Spacing (in) Diaspora: Law, Literature and the Roma [14, 1 ed.] 9783110543636, 9783110544251, 9783110543698

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Emma Patchett Spacing (in) Diaspora

Law & Literature

Edited by Daniela Carpi and Klaus Stierstorfer

Volume 14

Emma Patchett

Spacing (in) Diaspora Law, Literature and the Roma

This work was conducted as part of the CoHaB (Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) ITN, funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme and Marie Curie Actions. Earlier drafts or substantially revised versions of several chapters appeared as the following publications: chapter 1.2 as “The Big Gap Beyond? Property, Planning and Space”, Feminists@ Law 4.2 (2014); 2.3 as “Diaspora Space and Nomadic Legality? Tribe and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994” in Spatial Justice and Diaspora, edited by Emma Patchett and Sarah Keenan (Oxford: Counterpress, 2017): 164–184; 2.4 as “La Zone: In/Habitation in the Itinerant City”, Global Jurist 15.2 (2015): 175–194; and 3.3 as “The Right to Respect for Home: Roma, Material Spaces, and the Interpretative Potential of Article 8”, Today’s Children are Tomorrow’s Parents 40/41 (2015): 81–95. I wish to express my gratitude to the editors and publishers of the aforementioned works for kindly granting permission to revisit these articles and chapters in the following monograph.

ISBN 978-3-11-054363-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-054425-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-054369-8 ISSN 2191-8457 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Acknowledgements

VII

Introduction: A Literary Jurisprudence of Entanglement Unsettled spaces in the Diasporic lawscape 1 8 Methodology

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 Zero City 12 . Chaos and chora 12 16 . Ambivalent belonging in David Morley and Cecilia Woloch . Sovereignty, space and the chora in “Kings” by David Morley 28 . Control and contamination in Mariella Mehr’s Stoneage 40 65 . Plasticity in Louise Doughty’s Fires in the Dark  The Sedentary Order 73 73 . Nomadic lex specialis: from dale farm to detention . Mogoş v. Romania and the poetry of Mariella Mehr 84 . Moving through the lawscape in John F. McDonald’s Tribe 96 104 . Trespassing in the city with Django Reinhardt . Nomads, outlaws and frontiers in Ronald Lee’s The Living Fire 117  Diaspora Space 128 128 . Property, possession, and proper use of space . Autobiographical tales of uncanny space and unsettled encounters 135 . Alina Serban speaking (of) and spacing “home” 147 . Alienation and enclosure in Louise Doughty’s Stone Cradle . Romani poetry and the arrivant 169 Conclusion

180

Bibliography Cases cited

191 216

Legislation cited Index

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217

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Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank Klaus Stierstorfer for his patience, advice and support during the research and writing of this thesis. The guidance I also received from Parvathi Raman during my secondment study at SOAS was incredibly beneficial and gave me the context in which to shape my research. I would also like to thank Janet Wilson for her insightful comments and analysis, which challenged me to rethink key arguments within this research. I am indebted to Sarah Keenan, with whom I shared many invaluable discussions on the critical issues I have been hoping to contest in my research, and whose own academic work and activism continues to be an inspiration. My sincere thanks also goes to Holly Morgan (whose advice I should always have taken!), Annika Merk and Marlene Tronicke, who put up with my ramblings, belligerence and unusual office experimentation for three years. I would also like to thank Jayana Jain Punamiya and Liz Syrkin for their welcome feedback and insightful suggestions. My sincere thanks go out to all the CoHaB fellows, a wonderful group of scholars who made it thrilling, stimulating and beneficial to work across countries and disciplines. I would particularly like to say thank you to Nydia Swaby and Špela Drnovšek Zorko: your critical approaches to work (and life) have always animated even the dullest days. I would also like to thank all the organisers, speakers and participants of the Critical Legal Conferences – although I am a relative newcomer, I cannot express my delight at having found such a dynamic and always thrilling environment exploring the critical study of law and justice, one of the rare places in which interdisciplinary outsiders no longer feel like outcasts! I am grateful to my friends Le Anh Nguyen Long and Meaghen Rowe, who always helped me out of the pits and quarries I often fell into with this work by offering life advice, unusual cocktails, and laughter. I would like to thank my family, who are always behind me in whatever venture I pursue. I am indebted to Karen Crum for her constant advice, love and support. Most importantly, I wish to thank my wonderful daughter, who has put up with the turbulence that is academic life with wisdom, tolerance and patience far beyond her years.

DOI 10.1515/9783110544251-202

Introduction: A Literary Jurisprudence of Entanglement Unsettled spaces in the Diasporic lawscape I am circling you. In the court of hayfields I am circling you. (Morley 2007, 25) I, as a Gypsy, would be no-one’s itinerant Bilbo Baggins, nor would I accept the garb of Dracula’s coachman nor anything in between. I will not be placed on a categorical reservation nor will I accept my allotted place on a hard-cored bantustan; I no more ‘belong’ on a site or in a caravan (metaphoric or otherwise) than I do in a bender tent or a modern Native American ‘belongs’ in a wigwam! (Belton 2010, 46)

Before the sun had risen on a cold winter’s morning, police arrived at a Roma encampment on the outskirts of Paris, clad in riot gear. After giving fifteen Roma families less than half an hour to collect their belongings, the police began to demolish the campsite, digging gaping hollows into the ground “to stop anyone settling there again” (Astier 2014). This scene is a familiar one for many of the Roma minority in Europe, who have been subject to repeated expulsion from camps or gradual restrictions on their movement and access to halting sites. The situation in France is a particularly virulent example of the ongoing pattern of exclusion and discrimination directed at the Roma Diaspora. A Parisian police official involved in evictions from the sixth arrondissement of Paris stated, “[w]e chase the Roma from one place to another […] and it resolves nothing” (Samuel 2014). The Roma are an extensive heterogeneous Diaspora, who migrated from the Indian subcontinent in the eleventh century and then dispersed into multiple countries across Europe (Hancock 2002). Hence, they represent “an ‘intergroup ethnic community’ which has no parallel among other European nations” (Marushiakova and Popov 2001, 33). The Roma Diaspora present a particularly problematic case for proponents of a Diaspora model based on the cadastral grid of the nation-state, or the rhizomatic networks of encounter premised on a “homeland” (Cohen 2007). In this case, the presence of this heterogeneous group challenges the primacy of the nation-state as the only valid formation of a unified territorial identity (Tambiah 2000, 163 – 164). Indeed, it has been suggested DOI 10.1515/9783110544251-001

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Introduction: A Literary Jurisprudence of Entanglement

that the forces of globalisation and increasingly powerful supranational legal entities provide evidence that a legally pluralistic society advocating a “diffusion” of sovereignty across multiplicities is possible (Sandel 1996, 73 – 74). In the case of the Roma, such multiplicity would reflect a heterogeneous and alternative model of transnational citizenship that could incorporate Diasporic loyalties: group rights, in such a diversified system, could potentially therefore be elevated beyond the subject-member-state-law tripartite, and demand a renegotiation of the negative discrimination elements of minority protection (Bunescu 2014). Any such measure, however, would necessitate rethinking the act of spacing in which Diaspora is implicated. Whilst they form a minority of ten million in Europe alone, the Roma are in fact “a huge Diaspora embracing five continents, sharing the citizenship of a multitude of states [and] formed by a mosaic of various groups” (Gheorghe and Acton 2001, 55). Although the Indian roots of the Roma in India have been verified through linguistic analysis, anthropological evidence and, more recently, genetic sequencing (Harmon 2012) there has been little attempt to emphasise the link between the Roma and India, or to categorise Roma as part of the Indian Diaspora, as they have their own distinct and historical culture. They are, therefore, unique in their status: these ‘wandering nomads’ “face prejudice, intolerance, discrimination and social exclusion in their daily lives” (Gergely 2014). Recent mass evictions across Europe have demonstrated that the Roma are subject to forced removal on a grand scale, in derogation of international obligations (European Roma Rights Centre 2014). The Roma Diaspora can therefore be said to belong to one of those categories of people considered to be “prisoners of the local [who] cannot benefit from the time space compression of the world” (Bigo 2004, 62). It must be noted that I am using the term “Roma” in the full knowledge of its problematic designation as a definition for a heterogeneous Diaspora (“[w]e have lived and are still living with names, with labels given from outside” (Gheorghe quoted in Rostaş 2015). In this book, I discuss texts and legal cases involving those who self-identify as Roma, Romany, Gypsy, Traveller, Manouche, Yenish, Sinti, Boyash and Kalderish, for example, reflecting a heterogeneous scope of ethnic identities. Whilst referencing these distinct groups, I use the term “Roma” to refer to the broader Diaspora. “Roma” is a plural designation of the masculine singular ‘“man” from the Sanskrit-related Romani language (Tsekos 2002, 26). Whilst not wishing to obscure the diversity of this heterogeneous mosaic of distinct communities, the use of this terminology derives from the recognition of a shared identity derived through ethnicity, language, culture and a history of discrimination and exclusion (Horváth 2006) as well as a political recognition of “the concept of nonterritorial identity” (Matras 2013, 209). This term is most commonly used in EU case law referred to here, although it includes diverse groups and, it must be

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noted “the term assumes slightly different meanings within each community” (Sigona 2005, 745). When discussing the particular cases of Romani authors in the UK, the term ‘Gypsy and Traveller community’ is used in recognition of the domestic categorisation of Romany populations in this particular country, although it is a problematic designation (as it derives from the mistaken belief the Egypt was the country of origin) with its undoubtedly discriminatory undertones. Addressing the issue of spacing (in) Diaspora demands a critical rethinking of the link between people and territory. This brings to mind Seyla Benhabib’s (2005, 674– 675) call for a new normative topography, which can account for the shifting terrain of territory populated by alternative human rights norms. Benhabib contends that “[t]he crises of the nation-state, along with globalization and the rise of multicultural movements, have shifted the lines between citizens and residents, nationals and foreigners” and therefore argues for the notion of a “bounded community” outside the nation state. The potential for ‘Diasporic recognition’ in cases of non-territorial minorities like the Roma is implied through increasingly bold advocacy, as non-state actors begin to play a more extensive role in the international sphere (Tsekos 2002, 29). However, despite the proliferation of multiple non-state voices in the international arena, it can be argued that even in the adaptation of a Diaspora model, incorporating “overlapping sovereignties dispersed among states” (Chander 2001,1014), it is impossible to escape the dominant spatial order of the state as a mandating principle of authority under International Law. The laudable aim of recognizing Diasporas as a new challenge to the principle of territorial sovereignty (Chander 2001, 1042) is revealed as another legal fiction, therefore, as even if it is conceived of as plural or overlapping, the notion of sovereignty remains notably intact, immune from deconstruction (Patton 2014, 72). There is, therefore, no validity in remonstrating for greater protection before reimagining Diaspora. This research proposes an alternative method of reimagining Diaspora by employing a critical reading of spatio-temporality in minority literature using two key premises: Avtar Brah’s (1996, 181) notion of “Diaspora space”, as a category of inhabitation which “includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’” ; and Sarah Keenan’s (2015,150 – 151) concept of “taking space with you”, where in spite of recognizing that space is contingent, dynamic and fluid, it can also be said that “space stick[s] to the subject”- not in the sense that an essentialized definition of space can be ‘picked up’ and carried from nation to nation, but rather, “because subjects exist in and are constituted by space – combining with space such that they cannot be easily separated from it”. In both perspectives, the conceptual interpretation of space challenges hegemonic portrayals of

