The Carceral Border: Refugee Detention And State Power In Sharon Bala’s The Boat People

Abstract

Sharon Bala’s The Boat People portray five hundred Sri Lankan Tamil refugee landing in Canada, offering a critique of the current refugee detention system. This paper attempts to study how Bala’s novel brings to the forefront the way carceral concepts extend beyond prison to immigration control using carceral theory, which mainly focuses on the study of prisons, surveillance and state control. The study uses the Foucault idea of disciplinary power.  Through this analysis, the paper claims that refugee detention functions like an extra-legal prison that treats asylum seekers as less than human, turns forced migration into a crime, and uses bureaucracy to make exclusion seem normal.