preparations for a theatre performance called ‘The Roundabout’, digging into the experience of constant waiting with no immediate end in sight. However, Sanctuary City does not stop here but uses these narratives to ask: How are spaces of sanctuary involved in the social mediation of waiting? Does hopeful waiting function as a technology that controls through a type of deferral? And how could we resist such attempts at governmentalisation?
The second ethnographic scene draws out the way asylum seekers challenge conceptions of the sanctuary city through their involvement in a ‘mapping project’ in Glasgow. While the sanctuary city is framed as an open and relational project, the maps that are drawn feature time and labyrinth-like structures, indicating a sense of containment, a bordering process constituted in temporal terms. Here, the book reveals its argumentative strength: where asylum seekers articulate, discuss and perform their experiences of sanctuary, conventional hospitable frames are unsettled. It seems appropriate that these imagined frames are disrupted through performative practices: by acting out waiting, and drawing out time. Gesturing to the ways in which waiting contains people, these maps critically communicate exclusionary limits of community. Through this spatio-temporal lens, Bagelman contributes an innovative new argument to the literature that has begun to critically investigate the seemingly open sanctuary city.
This book is published at a moment when scholars and activists, faced with an exclusionary statist border regime, increasingly turn to ‘the city’ as a potentially more progressive site. However, while Sanctuary City: A Suspended State remind us how cities (re)produce exclusionary logics of asylum, it ends on a rather hopeful note: they also create opportunistic sites through which to interrupt and unsettle dominant imaginations. It is in the shadow of grand narratives, and through the minor politics of forum theatre and maps, that people refuse to wait patiently.