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the migrating subject and exclusionary spaces of belonging, asking instead “how (their) ‘surrounding’ space is shaped” (Keenan 2015, 151). In this sense, it can be argued that the issue is about neither movement, territorial dispossession nor the notion of minority in Diaspora at all, but about the limits of spatiality that are drawn through the dominant paradigm of possession. This book will thus engage with a broader collective doctrine of the relationship between people and territory (Blake & Risse 2006), necessarily incorporating a critique of the sedentary spatial order. This lawscape is invested in the balancing exercise between the intrinsic human right to mobility without restriction and the state’s sovereign right to maintain spatial order (manifested through border controls, immigration legislation, and internal hierarchies of citizenship mediated through property rights).¹ It is suggested that the concept of the lawscape provides a means to examine the sedentary order, in order to consider how it ‘makes room’ for Diaspora space. The lawscape denotes the restoration of materiality to spaces of de facto statelessness, an unsettling of settling and the restoration of formerly uninhabitable sites of representation, as a critical framework in which to look at justice from a “spatial perspective” (Soja 2009, 2). Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2010a, 202), moreover, advocates an alternative form of spatial justice which focuses specifically on the subjects’ locationality in space, and the way in which the “dispute between mine and your claim to ‘here’ rises above the law while relying on it”. This approach reads the spatial mobility of the subject as a significant way of framing the universal and particular dimensions of the law (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2010b, 214). It can be argued that this counteracts the dominant reading of Diaspora, which threatens to obscure the fictional spatial paradigm it maintains by manifestly denying its mythological fixations. This book attempts, therefore, to rethink the notion of Diaspora as a spatial concept. I argue that, whilst the current move in Diaspora Studies is to move away from the point of departure to embrace multiple epistemological models of Diasporicity (Sigona et al 2015, xviii),² an essentialism of originary thinking

 In this book, my reading of the lawscape is taken from Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Sharron Fitzgerald’s (2008, 440) interpretation of the term, as a recognition of incommensurability and paradoxical invisibility in an inoperable topos, in which “instead of shedding light onto and into blind spots, [it] reveal[s] instead in resplendent floppiness the inevitability of the continuous production of further blind spots, each new one inexorably feeding into the others, thus confounding modernity’s visibility with its very escape into invisibility” (2008, 440).  In his foreword to Diasporas Reimagined (Sigona et al 2015), Robin Cohen details the expansive list of subjects featured in the book as follows: “Diaspora appears here as ‘linear negotiations in costumes of culture’, Muslim burial funds, school alumni associations, nomadic cyber-

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pervades academic discourse. Here I attempt to write against this by providing a new reading of a relatively understudied corpus of literature from a Diasporic group considered to problematize the notion of Diaspora. Excluding this minority from Diaspora discourse mirrors their exclusion from the legal construct of the legitimate citizen, an exclusion that demonstrates the need to rethink the very concept of Diaspora, and its problematic dependence on a connection to movement that mythologises departure. Literary texts, it can be argued, provide a distinct platform in which to challenge such originary essentialism. The proposition advanced here is not that the key determinations of Diasporicity – namely “large-scale involuntary displacements and an inability to return home, coupled with a great yearning to do so” (Koser 2007, 25) – are neither historically verifiable conditions nor recognizable evidence of migration, but rather that the mythologisation of these very ontological categories is at the heart of Diaspora discourse. To a great extent, therefore, its existence as a mode of definition is in itself a mythologisation. This is not to discredit its validity as a form of terminology – on the contrary, my argument is that its validity would be doubly enhanced through the recognition of this mythologisation of originary essentialism by wrenching it from its antithetical opposition to state-bound binary identities, whilst simultaneously not allowing it to sink into a “catch-all term” for multiple groups (Koser 2007, 48). The aim of this book is to expose the mythological connotations of Diaspora not in order to undermine its validity as a category of experience, but rather to challenge the supremacy of those who would attempt to root Diasporicity in the liminal space between “host country” and “homeland” (Sheffer 1986, 3). This work aims, then, to look beyond “the moral basis of restrictions on people’s mobility” (Pécoud & Guchteneire 2007, 11) by taking account of Diaspora as a spatio-temporal exercise in encountering unsettlement. Hence, the key question I am exploring in the following chapters is what kind of space exists before and after Diaspora, particularly if Diasporic subjects take space with them? This responds to Henri Lefebvre’s (1991[1974]) charge that any theorisation of space should attempt to define what is actually meant by space: in this case, the continuous presence of the Diasporic. The definition articulated here draws heavily on Doreen Massey’s (1992) conceptualization of space as a dynamic, interconnecting exchange of colliding and simultaneously evasive interrelations, from the micro to the macro level. As such, it takes account of space as excessive space, intimate cross-cultural liaisons, architectural permissiveness, multiple religious affiliations, Pentecostalism, Yiddish anarchism, job-seeking networks, polygamy, carnival, skilled entrepreneurship, floating roots, anti-politics, counter-insurgency, international relations, global ecumenes, pan-Somali unity, Palestinian statelessness, bodies in motion, and much else besides” (2015, xvi).

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saturation, a motion of complex interstices and legal porosity (Blomley 2003b, 22; Santos 1995, 453), but seeks to apply a reading in which space is produced rather than fetishized (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 11; Butler 2009, 318). Taking account of the mutually authorising counter play of spatiality, drawing on Davina Cooper’s (2013, 11) notion of a concept as an “oscillating movement between imagination and actualisation” to read the concept of space, I adopt David Harvey’s (2004, 6) dialectical approach in order to keep these networks of encounter in tension. Hence, just as Harvey applies dialectical tension to his three frames of reference for space (as relational, relative, and as absolute), I understand space here as the collision, dialogism and production between the material and the imaginative. Subverting the discriminatory nomadic classification applied to the stateless Roma Diaspora, the chapters which follow will fundamentally critique the notion of inside v. outside implied through the sedentary order – that which designates that “[c]itizens are after all insiders” (Layton-Henry 1999, 50) – deconstructing the dichotomy of sedentary versus nomad by searching for a new spatiality in which to talk about unsettlement. Such a project will expose the nationalistic imperative of territoriality “rooted in national closure with a double meaning of limited access from outside and cultural homogeneity within” (Layton-Henry 1999, 50). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of space as a complex matrix of competing power relations, for example, territory is anything but static: it is not “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile”, but is rather “a socially produced space […] saturated with power relations” which acts as both a transgressive and productive site of power (Foucault 1980, 70). In this sense, legal space can be regarded as simultaneously constructing and constructed within a cadastral grid, so that “in enacting law, we enact space, and vice versa” (Blomley 2003b, 31; see also Delaney 2001). As “space is the terrain of law’s questioning par excellence” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2010b, 194), the attempt to reimagine Diaspora space must start from the recognition that at its root it “implies an end within space and not beyond it” (Westhelle 2012, 79). To a certain degree, the Diasporic could be considered a deconstruction in and of itself, read as a Derridean critique of the logos and the nomos,³ as anti-centric as it is a mockery of the misnomer “postcolonial” (Hiddleston 2012, 28). The Roma elude this grid-like matrix of a nonpostcolonialism, where the sedentary order  Here ‘nomos’, deriving from nemein – “regular attribution fixed by custom but also territorial attribution fixed by pastorage”– is from the Greek term for law or custom. As a ‘semantically ambiguous field’ it can change meaning according to how, why and when it is used. It is, therefore, a highly productive term that takes account of the ambivalent sovereignty and traditional incommensurability that frames the concept of law itself (Douzinas and Warrington 1994, 198).

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exists as a descendent of colonial order, gradually reducing stopping places and restricts access to space for those deemed perpetual ‘outsiders’. It has always been important to my work that I have foregrounded Derrida’s argument that “the deconstructability of law […] is a theoretical conception that does have practical consequences; the practical consequences are precisely that law cannot inevitably shut out its challenges and prevent transformation, at least not on the basis that the law itself demands that it do so” (Cornell 2003, 160). Following the spatial turn in the fields of both Law and Literature, critics have started to pay attention to the ways in which we can be more “attuned to the spatiality of the narrative” (Tally 2013, 17). To approach the text through a spatial framework, then, “allows us to recognize the degree to which literary texts both operate within and help to shape the geography of their worlds, and through them, of ours” (Tally 2013, 99), attending to Braverman et al’s (2014, 2) call to look “into the horizons of a post-legal geography”. Research has explored the relationship between law, power and space (Blomley 1994, 2003b; Dahlberg 2016) including taking account of diverse sociolegal challenges to the law-space nexus, as a recognition of the self-authorising co-dependence of the spatial and the legal in the field of legal geography (Braverman et al 2014). In this context, space is considered as neither dead nor neutral but is “invested with meaning in the context of power” (Cresswell 2004, 12). Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2010b, 188,193) writes that despite law’s “spatial turn” driving an engagement with scale and jurisdiction, “law’s engagement with space is being increasingly despatialised” and argues instead for “a reinstatement of the particular embeddedness of the law […] with a view to a fuller, more potent understanding of the connection between law and space”. Hence, rather than simply theorising the spatial it is necessary to “embrace the uncertainty of space” (Keenan 2015) through a critical interdisciplinary analysis of Diaspora. This is a potentially liberating perspective to bring to any theorisation of Diaspora, for as Paul Gilroy (1994, 57) argues, “[w]e have to fight over the concept of Diaspora to move it away from the obsession with origins, purity and invariant sameness [and] the original moment of our dispersal”, attending to the notion that “[d]isplacement, perhaps more than a homely rootedness in place, underscores the critical importance of spatial relations in our attempts to interpret, and change, the world” (Tally 2013, 13). Critical analysis of the categories of nomadic and sedentary will demonstrate that this binary represents, in fact, a fundamental misunderstanding of the complexity of spatiality as a mixed and fluid dynamic in which and upon which all subjects are operating. The need for this deterrotiorialization is starkly apparent in the case of the Roma, whereupon it can be observed that international frameworks “are often inadequate to address the problems faced by minority groups such as the Roma” (Tsekos 2006, 26).

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Mary Ellen Tsekos (2002, 26) regards this as a problem of definition, as the Roma are nominally “excluded from current definitions of ‘minority’”, but the problems of semantic determination have haunted the claim to belong in numerous cases of contested territory. Tsekos (2002, 27) argues that the Roma are a special case, however, as they are “not a colonized people, they do not have a homeland, and they do not bear ties to any currently existing state”, posing the need for special consideration through enhanced minority protection under international legal frameworks, due to the nature of what Helen O’Nions (2007, 278) terms the “complexity of Roma exclusion”. However, alternative recognition necessitated by a notion of exclusion represents a misreading not only of what law is capable of, but, simultaneously, of how the nomos is continuously reconstructed, and whether any “legal system [can] completely escape the promise of conservation that inheres in its myth of origin” (Cornell 2003, 161) without arriving at a “necessarily sacral resolution” (Pahuja 2011, 112). Diaspora has, it can be argued, disappeared into this very mythology.

Methodology As work situated in the Law-in-Literature movement, beyond the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship,⁴ this book aims to construct a literary jurisprudence (Gurnham 2014, 12) of Diaspora space. A literary jurisprudence embraces literature as both a productive source from which to re-theorise legal concepts, and as a reactive palimpsest of legal constructions of space. It also takes account of “the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’” (Brah 1996, 181). It is thus a distinctively material and radical political strategy (Pavoni 2010), which is why it lends itself to the textually rich drawing of space in literature. A literary jurisprudence provides a way to read space against a proprietorial doctrine, recognizing the act of spacing and the materiality of Diaspora space. It enables the interrogation of complex composition in relation to the tangled construction of home as “imagined, experienced, and forever remade” (Sigona et al 2015, xxi) whilst creating space for the recognition of unsettlement. A literary jurisprudence acknowledges complicity in the process of arrival, shifting

 Some critics have argued that the Law and Literature movement broadly falls into two strands: the first attempts to analyse or theorise the law as it is encountered in literature, and the second performs a literary analysis of a legal document (Morison and Bell 1996, 2; Hursh 2013, 5). This research seeks to do more to challenge the disciplinary boundaries of both, evoking the power of socio-legal ideology in minority literature at the same time as “[c]hallenging law’s autonomy as a rational system” (Olson 2014).

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the focus from the subject to the space itself as a scene of waiting as a site of multiple implications for both the Diaspora and the settled. It creates a framework for recognition of the role of concealment and containment in modern law, deconstructing space in order to consider how inhabitation is acknowledged in the lawscape, and questioning therefore what it means to be ‘settled’. Literature is regarded as more than merely a “supplementary chronicle of [legal] events” (Ward 2009, 21): here the literary text provides a hermeneutic framework with which to re-imagine concepts of law differently, as well as a rich site in which to analyse refractions of legal doctrine. Hence, through close readings of literary texts, it is possible to interrogate the notion of the limit or threshold in relation to mobility, whereby literature “might be said to be the very domain of the incommensurate” (Dimock 1996, 10). Consequently, this work acknowledges the call to extend “beyond the interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary, or perhaps even postdisciplinary, modes of scholarship” (Braverman et al 2014, 2), without being in the thrall of the ‘post’ but in order to “wrench […] law from Law” (Braverman et al 2014, 15). An interdisciplinary analysis facilitates the rigorous exploration of how a legal ontology “depend [s] upon the authoritative interpretation of space and the micromoves that constitute these interpretations” (Delaney 2004, 848). The ways in which space is constructed through the “‘contours’ of law” (Ward 2009, 22) are refracted in the spatialised narrative of the literary text. My interpretive strategy employs the techniques of deconstruction in order to critique foundational concepts pertinent to Diasporic fixation on a mythologised departure – or rather, to “show that doctrines are incomplete” (Balkin 1998). The corpus of literature is drawn from selected works by Romani authors across the Diaspora, including a wide breadth of contemporary plays, poetry, novels and autobiographies. These texts act as hermeneutic framings to draw unique spatio-temporal landscapes through which the reader can explore the refractive, reflective, interpretative conditions of legality as a crucible in which to theorise law. The choice of texts was limited to those written – or translated into – the English language. It must be noted that there is a significant dearth of published literary texts written by the Roma Diaspora, and very few which have been translated into English, although there have been some recent efforts at new translation (for example, Menyhért Lakatos’ The Color of Smoke, published by New Europe Books in 2015). Mariella Mehr’s novel Stoneage has not been published in English, and so I was required to contact the author directly via her website to request a translated copy. Similarly, I had read about Alina Serban’s work but there was no published version available, so once again had to rely on a private appeal to the author to obtain a translated manuscript. Romani authors are, however, published in multiple languages – including Philomena Franz in

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Germany and Mateo Maximoff in France – and many works are promoted through Romani press organisations including KHER in the Czech Republic and Magoria Books in Canada. Efforts have also been made to develop significant engagement between writers across Europe, such as the Romani Library Project. There are many autobiographies written by Roma, or Gypsy and Traveller authors – notably featuring the same cover of a long disappeared “vardo” [wagon] on a country lane, which suggests that the publishing market has only a singular appetite for nostalgic depictions of romantic stereotypes, commonly depicted in Western literary culture as versions of Prosper Mérimée’s “Carmen”, Victor Hugo’s “Esmeralda”, or DH Lawrence’s “Boswell”. It is for this reason that it is highly important to press for the publication of a broader variety of texts written by Romani authors, to counteract the hegemonic archetype of the Roma as a mythical, ahistorical trope or romantic, nomadic stereotype rather than a distinctively heterogeneous contemporary minority. This book is divided into three sections in order to attend to the distinctive (yet overlapping) characteristics of Diaspora space in the context of law, literature, and the Roma. The first section, entitled “Zero City” focuses on the qualitative condition of space and the way in which space is ordered and authorized, using literary texts which subvert formal structures of text and form in order to challenge the deterritoriality of the colonial subject in space. This section will begin with a close reading of selected poems from David Morley’s collection The Gypsy and the Poet (2013) and a reading of the spatial condition of erasure from the map in Cecilia Woloch’s poem Tsigan (2002). Subsequently, I will explore a post-legal geography in order to move beyond the binary of the nomadic set against the sedentary and the rhetoric of dispossession through an analysis of Diaspora as a foundational concept, as read through the poetry of David Morley. This chapter will thus address the issue of origins which is fundamental to the prominence of the rhetoric of dispossession, and will do so by highlighting the need to re-frame the reading of space as that which ‘possesses me’. After this, I will attempt to theorize the condition of space in order to provide an ontological deconstruction of spatiality in Diaspora read through the novel Stoneage (1990) by Mariella Mehr. The final chapter in this section reads plasticity in Fires in the Dark (2004) by Louise Doughty, in order to consider the state in which a protagonist traumatized by the holocaust carries Diaspora space with him. The second section begins by focusing on the recent Dale Farm evictions in the context of the novel Tribe (2000/2002) by John F. McDonald, considering the flawed binary between illegality and legitimacy, framed as the (disordered) nomadic v. the settled community. The subsequent chapter will analyze the case of Mogos v Romania as read through poetry by Mariella Mehr, employing the spa-

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tial critiques of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to read the narrative construction of spaces of detention in the context of de facto statelessness. Following this, I consider the way in which the protagonist moves through the lawscape, encountering the interlegality of Romani settlements on the outskirts of Paris in The Life and Times of a Gypsy Musician, reflecting upon the rhetoric of nomadism as an anarchic form of ‘deviancy’, subverted through a reading of the lawscape as that which is continuously in production. The final chapter in this section explores the issue of nomadic spatiality of another ‘outlaw’, the Canadian Gypsy Yanko in Ronald Lee’s A Living Fire, exploring the multiplicity of negotiated identities in the Canadian ‘melting pot’. The third and final section focuses specifically on the interpretation of home and the scene of waiting in the context of Diaspora. I begin by discussing the ideology of planning in relation to the specificities of Diaspora space in a selection of Romany autobiographies: including Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two by Maggie Smith-Bendell; Gypsy Princess by Violet Cannon; and Gypsy Boy by Mickey Walsh. Then, through a critical reading of Alina Serban’s play I, the Undersigned ⁵ I will deconstruct the narrative of home within the nomadic Diaspora, and explore their spatiality in a Diasporic context. Following this, the topos of alienability in Louise Doughty’s novel Stone Cradle is examined in order to deconstruct the lawscape in relation to a series of local spaces of home and issues of possession and inhabitation. Subsequently, I will explore the Derridean scene of arrival through selected poetry by Valdemar Kalinin, Ilija Jovanović, Ali Krasnići and Dezider Banga in order to consider themes of unsettlement and the ‘arrivant’ through a counter-reading of presence and absence in the context of Diaspora space. The radical intent of this work, therefore, is to imagine “an alternative jurisprudential narrative” (Ward 2009, 20; see also Weisberg 1992) through which to theorize Diaspora space in the context of the Roma Diaspora. A corpus of literature which is frequently marginalized and rarely studied in the academy provides a rich site through which the right to Diaspora can be reimagined: this work will argue for the need to move beyond binary of the nomadic against the sedentary, to deconstruct the sedentary spatial order within which a particular ontology of possession is legitimized in contemporary Diaspora studies.

 A revised and updated English translation of this play is also known as I Declare at My Own Risk, and has been performed to critical acclaim across Europe. See http://blacktheatrelive.co. uk/tours/i-declare-at-my-own-risk

1 Zero City 1.1 Chaos and chora Any critique of the stateless Roma Diaspora must necessarily recognise that the “colonial spatial order is not natural”, and thus aim to reveal the “chaotic reality” it seeks to obscure (Upstone 2009, 6 – 8). As Angus Bancroft (2000, 41) writes, “[t]he forms of exclusion and ordering of marginal populations in modernity [can be understood] as an intimately spatial form of regulation”. Therefore, any attempt to read the spatio-legal positioning of what has been termed the “Romani subaltern” (Trehan and Kócźe 2009, 51) must take as its starting point not the subject, but the space in which that subject is constructed in the literary text, thus necessitating a critique of the foundational imperative of the sedentary spatial order. The Roma Diaspora have been subject to a history of persecution and enslavement (Hancock 1987; Fraser 1995), dispossessed through a spatial ordering predicated on notions of territorial belonging and “the presence of racialized hierarchies and neo-colonial dynamics” which designate these heterogeneous groups as perpetual outsiders (Trehan and Kócźe 2009, 50). The myth of nomadism has been historically pervasive in the construction of a legislative narrative justifying institutionalized discrimination and policies of forced sedentarization.¹ Following migrations from the Indian subcontinent in the sixth or seventh century AD, the Roma dispersed into distinctive heterogeneous sub-groups across Europe (Mendizabal et al 2011). The nomadic myth was perpetuated under regimes of power enabling legislation prohibiting Romany groups from stopping anywhere (Hancock 2002, 59) and instigating discriminatory treatment for those who remained. Fear of difference and uncertain historical origins, as well as laws and customary dress which set the group apart from the ‘host’ society led to “representations of the exotic non-national and ‘non-European’ ‘Gypsy’ that helped to define and strengthen nationalist paradigms” (Glajar 2008, 35). Nomadism was often depicted as a dangerous criminal pathology requiring medical treatment (Bidet 2010, 21), whereupon the Roma were depicted as ‘contam-

 Ian Hancock (2002, 53) has written extensively about the historical persecution of Romanies in Europe, in particular “institutionalized antigypsyism” and the “laws curtailing the movements of Romanies” which, he argues, are still often in effect today. DOI 10.1515/9783110544251-002

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inating’² to the settled spatial order and effectively authorised the ghettoization of travellers as outlaws, and continues to do so to this day. Anca Pusca (2010, 1) suggests that it is spatialisation itself which is ultimately the problem, in “which what is ultimately an economic and legal discrimination problem gets translated into a ‘space’ problem: expulsion from ‘camps’, rejection of ‘nomadism’ and the Roma’s right to free movement as EU citizens”. In pursuing this argument, Pusca seems to end up in the same bind of reiterating the concept of nomadism in the same limited framework of construction as the authorities she rightly chastises: she declares it to be both a temporary (and misguided) formation, part of a singular identity construction, and yet denies its applicability. She writes that the fetishization of the term is problematic, although it is appealing to some critics as a form of interrogating positive law and its authorisation of the modern nation-state. However, Pusca does not go on to address the issue of the particularity of spatiality, and in doing so does not rightly interrogate the fetishism of nomadism. Her reading of space here is flawed, as it constructs a framework in which any attempt to validate nomadism is an attack on belonging only as it is defined through the limited terms of nation-state positivism. It is true, nomadism as an aesthetic construct symbolising resistance to the state is an appealing one to those with a passport and privilege for whom a border is nothing but a short queue behind a desk. However, a focus on Diaspora space as a radical re-framing of sovereign spatiality would move beyond the limitations imposed by the solely temporal perspective advocated by Pusca. To approach this paradox from a spatial analytics of power would provoke an alternative resolution: one that neither reifies nomadism nor reaffirms borders, but instead attempts to recognise the complexity of the relationship between people and territory. The false dichotomy between the settled citizen and the wandering nomad without ties or bonds to modern civilization therefore insists that the Roma symbolize a pre-lapsarian mode of being, a representation of pre-civilisation (Landon 2008, 51), whereby the ‘Gypsy’ becomes “an exotic nomad, a ‘child of nature’ aloof from settled society” (Glajar 2008, 32). Such a representation thereby legitimizes conditions of perpetual exclusion,³ which are justified under the ambiv-

 William Kurt Barth (2008, 197) writes that under the Nazi regime this narrative was taken to its extreme, when “public health initiatives [redefined] Roma travelling practices as a criminal disease pathology that resulted from hereditary defects”.  Hancock (2002, 58 – 59) recounts the building of a wall in 1999 in Ūstí nad Labem (Czech Republic) “to separate Romanies from the rest of the town”, and the Romanian ghetto in Piatra Neamț in Romania built by the Mayor in order to “exclude us from the rest of the community” (2002: 58 – 59).

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alent positioning of the nomadic subject as simultaneously a disloyal outlaw and a romantic hero, “an innocent child of the universe leading a carefree life under the open sky, a living symbol of freedom in nature” (Landon 2008, 45). Ronen Shamir (1996, 232 – 247) explores this ambivalence in his work on the Bedouin culture, which relies on the dominant narrative of the Negev territory as “vacuum domicilium – an empty space that is yet to be redeemed” in which the official juridical narrative constructs the territory as blank and empty space, and the Bedouin “as part of nature” who can therefore make no claim to the space. Hence “[n]omadism becomes an essentialist ahistorical category that provides rational foundations for appropriating land on the one hand and for concentrating the Bedouins in designed planned townships on the other hand”, with clear parallels to the exclusionary designation of space in the case of the Roma. However, Shamir does not examine the condition of space – for him, law simply imposes “a conceptual grid on space”. In acknowledging this superimposition– rather than taking to task the content of the law it presupposes – Shamir risks privileging the role of law and bestowing it with undue authority: his view of law is of that which constructs an “objective series of temporal signposts that determine when a story begins and ends”. Thus, in his interpretation, nomadism “is the perfect mirror image of modern law, which assumes and demands the ordering of populations within definite spatial and temporal boundaries”. This can also be compared with the attitude towards Indigenous people in juridico-political narratives, where indigenous peoples were (and, as the recent Northern Territory Emergency powers in Australia or the condemnation of Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline demonstrate, are now) positioned as if set against modernity, a symptom of primitivity standing in the way of the march of industrialised, urban progress constructed through a framework of sedentary ownership. As Ben Silverstein (2011, 18) writes, the modern state is “suffused with a spatial configuration which told a story of becoming modern”. Thus, what can be called the foundation of modern law, built upon a matrix of ownership, is constructed around the narrative of “the performance of progress” (Silverstein 2011, 17), seen as a linear continuum whereby enfranchisement is irrevocably linked to capital, and rooted territorial acquisition/appropriation. In this narrative, such a matrix thus competes against the Indigenous inhabitation of places such as the Northern Territory in Australia, where the latter is portrayed as a wild and empty, “deviant” (Silverstein 2011, 19) and remote space. This perception of ‘empty space’ is crucial to the construction of nomadic identity as a non-status. It is for this reason, primarily, that the function of the nomadic requires careful deconstruction. In reference to native title, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2003, 33 – 36) argues that the Indigenous “ontological relationship to land is a condition of our embodied subjectivity”: in this way, for Moreton-Robinson, the

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construction of space must be reimagined outside a narrowly defined Western system of knowledge. She writes that this alternative connection to territory has been gradually eroded through the socio-legal paradigm – it is not possible to think in terms of a hybridised “third space; a kind of menagerie of fluid Diasporic subjects [but rather] an incommensurate doubleness superimposed by marginality and centring.” Moreton-Robinson exposes the fiction at the heart of any attempt to identify Indigenous peoples as postcolonial subjects because there is a pervasive sense of dislocation that does not fit with the dominant narrative of sovereignty as a possessory interest. It is for this reason, I would argue, that the category of nomadism can be considered as a challenge to Diaspora: not in the way in which the nomadic have been positioned outside the boundaries of the conceptualisation of the claim to entitlement by virtue of their dispossession, but rather as a way of interrogating the normative claims of the sovereign conceit itself, which is intrinsic to the paradigm of Diaspora space. Yet, for Shamir (1996, 237– 253) the correction or sanctioning of this “trespasser” are both invisible and moveable; the law thus produces a one-dimensional story of identity for both Bedouins (as primitive and chaotic exponents of nature) and Zionists (as proponents of modernity, order and civilisation). Although it can be argued that Shamir focuses specifically on the temporal dimension, this book relies instead on a notion of temporal collapse as a condition of spatiality, arguing that law exists itself at a point of such collapse – there is no before and no after, it is what we say it is if we bring space along with us. Here nomadism is not the ambivalent twin of settled society, for this mistakenly establishes law’s role as purely neutral and takes no account of spacing. Whilst seeking to expose what he determines as law’s narrative ordering of space, Shamir risks reifying a sense that the land ever was; despite battles over registration of title and the retelling of Bedouin history in relationship to the land contesting a singular narrative of the territory, space itself remains curiously untouched in his analysis. Through his examination of the way planning provisions are composed as zones of regulation – where permission to reside is tempered by strict prohibitions on legitimate sites – Shamir considers the criminalization of the nomadic Bedouin through a particular framing of land observing the paradigm of ownership. In common with the Roma across Europe, and furthermore the Gypsy and Traveller planning provisions in the UK, the Bedouin are thus contained within a repressive circular paradox which seeks to delegitimize their claims through a recognition of perceived illegitimacy. However, although Shamir acknowledges that this legal violence/ordering is only made possible through the way in which the Bedouins are “dispossessed of their own sense of time and place”, he is himself repeating this narrative by retaining the same framework of chaos v. order through a notion of space which cannot escape from the same

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tired vocabulary of possession. My analysis in the following chapters seek to then start, instead, from the departure point of deconstructing the narrative of nomads in empty space as a form of Diasporicity that can be effectively subverted. The particular idea that the shaping of any space can effectively come from above is problematized through the particularities of how this space is constructed; in other words, to focus on the legal spaces of the campsites or settlements themselves or to consider how this space is effectively mastered (Derrida 1997 [1964], 68 – 69). Drawing on Derrida, space can be read differently, not as ‘exclusion’, but rather taking account of the fact that “Derrida’s work is everywhere concerned with that which is subversive insofar as it spaces” (Wrigley 1993, 72). It is too simplistic to say that these sites must be then ‘other spaces’ (those places which are marginalised, uninhabitable, and liminal) as they are part of a systemized sociolegal construction in which nomadism has been both eradicated, and, simultaneously, exploited to determine the basis of a singular ethnic identity.

1.2 Ambivalent belonging in David Morley and Cecilia Woloch This chapter will focus on the nature of Diaspora in relation to space, in order to find an alternative way in which to discuss the qualities of spatiality evoked in the context of Diaspora. A focus on Diaspora as a condition of spatiality is a productive way of moving beyond the reductive connotations of formal legal categories as manifested through the statist paradigm. This alternative reading emphasises that it is not the case of non-attachment to territory, but that the specificity of attachment is interpreted differently, as an acknowledgement of alternative ontological conceptions of the normative link between people and territory. Analysing the nomadic Roma Diaspora with the aim of searching for the legal constitution of the Diasporic subject often comes up against the staggering circularity of a reconstituted nomadic subject, and typically one who is propertyless, dispossessed, and marginalized – which only serves to reaffirm a dominant, positivist narrative. Taking a cue from the spatial turn in law enables this reading to, as Sarah Keenan (2015, 5) writes, “[shift] the focus of analysis away from the legal subject” – in this case, that of the wandering nomad, the marginal outsider – “and on to the broader spaces in which that subject is embedded”. Conceiving of space as dynamic subverts this ontological knot of ownership, propriety and dominium, by unsettling the conditions of law’s active operations. Moreover, this section can be regarded as a critique of unanswered questions in interdisciplinary legal research, which to some extent has relegated analysis to a deconstruction of space in a specific context, a specific place or case study, often it

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“does not offer to explain how space might travel with the subject” (Keenan 2015, 35). It can, furthermore, be argued that the field of Diaspora studies has remained stubbornly resistant to such a general critique as it does not yet have an adequate interdisciplinary theoretical framework in which to deconstruct the concepts of spatiality and law, or to explore the actual meaning of law and space outside of discrete contexts (Keenan 2015: 35). Rather than negating the loaded value of possession as a concept, turning away from the ‘possessor’ towards a literary jurisprudence of the space itself offers the opportunity to reimagine the ‘roots’ of Diaspora as an analytical concept, through an alternative framework of spatiality. Doreen Massey’s theorisation of space as a dynamic and productive system can be seen to take full account of the uncertainty of space as that which is “necessarily unfinished” (Keenan 2015, 13). Legal Geography has explored the relationship between law, space and power in a way that is, or has the potential to be, “profoundly subversive” (Blomley 1994, 26), turning away from a conception of space as “the deadened material over which legal disputes take place” (Ford 2001, 82). In opposition to this implicit assumption, critical Legal Geography rejects the notion of neutral space operated upon and through the law (Keenan 2015, 27). Hence, rather than regarding nomadism as the manifestation of disorder occurring as if it were the scattered moves of an absent-minded chessplayer on a silent board or a finger tracing a border along the thick black line circumnavigating a child’s globe, it is seen as a process of shaping and being shaped by an active legal space. The guise of neutrality neglects to question not only the legitimacy of such a construction and the spaces produced therein, but also “how spaces come to be shaped such that some subjects fit and others are out of place” (Keenan 2015, 35). This sense of being out of place is examined in David Morley’s poetry collection The Gypsy and the Poet (2013), exploring the friendship between two men through a meandering journey through their lives and an unsettling of the spatiality of their collision. The first part of this chapter will focus on this dynamic spacing through a close reading of two poems from the collection, “The Gypsy and the Poet”, and “The Pen” (2013, 67, 91). In the latter, Morley writes: John Clare writes air between his words. He senses his friend beside him [ ]. But Wisdom has wended below the horizon to an earth beyond Northamptonshire⁴

 The spaces evident here are present in the published poem, as David Morley plays with the aesthetic connotations of absence and presence by inserting blank spaces on the page, between and within the lines.

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Spatiality is mapped onto the journey of Wisdom to the text that he can be both ‘beside’ the poet and simultaneously constructing a path elsewhere, beyond the known locality, to such an extent that his very absence tears a rent in the text. In this poem, Morley considers the encounter between the nineteenth-century poet John Clare and his friend, a Gypsy named Wisdom Smith. Clare, famously known as the peasant poet, portrayed his experiences of coming across a band of travellers in his own works, but was never “judgmental about the Gypsies, though he doesn’t romanticise them” (Rumen 2009). In “The Gipsy Camp”, Clare writes: “Tis thus they live – a picture to the place;/ A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race.” Morley has described the somewhat nostalgic yet demonstrably political intent of his work, describing how “[h]e had been drawn to these figures from a time when the travelling lifestyle was more prominent – and the land was already under siege” (quoted in Quarmby 2013a, 276). Turning to spatiality rather than the subject, then, re-frames Morley’s observations: not away from the figures but to the land under siege, in other words, “away from the propertied subject and on to the spaces through which property is constituted” (Keenan 2015, 14), challenging the way in which the Diasporic Roma can be narrativised as those situated ‘out of place’. Morley’s poem focuses on the moment John Clare is attempting to write in the absence of his friend, the Gypsy Wisdom Smith. The pen can be read as a metaphor for Wisdom, an emblem of a different reading of space, in that it falls from his hand but is still “writing its way across a world” (2013, 67). Morley writes: The poet lets his pen fall. It rolls on a bearing to the door. Clare follows it with his eye. The nib tuts over the stone floor writing its way across a world as if held by an invisible child.

The pen complicates the relationship between the part and the whole that is central to notions of propierty in law: Morley’s poet exists both in a material condition through the pen he lets fall, and in an unsettled spinning world. He is located but the space is not static: it is operating in a certain way, responsive and relational, just as the subject Clare is indirectly addressing in his poem is both absent and present. This relationality is of course key to any understanding of property rights as a “relationship between persons with respect to things” (Ackerman 1977, 26), and yet the emphasis still remains on the possessor in law, rather than the conceptual things, places and spaces which are “mobilized in the spatial assemblages of private property relations” (Whatmore 2003, 212). This is where a reading of spatiality demands recognition beyond the dichotomy of inside/outside’- or, rather, “who/what constitutes a legitimate object of pro-

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prietorial claims” (Whatmore 2003, 213): in this context, space is operating as the foundational spacing movement of the law. Though these spaces seem to be owned by the subject, in effect they relate to an alternative reading of possession in which spaces are neither empty, nor owned. The idea of Gypsies invading or camping unlawfully on territory plays into positivist assumptions about space as a static zone, which informs legislation restricting travellers’ rights. To quote at length from Keenan (2015: 21): [l]egal judgments, executive powers, legislation and legal commentaries tend to treat space as something to be planned over, built on, cultivated, bought, sold, and/or protected: a blank canvas or platform to be smoothly acted upon. Space is implicitly understood as separate from the subjects who occupy and move through it: separate from the social, the conceptual and the political, and confined instead to the physical and the mundane.

In the context of Diaspora, this “blank canvas” reflects the mythology of displacement evoked by in the juridical depiction of Roma. Attempts to restrict and prohibit movement demonstrate not only an explicit attempt to control nomadic behavior, but also reflect a proscription of legitimate space as “a platform to be acted upon”. Although subsequent legislation – including the Housing Act 2004 and Circular 1/2006 – has placed a requirement on local authorities to address the allocation and provision of sites, the paradigm for space as a condition of ownership was sealed through this restrictive legislation, which can be regarded as the culmination of centuries reifying a singular spatial order reliant on the notion of possession. To take a recent case which will feature prominently in this book, in her work on the Dale Farm evictions in Basildon, Katherine Quarmby (2013a, 89 – 90) describes how the debate over what was described as an ‘illegal’ site appeared to feed into a shaping of space, where the land was invested with claims of title to “an iconic plot [and a] literal background”. Quarmby extends this hegemonic narrative to the case of the Meriden camp, similarly framed as an issue of dispossession and illegality, when in fact this was “land [the Travellers] owned, but for which they did not have planning permission”. Such a narrative constructs the camp as a marginal menace, a “camp dumped on their back yard” (Brown 2008), whereby a narrative of invasion and a threat to the very land itself was intrinsic to the socio-legal construction of the Gypsy Traveller. The resilience of the nomadic label renders Morley’s (2013, 67) poem particularly visceral in its production of space, for as he drops the pen “the thing” stabs his hand and sees that “the wound tightens / like an anemone of ink […] the room and world are in a spin”. In the text, Morley does not shy away from this collision but seeks to interrogate the conditions of the space: Clare may be attempting to write it into being, but it is always in motion, articulated and dynamic:

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By now the room and world are in a spin, one around the other – a gyroscope buzzing inside a gyroscope. ‘If I could win a name through poetry and sacrifice friendship for that prize’ – the pen rattles loose. John sinks to the floor. He senses his poem beside him .

Morley’s text suggests that space can be in motion whilst it is simultaneously instigating a spacing, or movement of enclosure. The final gap on the page of the text denotes an absence that can never be filled, despite the omnipresence of the physical confines of the room. The fact that “laws pertaining to where subjects can be, also affect who they can be” (Keenan 2015, 29) reveals the paradox at the heart of these ‘spinning rooms’: namely that although “property law insists that place is irrelevant to property law” (Graham 2011, 7), it continues to authorise certain spaces as legitimate. It is for this reason it is problematic when Katherine Quarmby (2013a: 93, 229, 189,143) identifies that “occupying land illegally was a kind of self-help resistance campaign” where reactions against nomadism are seen as a guarding of the nation-state as it is authorised through law, rather than being read in the context of the shaping of space. The portrayal of Gypsy camps as situated on the peripheral is problematic: whilst it is critical to recognise that stopping places are usually located “near landfills, electricity pylons and other blighted locations”, the construction of spatiality here is paradoxical – even if conceived in antithetical resistance to dominant narratives – as Quarmby’s assertion that “[s]topping-places were used for hundreds of years until they were enclosed by law” plays into the idea of enclosure itself, restricting space along the claustrophobic lines drawn through the sedentary order. Quarmby’s argument that the village community of Dale Farm ceased to be a functional space once it was “torn apart, plot by plot” is also troubling, because it reaffirms the notion of proper usage determined solely by the paradigm of legitimate occupation. The idea of being “itinerant because of legislation” (Hancock interviewed in Quarmby 2013a, 241) thus leaves intact this concept of space as a static receptacle. It is not even, then, an issue of arguing for hybridised inhabitation, for this still creates the space as one of legitimised dead land that can be carved up and enacted upon in multiplicity. Within this framework, the only alternative to this uncontested depiction of space is either a hybrid assimilation within a network of competing loyalties, or strictly controlled ‘legitimate’ segregation which can be observed, as the Romani poet Charlie Smith (1995, 26) puts it, in the instances of those “kept at a distance on the reservation”, and provides a critical context for the theme of proximal distance Morley explores in his poetry. The encounter between John Clare and Wisdom Smith can be read, therefore, not as the reso-

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lution of absence or the organization of space, but as playfulness with the idea of absence, presence, and possession of the spatial. A means of engaging critically in this way is to return to the concept of enclosure from the perspective of Diaspora, as an alternative conception of the “connection between people and place” (Graham 2011, 54) and the definition of what constitutes land use as proper inhabitation.⁵ Critical Legal Studies have gone some way to exposing this fiction, by challenging the narrative of terra nullius,⁶ as ‘blank spaces’ on the map open to colonisation. Drawing on Morley’s poem to prise open the notion of the blank space is a means of observing what is absent from the possession – law nexus, embedded in the concept of Diaspora. There is a different depiction of space here, in the aesthetic blank spaces set amidst the lines, and in Morley’s tightly woven structure, using enjambment to construct an elsewhere that is also definitely here. Morley writes that, “John Clare writes air between his words. / He senses his friend beside him” (2013, 67). This brief and punctuated passage is broken by a wide gap, between parentheses, carved into the page. Morley (2013) writes, “Wisdom has wended / below the horizon to an earth beyond Northamptonshire […] By now the room and world are in a spin, one around the other – a gyroscope buzzing inside a gyroscope”. There is perpetual motion here: it is not without restrictions or spatial limitations, but it is recognised as a conditioning and simultaneously conditioned force. Yet, there is also an ‘absence’ at the end of this short poem too: Morley writes that, “He senses his poem beside him” – which is then immediately followed by an omission, another blank space. This is not an absence, however, in a delimited and singular sense: it is enclosed between square brackets; it is there to be acknowledged; to be theorised in conceptual terms. Just as it is not enough to say that Morley leaves this gap, or ‘blank space’ behind, neither can we adopt David Delaney’s vision of the nomosphere,⁷ but rather, must take

 Here I am turning the sense of ‘inhabitation’ (as the opposite of ‘propriety’ as a doctrinal concept authorising colonial occupation) on its head in order to emphasise the elements of inhabiting space outlined by Michel de Certeau (1984, 93), in which those who “live below the thresholds at which visibility begins” bring space into existence.  Terra nullius – or ‘nobody’s land’- was a doctrine deriving from Roman law, which became an intrinsic part of colonialization in which ownership through trespass was deemed legitimate, authorising the conquest settlement of foreign territory. The British employed terra nullius as part of colonial policy most prominently in Australia, where settlers “depended on terra nullius for the security of their title” and the Indigenous people were considered to be “the inhabitants, but not the proprietors of the land” [emphasis in original] (Banner 2005, 130, 124).  In this context, the ‘nomosphere’ refers to the broad cultural, social, material and performative rendering of the “legal” in the acutely embedded (and embodied) spaces of the local, as a

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the more radical unsettling approach in order to “consider not only how law is everywhere in space but also […] how space is everywhere in law” (Stramignoni 2004, 184). Rather than seeking to negate the presence of law or to consider whether there are spaces devoid of law or imbued within a grid-like regulatory system, this form of critique allows us to tend to the nuances of the relation between space and law in the context of that which is neither “inside and outside”, but rather reflects a consistent paradigm of unsettlement. This succeeds in reframing the concept, and demands a re-interrogation of relations of power – particularly through the concept of ‘taking space with you” (Keenan 2015, 8), enabling a radical critique of anti-nomadic halting sites and the legitimate spaces of the law. Doreen Massey (2013) claims that what motivated her to address the quality of space was “anger: [with the way in which] space became a kind of residual dimension”, arguing that she wanted to “bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live”. What ethical considerations must we take into account if we are to endorse Massey’s “call for a normative framework of ‘geographies of responsibility’ [that] allocates responsibility according to the relations and connections that constitute different spaces and places rather than following the legal model of allocating responsibility according to the acts of individual subjects” (Keenan 2015, 54– 55)? Can law facilitate such dynamic multiplicities, and what would it look like if it did? It can be argued that law is not capable of adapting to such a framework, which is why so little work has been done to date to explore the link between law and Diaspora.⁸ On the other hand, it may be possible that a coherent critical method of unsettling the law is necessary if any analysis is to begin grappling properly with space. This, then, goes beyond Nicholas Blomley’s (2003b, 32) notion of space ‘unravelling’, we risk returning to the legal fiction of terra nullius, albeit in a different form and by a different route, particularly if it is possible to ‘take space with you’.

means of “hold[ing] together the socio-spatial and the socio-legal while foregrounding the dynamic interplay of forms of social meaning and materiality” (Delaney 2010: 27).  With the notable exception of Daniela Carpi and Klaus Stierstorfer in their collected essays on Diaspora, Law and Literature (2016), following a conference in Vigoni in 2013 in which the interstices between these separate domains were discussed; Migration, Diasporas and legal systems in Europe by Prakash Shah and Warner Menski (2006); Anupam Chander’s seminal essay “Diaspora Bonds” (2001); work by Peter Karsten (2002); and a broad series of works focusing on globalisation, migrating legal orders and legal pluralism (if not specifically Diaspora) by Schiff Berman 2007; Benton 2011; Malik 2012,2016; Benda-Beckmann et al 2012; and Shah, Foblets and Rohe 2016.

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In “The Gypsy and the Poet”, Morley (2013, 91) writes that “[s]hades shift around me”: Clare is narrating his place but it is within a corridor of visceral recognition, there is a recognition of the numinous – “My child stares out of windows on a pouring planet” –, and yet there is an insistence on the material here, too: It has rained speech-marks down the windows’ pages, gathering a broken language in pools on their ledges b efore letting it slither into the hollows of the earth.

The separation of the letter ‘b’ from the rest of the word ‘before’ creates an unnerving sense of absence, in which the reader is temporarily abandoned in the same space as the raindrop, forcing the visceral sense of halting steadily on the window ledge before changing form as it drops below view. Attending to Clare’s revelation is a way of turning to the critical project of “contesting closure” (Holder and Harrison 2003, 5) in order to radically redefine what unsettlement might mean in the context of Diaspora. At the end of his encounter, he acknowledges the relationality of the multiple, “I call out to my child, and he is everywhere, and she is everyone” (Morley 2013, 91); absence, in this sense, is always a form of spatial presence. When considering the history of anti-nomadic legislation in the UK and the prevalence of eviction and persecution, any analysis must thus aim to deconstruct the rhetoric of propriety v. nomadism, and instead reveal it as a spatial contradiction of orientation (Keenan 2015, 85). In the context of the stateless Diasporic subject, this works towards unsettling the construction of Roma as the non-proprietorial manifestation of disorder due to their untethered orientation, just as the proliferation of a sedentary v. nomadic dichotomy can be seen as a reflection of the persistent failure of modern legislation to both exclude and accommodate the Roma. Colin Perrin (1999, 28) writes that the failure of similarly exclusionary discourse in regard to Indigenous peoples rights, attests not so much to a “lack of modernity, but as a lack in modernity”, denoting the absence which challenges the sedentary narrative of spatiality and simultaneously representing a failure in accommodation. A different form of displacement as part of the rendering of space can be found in Tsigan – The Gypsy Poem by Cecilia Woloch (2002, 22), who writes: We are this line on a map and this and this invisible line my father traced with one thick finger: this is where we come from

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he would say, Carpathian – nothing there beneath his hand but paper nothing there that hasn’t been erased redrawn dreamt of.

These lines reveal a broken non-teleological ontology, mapping made possible through the staggered cartography partially and incompletely drawn by the invisible markings of her father’s “thick finger” on the page. Woloch’s poem explores her own search for personal identity – her ‘lost history’ – inspired by a journey to the village of her paternal grandmother who, she writes in the introduction, “was laughingly and lovingly but also rather darkly referred to as ‘Tsingka’, ‘Gypsy’”. One critic described it thus: “[u]pon the blank page of her grandmother’s, and every gypsy’s, death, Cecila Woloch writes her own story” (Angel in Woloch), mapping space as a temporal palimpsest. This search for ambiguous roots can be read against genealogy, without being anti-genealogical, through a focus on the material construction of form as a means of engaging with “the voir venir, that seeing or glimpse of what is to come” (Goldberg-Hiller 2011, 17). This sense of the space rendered as the site of both what is to come and simultaneously what has been is crucial to any theorization of Diaspora. Woloch (2002, 24) writes, “Once migrant, immigrant: / we tore those roots / out of the ground / moved” – although the final, solitary word “moved” evokes a sense of Diasporic currents, the conscious violence made explicit in the text reflects the way in which there can be no transcendence here. The naming of her “once self” as “migrant, immigrant” presents a continual yet disruptive temporality through a violent tearing of roots. This is where the neuronal concept of destructive plasticity at its most productive, to read this splitting not as the generative branches of a familial tree (for she does not reach out, only back, but only momentarily) but instead as a signifier of the rupture as a precondition for Diaspora. Catherine Malabou (2012, 1) describes destructive plasticity as what happens when “the path splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person, and eventually takes up all the room”. In the text, this subjectivity is announced with the isolation of the narrative voice – the “I” standing outside the process of replanting stands alone, separated by parentheses as claustrophobic as they are distant. This is not, however, to suggest that under the law (or “before the law” (Derrida 1992) outside the categories of ‘migrant’ and ‘resident’, ‘national’ and ‘illegal’ there are slippages where you are rendered invisible by your Diasporic status. The Diasporic, in always looking at what is to à venir [to come] (Derrida 2005) may not look back, nor construct an Otherness that can be settled in the

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present; instead she cleaves a temporal space which draws life from the violence latent in law’s naming of the world. Hence, the Diasporic is not emblematic of a disappearance or a rendering up of sovereignty, but a process whereby, in Malabou’s terms, “[s]omething shows itself when there is damage, a cut” (2012:6). Such a rupture can be characterized in broad terms, as the emergence of a Diaspora born out of “centuries of discrimination” (Silverman 2012, 56), eviction and expulsion. This shifts the focus from the journey, or the point of departure, to the impossibility of fleeing as a reflection on the nature of the nomos: to acknowledge change without a locus, through an emphasis on the materiality of the spatial dimension; to recognize, in other words, that “metamorphosis by destruction is not the same as flight” (Malabou 2012, 10). This discomforting signature bears resonances of a Derridean “trace” (1981, 26): replicating that if the moving body is regulated yet strangely absent from normative discourse (MacNeil 1998, 37), there is a need to reinsert the topos of materiality through which and within which that subject is embedded (Render 2013, 557).⁹ Taking note of the finger tracing its way across a map, it becomes possible to arrive at “the realm of the illicit, and [turn] to improper, unexpected acts and practices that open a space for political transformation and rupture” (Bhandar 2011, 230). The space of Diaspora must consider what has been and what might come to be, and be attendant to both. This is the task now open to law in order to acknowledge this complicity as crucial to the analysis of the Diaspora space as intrinsic to a process of world-making in the context of articulating the rupture. This perhaps requires an adoption of a Deleuzian frame of “principles of connection” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 7). Yet, rather than imagining intersectional vectors of identity as marking out the contours of the space, or the migratory effects of bonds connecting the subject to an imagined centre, it is important to consider the legal spaces themselves. Turning from the lines of flight which are so readily evoked in discussions of Diaspora, to the theoretical condition of the space itself, challenges assumptions of connectivity and continuity (in legal terms, along the lines of birth place or lineage as determinants of nationality). Woloch’s (2002, 48) poem emphasizes the nature of construction: “We have to / make it up, he says / invent as I invent myself / (part-Gypsy) laughing”. In this instance, the broken syntax disrupts and unhinges the narrator’s journey. The poem seems to be an attempt at recovery despite the recognition this can never be achieved, for asking to live “inside [this] history” (2002, 71) represents  Render (2013, 557) writes that “[i]t is this fleeting finiteness, as well as the fascinating capacities of the human body, that – when coupled with the technological revolution that is quickly bringing ever-more biological secrets within our grasp – necessitates that we take seriously the human body as a subject (and object) of law”.

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a reinforcement of the mythologisation of Diasporic genealogy. The text itself reflects an uneasy wrestling with this spatial rhetoric of Diaspora as a form of remaking connective tissue, as if the rupture could be woven into these very contractions. The deconstructed form of the text on the page highlights the violence of definition, in which Europe is a space marked by “borders / on every border, murderers” (Woloch 2002, 58). The Diasporic body must exist within this space as an untethered construction, bringing space through and in resistance to law, that which owns and is bound within a commodified matrix.¹⁰ Spatio-temporality is thus always operative in law’s rendering of legitimate access to legitimate spaces of history and of the present, just as the law defines “personhood” as an epistemological category, rather than as part of a spatial process. Meredith Render (2013, 584) writes that: When the law defines what “counts” as a person, it is not applying our conventional concept [which] connotes an ontological engagement with the category of personhood […] The legal concept, in contrast, connotes an engagement with what “counts” as a person in a given legal context.

For Woloch, this “given legal context” of a “particular history” she cannot live within is marked by disassembling and the nostalgia of “personal mythologies” operated through forgetting. It is only when one stands before the law, trailing history behind you, as a body embedded within a certain space that one can be recognized (Bhandar 2011, 241). There is a need to disrupt this spatial proximity in which Woloch finds herself, not least of all because there is evidence that the notion of what constitutes the law – including the sanctions, duties and responsibilities that go with it –contrasts with a less state-bound and individual centered system of norms that exist within the Gypsy/Romani legal traditions, where notions such as property are conceptualized differently (Acton et al 1997, 247; Weyrauch 1997, 226). It can be observed that even a cursory glance at legal history will reveal the transition from people over territory (where space was defined by those within it, and moving through it) to territory over people (where the political borders came to be claimed) (Knight 1982, 252). Through this conception of citizenship, legitimacy is derived from the cohesive regulatory will of a collective body thickly bordered by historical claims to a specific territory (Mattais 2009, 258). Beyond the national there is only the ‘inter’na-

 Indeed, Brenna Bhandar (2011: 236) observes that “[t]he dialectic of recognition is firmly embedded in a nineteenth century, modern conceptualisation of the subject and property relations” .

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tional, the latter a network of bodies deriving authority singularly from the links between the former. This is manifested in a tree-based concept of the state as a whole and indivisible series of branches stemming from a single, firmly planted root, whereby “law, through the notion of sovereignty […] both author(ise)s and mediates the universal and particular dimensions of the modern nation-state” (Buchanan and Pahuja 2004, 141). It is therefore necessary to disrupt this rooted conception of a particular configuration of the state to understand it not as taking “place in space or in time, but as space (and) time” (Martinon 2007, 4). Whilst Woloch is “writing [her] own history”, this self-invention is marked by violence rather than a celebratory sense of renewal, for these post-traumatic subjects are, in Malabou’s (2012, 3) words, “modes of being without genealogy”, rupturing the notion of linearity and teleology (Martinon 2007: 5, 10) and challenging the statist paradigm of a root-based tree with many branches. The idea of a being without a genealogy represents a reading of violence as more than merely negative, as a nuanced condition of existence. Malabou’s (2012, 24, 29) assertion that the subject in fact “becomes an ontological refugee, intransitive […] without any correlation, genetive or origin” is a recognition that the topology produced here is different, as there is no ongoing journey but instead a rupture, characterized as a “brutal, sudden, blind event”. Any recognition of Diaspora space must be therefore cognizant of both eschatology and emergence, along with all the paradoxical contradictions that implies. Within this literary jurisprudence, eschatological thinking shifts the Diasporic from becoming as a migration, to emergence as explosive transformation without transcendence – where, as Malabou (2010, 65, 32) explains, “[i]t is not a question of how to escape closure but rather of how to escape within closure itself”. For Woloch (2002, 71), this is a potential answer to the question she poses, “How do I live / inside this history?” (2002): the response is embedded in an ontology that is neither exilic nor marked by the interruption of borders, but instead ‘finishes’ the process of becoming at the site of the corporeal, where, as Margrit Shildrick (2005, 32) observes, “[t]he subject no longer stands before the law awaiting judgement, but is constituted by the subject effects of its capillary circulation”. To spatialise in this way is to wrench the subject from ‘before the law’ to magnify unease at what Malabou (2012, 12) might call “the flight identity” as a central part of the misplaced narrative of Diaspora. Corporeality then becomes re-constructed in a way that highlights the sense of rupture, or unsettlement, as a permanent event, rather than foregrounding the liminality of Diaspora. Although Woloch’s (2002, 58) perambulatory narrative attempts constantly to cast off the limits of a rigid structure, there is no way out of the material form – as “on every border, murderers”. Hence, responding to such a reframing in a law that seeks to deny its own spatiality will be a difficult project, but can

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begin with a Diasporic ontology of ‘closure’, which emphasizes that both the myth of Return and the primacy of origin in Diaspora (Axel 2002, 411) are conditions of a post-metamorphic mythology. It is the authorial enunciation of the law and its power to name as a condition of the spatial that becomes what Woloch (2002, 73) thinks she is seeking: “a name that answered / to my name, / a place that held me/hard between its borders”. To be “held between borders” is a recognition of Diaspora as a site of absence/presence, so that the space she finds herself in is then purely eschatological (Woloch 2002, 73): as if by crossing and recrossing I could wear the borders down or smudge my thumb across the map with spit and ash until there’s nothing left (the pavement stained with blood).

The implication here is that movement is a process of inscription, rather than departure: it is neither, then, emigration nor Diaspora that is feared but “arrival”, due to “the disruption it brings to socio-cultural and legal normativities” (Shildrick 2005, 42) of the sedentary order. To move the outlaw away from the teleological trajectory of the liminal and the “void” of nomadic space is to take account of “alterity when no transcendence, flight or escape is left” (Malabou 2012, 11). Approaching the Diasporic subject through a literary jurisprudence is a call to read the spaces of the law differently, through a spatio-temporal framework which re-imagines what it means to be ‘before the law’, acknowledging the call to arms implicit in Woloch’s (2002, 51) question: “how long / have Rom erased themselves, / allowed themselves to be erased?”

1.3 Sovereignty, space and the chora in “Kings” by David Morley “[W]e are all foreign Romanies in a foreign land, peopled by gadže [non-Romanies].” (Lee in Hancock 2002, xi)

It is critical to analyze the spatiality of the concept of sovereignty in any discussion of Diaspora, as this is the framework by which law authorizes itself, and upon which Diaspora gestures to its own limits. As one of the founding concepts of modern law, the concept of sovereignty is therefore fundamental to the con-

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struction of Diaspora. Drawing on theories of deconstruction, this chapter will delve further into the fundamental elements of spatiality intrinsic to a new reading of through Derrida’s conception of the chora, as both receptacle and definitive place, a source of power and a site of inscription. Through a critical reading of “Kings” by David Morley (2007, 24– 38), in order to interrogate and unsettle sovereignty, exposing the unstable qualities of this spatial construction and thus piercing its hold on modern law, provides a means of re-framing Diaspora through literature. This analysis will therefore attempt to challenge the narrative of spatial ordering legitimated through sovereignty as the originary source, in order to reflect upon the radical foundations of legitimacy. It is perhaps worth noting that within this analysis, it has been a struggle to determine how to locate originary foundational concepts without resorting to a theological Lacanian reading, where “God is not dead but unconscious” (Žižek and Milbank 2009, 297). In this sense, any discussion of the absence of a pre-sovereign authority risks reifying the Lacanian sense that god or a state of natural law risks being present within a critical analysis of sovereignty, and must be guarded against (Ainley 1998, 338). It is possible instead, I argue, to develop a reading of sovereignty that negates the static vocabulary of territorial possession, without resorting to a belief in a higher order, or natural law. This critique, however, is in its infancy in this regard and hopes for others to take up its revisionist call. To recode sovereignty in such a way is not to do away with the concept of sovereignty altogether but, in recognizing it as a spacing movement (Dahlberg 2016, 6 – 9; Spivak 2000 [1988], 1449 – 50), begin to deconstruct the authorization to determine who belongs where in which place, if we ‘take space with us’, and perhaps provoke its subsequent unravelling. The relationship between law and literature is predicated on an understanding of sovereignty as a foundational concept: it is a “legal fiction” (Harrison and Dye 2008, 15) with a “rich discursive history” (Hebard 2012, 5), a poetic framework for the carving up of territory (Hebard 2012, 18). The conceit of sovereignty is that it exemplifies how real places become narrativised as unreal spaces, pertinent in the context of Diaspora as an unreal (or unruly) space in the context of law. Thus, this analysis will explore the argument proposed by John Hilla (2008, 81) that as sovereignty belongs to the realm of discourse, it should be “contemplated as a literary term in a non-legal reality”. Reviewing sovereignty as a foundational concept both pays attention to its figurative textuality as part of the rhetoric of legitimacy, whilst also attending to the notion of the authority of sovereignty as a resonant pre-condition of space. If we are to unpick the spatiality that textures Diaspora, it is therefore a good place to start. In this regard, the ambiguity of the concept – in the sense that “[s]overeignty exists as the negation of what it is not” (Hilla 2008: 147) – demands an intertextual analysis of its quasi-

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theological dimensions, in order to interpret the positioning of Diasporic subjects within (or, as the case may be, outside) a sovereign framing of legitimacy. This deconstructive analysis therefore seeks to unsettle the concept of sovereignty as a foundational mythology, but must then also speak from it. An exploration of the concept of sovereignty as a self-designated originary source – and thus the legitimation of the colonial narrative of the spatial order – will be conducted through a reading of Chora L Works (1997), a collaboration between Derrida and the architect Peter Eisenman drawing on Plato’s work in Timaeus (written c. 360 BC). The authors’ intention had been to move engage with Derrida’s philosophical interpretations of chora in the production of a space for the Parc de la Villette in Paris.¹¹ The text, perforated with holes, weaves transcripts of their conversations and design drawings for the project alongside Derrida’s reading of Plato, for a project which didn’t take place, couldn’t have taken place, for as Derrida (1997, 35) says, “chora cannot be represented in any form, in any architecture”. This makes it helpful in a discussion of Diaspora, which exists only through an analytical mythologisation of its own intentions. In Plato’s text, chora is a “third thing”: in other words, chora cannot construct or give place to property, for it is “neither sensible (matter) nor intelligible (form), but a generative relational matrix that organizes and disturbs form/matter interactions” (Mickey 2013). This reflects the spatial order of sovereignty: not discussed here in relation to its external/internal dimensions, but as a foundational concept fundamental to the reading of Diaspora and any critique of spatiality in law. Sovereignty implies a suspension of law but is also the condition in which law authorizes its own legitimacy. The rule of law in a state is enabled by a practice of sovereignty that rises above the law. Often the paradox of sovereignty is asserted with respect to the founding of a state, but those who locate a paradox in the founding act typically discern its echoes and reverberations in the state that results as well (Connolly 2004, 24).

Law and sovereignty are thus complicit, but law must always imply that sovereignty came before it and hint that it will be there even in the anarchic future, when all law has been overturned. This is where the chora may be regarded as a way of recoding sovereignty so that it becomes more of an active than a redundant concept in relation to practices of migration, as “Derrida treats chôra as

 Thomas Rickert explains that: “[t]he word chora was commonly used for space before Plato adopted it in the TIm […] Chora and topos were often used synonymously to refer to space and place […] while chora does mean ‘place’, it is also closely associated with land, city, region, or ground” (2013: 47) and thus, “the platonic chora remains murky” (2013:49).

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a space for projection, a theoretical space in order to undo the distinctions” (Vismann 2005, 11). This can be read as a reflection of the fact that, as Martin Loughlin (2013, 48) explains, “it is more accurate to say that sovereignty has no locus”: it is vested in the self-authorising relationship with law. For Derrida (1994a, 31), chora is both chasm and receptacle; he also (somewhat characteristically) asks whether chora could signify “that which separates, deviates from any particular thing, that which is effaced, that which thus admits something other and ‘makes space’ for it?” This chapter is thus hoping to display a restlessness with the concept of sovereignty, in the recognition that “[d]econstruction does not [seek to] overthrow the concept of sovereignty but recod[e] it by searching for a topos, a concept […] that transcends these conditions” (Vismann 2005, 9). The purpose here is therefore to re-read Diaspora as a condition of spatial mythology, and recast its analytical integrity as a spatial concept before – and standing up to – the law. This mythology is predicated on the narrative of origins, so it follows that in order to negotiate the implications of sovereignty on the spatial order, it is necessary to interrogate the paradoxical way it is imagined into being as “the origin of authority” whilst denying its own “mystical foundations” (Cornell 2003, 159). Whilst some critics have encouraged the rejection of sovereignty on grounds of its messianic contortions, “[s]overeignty can only be subverted, [as Walter] Benjamin seems to tell us, by turning towards it, by looking at the very materiality of what makes it what it is and seeing its undoing in that very place” (Martel 2012, 63). One way of “turning towards” sovereignty is by focusing on bare sovereignty, or “what happens when a community gives itself the law” (Pahuja 2011, 112) in order to deconstruct what it is that is given at the point of constitution. This generative process is dependent on an emergence characterized as an originary gesture, whereby an “assertion [of self-jurisdiction] often presupposes the existence of commonality in the form of a mythical past [though] it is the declaration itself that brings it into existence” (Douzinas 2007, 22). This boundedness is both reified and challenged by the concept of sovereignty, even if it cannot be wrenched from its messianic derivation. Even the Diasporic subject is therefore spatialised through sovereignty, which has not withered as expected in the glare of globalization or enlargement (Sassen 2015, xxv, 5 – 10). Whilst the validation of sovereignty as a perpetual colonization of the spatial need not be inescapable, nor do we need to explore it as a fetishism whose end can only be mitigated by nihilism or an eschatological yearning; on the contrary, Derrida’s writing on the chora provides a means of evoking the unstable qualities of this construction and thus piercing its hold on modern law, as “simply a doctrine […] limited by the very nature of power itself” (Juss 2006, 47). Like Diaspora, it is a “virtual” category manifested at the level of representation, an abstract designation of origin (Minkkinen 2009, 45). Unlike Diaspora, however, it is the source of legal author-

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ity, a frame for order, and yet as a judicial frame cannot also be an origin. This indeterminacy is reflective of law’s claim to be both particular and universal: law’s quality of autonomous determination and its supine dependence on forces to which it must relate and give way […] to the demand for an assured position integrated with a responsiveness to all that is beyond a position (Fitzpatrick and Darian-Smith 1999, 3).

This “demand for an assured position” is the ambivalent sighting of a messianic authority, an unfinished architecture of sovereign power that paradoxically demands both the genesis and the final word (Connolly 2004, 26). It is for this reason that chora is productive as part of a strategy of ‘unsettling’ the law, because as Derrida (1997, 36) reiterates, whilst “chora is the beginning of the beginning, before everything [it is also] not an origin”. In Diaspora, the origin of the command as it is received through sovereignty is not the reiteration of blank space nor a pre-ordained right to space. Chora is, then, a “zero […] at the point of origin” (Derrida 1997, 35); it is the means through which the law “author (ize) s and mediates the universal and particular dimensions of the modern nation-state” (Buchanan and Pahuja 2008, 262). It is then, a receptacle: that which does not represent the borders implied by sovereignty, but the space in which this recognition takes place. This is often ignored in the drive to dismantle sovereignty in favour of pluralities of jurisdiction, or even in the layering of multiple sovereignties residing in both corporeal and territorial spaces critical to the Diasporic imaginary, conceived through remittances (Eliassi 2015, 47– 49; Fischer 2015, 183 – 184; Van Hear 2015, 32– 35). The spatio-temporal unsettling of sovereignty, then, does not negate the cartographical rhetoric implied by Diaspora, in which “sovereignty is the entitlement to exercise effective control over a territory” (Butler 2007, 18) or argue that it is the receptacle upon which this cartography is already contained as evidence of “discrete, self-contained, territorially delimited units” (Butler 2007, 23). Instead, this reading attempts to evoke the paradox of sovereignty as infinite “finitude” […] a spacing that is always already a ‘sharing’” (Motha 2011). This will be explored through a reading of the epic poem “Kings”, by David Morley (2007, 24). The poem is a guidebook for survival, or as Morley puts it, “for living in edges”. These edges are the borders and the boundaries of the law, experienced as a particular narrative of the border. Morley prefaces the poem with the following introduction: [t]he poem is a fairytale, once upon a time. The scenes are set in no country but in many countries the borders of which are invisible. The time frames coincide with certain events in Eastern Europe, but the persecution of Roma has been permanent and is a story that lies outside written histories. Yet the poem is also the man’s history as he remembers it, and sings it.

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The poem is set everywhere and nowhere at once, told as an epic three-part story “outside written histories”; it also acts, however, as historical testimony where speech is privileged, structured in two line non-rhyming couplets. Where is the site in which it lies? Where is the voice speaking from and how can borders not contain it, even if the sites of the narrative are portrayed as merely temporal locations? Evoking these questions in his writing, Morley weaves mythology, testimony and spatiality in a way that makes his poetry a productive frame and source for interpretation of Diaspora and sovereignty (as chora). To a certain extent, to give chora the meaning of sovereignty is to read it seemingly against Derrida. In his reading of Plato’s Timaeus, Derrida (1997, 20 – 21) reiterates that “chora has no meaning or essence”: it exists as ‘chasm’, a “place of inscription”. However, if interpreted spatially this critical approach does not negate the Derridean emphasis on unutterability but rather confirms the play on absence/presence discernable in Morley’s text. This temporal dimension is intrinsic to this notion of complex positionality in sovereign space, for as Peter Fitzpatrick (2008: xxii) writes: if a sovereignty is to endure in the infinite imperatives of future time, its range cannot be confined, in whole or in any set part, to the presently and determinately given. Sovereignty, then, has to depend on a position apart from its determinate cohering ’for the time being’, a position that enable it always to be other than what it is.

Morley (2007, 24) weaves Romani into the text, writing that “the Romani language offers an opening, not a fence, between fields of language”. The speaker is always playing with the idea of the border, tempting us to be complicit in its construction and asking the reader to play with the idea of original space(s) and temporal linearity. This reflects the way in which sovereignty, as a juridical concept, is assumed to be ubiquitous and abiding (Walker 2013, 20) and yet, although existing in the abstract, it is always an effect. It is the axiomatic frame for “conceptualizing and ordering the world” (Adler-Nissen and Pram Gad 2013, 3) whilst conferring finite limits and a specific mandate for power on a singular territorial authority (Walker 2013, 20). Derrida (1997, 19) describes the chora thus: [it] receives, so as to give place to the, all the determinations she/it does not possess any of them as her/its own. She possesses them as properties, she does not possess anything as her own. She “is” nothing other than the sum or the process of what had just been inscribed “on” her, on the subject of her, on her subject, right up against her subject, but she is not the subject or the present support of all these interpretations, even though, nevertheless he is not reducible to them. Simply this excess is nothing, nothing that may be and be said ontologically.

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The concept of ordering acts as a frame for the illimitable limit, enabling sovereignty to proceed as an ordering device that gives Diaspora its genealogical traits. In a series of couplets, Morley (2007, 25) writes: four stars to follow: patyàv, apakyàv, patsyàva, or apatyàv. You must pick or be picked; be picked up or picked off. Like kopanàri, the carver one choice to your chisel, one sting to your karò, one karò to our thorn. Asanòo mànoosh, ‘all smiles’, I can wait for you but, tooryalìste, I circle you. I am circling you. In the court of the hayfields I am circling you; in the laws of the hedgerows I run on the field-side, oomalyàkom, you keeping the drom: I invisible, audible, a flume of finches blowing/through the thornfields at your riding.¹²

The movement here is not gestational in its circularity: there is a definite “I” who is being enclosed. Engaging with these words in Romany dialect creates a distinctive space in the process of reading, inserting an unsettled and yet collaborative sense of distance between the text and the reader. This could be read as reflecting the movement of the concept of chora as so much more than a static receptacle of singularity upon which spatial markers rest in order to be deciphered, for “[i]n its very operation, sovereignty functions through and with autonomy, freedom, force” (Leitch 2007, 235). The sovereign here is the protector of the ‘drom’, the road: it is ‘kept’ without being contained. To think of sovereignty as chora is to avoid the totalization of having to ask if there can be a space for law beyond sovereignty in Diaspora, a law of the non-sovereign space: chora is both a non-place and a place, a receiving place. This is one way to consider the question: if sovereignty is read as a doctrine on the limits of authority, how is it grounded outside movement, in Diaspora? When Derrida (1997, 34) speaks of the chora, he suggests that although it is a ‘zero, the point of origin’, it “should not be ultimate, outside; it should be a place among others”. Morley plays with a similar notion of placeless rootedness; for sovereignty to be exclusive, it must be rooted in a someplace, but it must yet be receptive. Yet, how can such a

 Morley (2007, 29) provides the following translation of these Romani words in the notes of his text: patyàv, apakyàv, patsyàva, or apatyàv [belief]; kopanàri [woodcarver]; karò [thorn/ sting]; Asanòo mànoosh [a smiling man]; tooryalìste [circling movement or manoeuvre]; oomalyàkom [field,drom: road]. A further playfulness with the slippery aesthetic of spatiality can be achieved due to the fact that, though Romany is a minority language and exists in multiple dialects through a largely oral tradition, the unknowledgeable reader is allowed access through the immediacy of the text because, as Morley (2007, viii) announces, “the words are pronounced exactly as they appear”.

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place be inscribed upon if its edges keep shifting? Within the poem, explicit shapes and spaces are marked out in the text – lines demarcating the court, the field and the road. However, the ‘I’ interrupts the ‘you’ with an assertion of alterity: the ‘you’ (that is the receiving ‘we’) and the sovereign with the chisel, marking power on the space which is constructed, is encircled – not, crucially, enveloped but surrounded by the voice. This dialogism is more than a Hobbesian “consent of the governed” (Benoist 1999, 104), it is not a case of obedient assimilation in which either “the state ‘swallows’ the people [or as] in Rousseau, where, through the general will, the people ‘swallow’ the state)” (Benoist 1999, 104). This reflects Derrida’s work on the relationship between law and language as “a circulating spiral, which [is] dynamic” (Vismann 2005, 6). Chora is not an essence just as sovereignty is not simply an effect: both are movements of spacing. An awareness of the spatial pervades Morley’s poetry in a reiteration of the paradox of sovereignty in which the sovereign power lays claim to the territorial.¹³ Such awareness does not represent an attempt to reaffirm Bodin’s concept of an absolutist messiah set against the people (Benoist 1999, 103) whereby two entities act in composite antagonism, although this is also not a gentle game: there are dangerous terms, in which “you must pick […] or be picked off”. Although there is resistance here, it is a game of collusion in which both entities are complicit in the act of making space. Both the subject and the reader can hear the sound of the anterior nonsubject subject, but we cannot see its defiance of the rigid conformity of the linear grid. The road still runs, as it is maintained, but is always un-made: what moves to take in sovereignty, therefore, is sovereignty itself. It is sovereignty’s “relationship to itself” (Nancy 1993, 116) which brings to mind Peter Fitzpatrick’s (2008, xxi) description of sovereignty as he writes that, “like its exhausted predecessors, most pointedly the monotheistic deity, modern sovereignty must marvellously combine being determinate with an unconstrained efficacy”. The inescapable paradox of sovereignty as a concept has been maintaining the appearance of being absolute whilst constantly seeking to define its objective limits (Benoist 1999, 105), limits at which Diaspora seemingly comes into being. Chora, evidently, may be chasm but is not emptiness; Derrida (1997, 23, 30, 34) writes that it must always be occupied, “even when it is distinguished from everything that takes place in it.” For Derrida, Plato’s description of chora identifies it as that which is “the neutral space of a place without place,  The territorial objective need not fall into the category of colonised in opposition to the coloniser in the traditional sense, for as Alan Ashton-Smith (2010, 82) argues, “[t]he colonist of the rootless race does not have to travel in order to carry out their mission – they force the people to settle on the land they already possess”.

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a place where everything is marked but which would be ‘in itself’ unmarked”. In this way, it is almost complicit in the notion of the origin. Yet this is not origin as genesis but origin as receptacle, whereby “going back behind the origin, or also the birth, towards a necessity which is neither generative nor engendered and which carries philosophy, ‘precedes’ [and] ‘receives’ the effect”. Derrida is always keen to stress that this is not a totalization nor a case of locating that which is a non-place and yet it is “totally indifferent to what happens”, which is how sovereignty can be both claim and frame (Walker 2013, 19), both partial and absolute. Morley’s text (2007, 26 – 27) is also a productive site from which to interrogate the reading of sovereignty as a receptacle or mode of inscription. The drink holds open doors to my dream, a lamàda of memory on which the kings scribe their rarorò razprèyzila. Ahmàtsi manoosh, but this is my mastery. This night I am ready. I rokker their story back, circling them, track my tale into the gerdèy, riding the rare roads, until I sleep hòratiba, dream-speaking their romanipè, speaking it plain as I have heard it. Just as I spell this spell: delpesgodì—Kings bend about my bed, eavesdrop on my night-speech. Trills and lulls, owlcalls and answerings. The tentpoles wrestling above our canopies grow woodland in my mind.¹⁴

Morley introduces the issue of inscription, as the “lamada” [flat stone] is inscribed on by the kings, but that which is inscribed or written is only a “rarorò razprèyzila” [dumb tale]. The “mastery” here lies in the act of speaking, the power to take the story of the ground and switch it back and forth. Speech is more than simply the construction of space here: it perforates the text and forces the sovereign to collapse in on itself, the kings “bend” in to the sound of “nightspeech”. Evidently, sovereignty is an utterance of possession in the abstract, but with real and variable effects. The “night speech” exists as a privileged singular testimony of history with authoritative power over those listening to the story. Acknowledging many voices present at the scene, albeit silent, is not an affirmation of multiple sovereignties just as it is not an attempt to reify a unitary

 Translated by Morley (2007, 29) at the end of the poem as follows: “Lamàda” [a flat stone]; “rarorò razprèyzila” [dumb tale]; “Ahmàtsi manoosh” [a foolish man]; “rocker” [talk in Romani]; “gerdèy” [gutter]; “hòratiba” [speaking]; “romanipè” [Roma legend, tradition]; “delpesgodì” [to remember].

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authority:¹⁵ the issue of inscription is not one of being marked at the point of genesis, or of palimpsest. As Derrida (2007, 70) writes of the chora, “[e]verything is inscribed on it, but, at the same time, the receptacle remains virgin […it] remains out of reach, so to speak”. Those rigid structures embedded in Morley’s tight couplets are revealed not as the site from which he is speaking, but as the backdrop to the speech that flows out through enjambment and sibilance; this is speech which neither speaker nor poet cannot claim as his own, and yet which contains the authority to generate new ways of remembering. This echoes the deconstruction of sovereignty as a blank space in which to privilege one form of writing, that is to say, “the ius scriptum […] the making of the authority of law” (Vismann 2005, 12). This takes the analysis, once again, back to the circling movement of Diaspora, as the voice that circles itself and in doing so unravels its own grounds of enunciation. The focus on motion here wholly returns to the movement as the condition of sovereignty obscured from view, beyond what the law says it is or can be, thus revealing “the [seemingly] impossible: that things happen without words, unconditioned” (Vismann 2005, 13). Space is suspended through an anchoring drawn in multiplicity, and re-made as receptive, yet indifferent, to the point of illegitimate possession. This is no anxious displacement: the question that matters in this context is “what is the last place, the last receiver of everything?” (Derrida 1997, 34). As Derrida (1997, 34) suggests, “[c]hora is the name for something in which everything will be received […] this place should not be ultimate, outside; it should be a place among others”. Throughout his discussions in preparation for the architectural project, Derrida drives at this question of reception: for what does it mean to receive everything? If sovereignty is power, can this power be configured as resistance if it can be imprinted upon in this way? If it receives power, it has to be both capable of being shaped and receiving the will of the sovereign, however this strays dangerously close to the doctrine of terra nullius, the imposition of legitimacy from an untouchable origin, and even Bodin’s conception of sovereignty as “totally independent of the subjects on whom laws are imposed” (Benoist 1999, 102). In the context of Diaspora, this represents the ultimate paradox of spatial ordering: a foundational ordering vested in the concept itself. A critique of sovereignty as a foundational concept is therefore key to a deconstruction of Diaspora, as “a return to the conventional idea of the sacred can

 De Benoist (1999, 105) writes that “[a]s with Bodin, sovereignty for Hobbes is completely unitary and identified with the state; any division or fragmentation of power is considered to be the cause of instability and political separation”.

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help to loosen the nexus between sovereignty and the sacred without eliminating pre-emptive respect for sovereign decisions” (Connolly 2004, 28). There is no scope for a rejection of the doctrine of legitimacy, but there is a need, highlighted inexorably in the case of the Roma, to question its absolute self-authorisation. Reading the concept of sovereignty as chora thus demonstrates the fallibility of sovereignty as a doctrine of power, without implying its demise. Even within a deconstructive framework, this would not make sense as a recognisable aim, for as Vincent Leitch (2007, 234) argues, “despite the terrible aporias of sovereignty in its modern democratic forms, Derrida aimed to preserve it, but in limited and shared forms”. Seeking to withdraw from it is therefore problematic in spatio-temporal terms: if sovereignty to come is read as chora, and chora is both a place and “zero […] at the point of origin” (Derrida 1997, 35), then the spacing movement of sovereignty reveals it as forgotten or suppressed; recognising its rooted universalism as a nothingness, but not a void; as both space and a spacing movement; place and non-place; an avoidance of totality but a receptacle nonetheless. How easy still to dismiss those we reject as mere zeros, sinks of energy, black holes in which all that matters, the singular and the memory of the singular, disappear without a trace. It is as if that hollow oval stood for anonymity. (Kaplan 1999, 191)

Some critics suggest that the impact of globalisation and the recognition of Diaspora demonstrates that contemporary sovereignty symbolizes a turn away from the “black holes” of colonial singularity, through “the principle of subsidiarity [and] the preservation of pluralism” and, as such, is instigating not “the dissolution of existing sovereignties, but, rather, the instrument of their rebirth” (Benoist 1999, 118). It can be argued, however, that such a reading returns to the reification of the nation and the obedience of the governed to a state-bound theological notion of an originary genesis mediated through space. To think of space differently we need not necessarily search for a new meaning, but rather find ways in which to deconstruct its fundamental sources of authority as it relates to law and power. Pavlos Eleftheriadis (2009, 3) writes that: [s]overeignty, when taken seriously, is the denial of the rule of law and the affirmation of uncompromised absolutism. It signifies, as all the classical authors of sovereignty knew, the unlimited power to be free of any legal restriction, contrary to any doctrine of constitutional government. Is this the same sense of sovereignty that we find in modern constitutional theorists, or does the modern sense have a special, weakened, meaning? Here is then a neglected question for the philosophy of law: is such a new meaning possible?

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Eleftheriadis argues that sovereignty, therefore, is incompatible with true democracy, but this is a misunderstanding of what sovereignty could be, as it need not be negated nor “understood as a ‘thing’ that is either present or absent. On the contrary, sovereignty unfolds” (Adler-Nissen and Pram Gad 2013, 1) [my emphasis], which could be taken perhaps as the ‘unravelling’ of the law. The spatial unsettling of sovereignty is not, then, the key to its undoing, however in spatialising the way this ‘unfolding’ takes place we can evoke the potential of its axiomatic narrative in Diaspora. This argument is perhaps best articulated in a transcript from the conversation between Derrida and Eisenman (1997, 34), where Eisenman relates the following: I once did a house with a room that you could look into but that you could never enter; you could feel its presence in every other room in the house. This had the effect of making one feel outside of the house, because the ultimate interior was inaccessible. [Derrida replies] That is a good analogy for chora. Chora is virgin, there is no content, no consummation. Chora is totally indifferent to what happens.

Derrida is drawing out here what is so often lost from the discourse on sovereignty and indeed, Diaspora, intimating that space must be read beyond and before the sacred. Eleftheriadis (2009, 4) suggests that “[w]hen taken seriously, sovereignty cannot be successfully adjusted and refined to fit the age or rights and constitutions […] sovereignty is and has always been incompatible with the idea of law. It is, in a way, unlawful”. Yet this is not the case: recoding sovereignty through a discourse of the chora is to recognise, that as Derrida (1997, 91) says of the chora, “is unthinkable, that it can only be conceived of as in a dream”, at the level of representation. Sovereignty is “spacing” that is not reducible to interpretation, nor is it spatialising: it is resistant to naming, but it is a receptacle; it is not emptiness, but is capable of inscription, it is the inhabitation of “an impossible place” (Rickert 2013, 65) where Diaspora can be found. William Simmons (2011, 41, 220 – 223) explores “de lege ferenda, what the law ought to be” in order to consider a “new normative map” (after Benhabib 2005) which focues on “respect for the marginalized” (after Rene Cassin 1970). Simmons emphasizes that “the Other provides a continuous critique of existing law”. He suggests “the Other” has been “cauterized” and encourages disruptive encounter with the “saturated Other” as an antidote to the hegemony of law, asking whether it is indeed possible for law to “empty itself of the hegemonic discourse”. He concludes it may well be, if a space is opened up in which marginal voices can be listened to, effectively inviting the “aneu logou” into the texts/courts of the law, in this case through the Diasporic. However, such a strategy merely acts as a normative map of linguistic transformation, which does not attend to the spaces of the narrative of the Other but the process by which they are dispossessed. I think this

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objective is therefore unfulfilled; Simmons draws on Gayatri Spivak’s (1993, 177) ethics of alterity in attending to the voice of the Other through the humanities, however both interpretations are problematic, because you still end up with a normative map that invites distance whilst outcasts have been particularized to the point of obscurity. An unsettling of sovereignty, on the other hand, does not only demand attentiveness to the Other but instead argues that the lawscape is already counter-hegemonic, due to its foundational absence. To unsettle sovereignty through Diaspora is not to do away with the concept of spatial order altogether but, in recognising it as a spacing movement, begin to “pick away” at its legitimation of space and the authorisation to determine who belongs where. Thus, to unsettle sovereignty in Diaspora involves both a movement and an unravelling of foundational authority, “circling you [i]n the court of the hayfields” whilst “Kings bend about my bed” (Morley 2007, 25, 27), listening to what else could come to be.

1.4 Control and contamination in Mariella Mehr’s Stoneage In order to contextualise Diaspora beyond the originary grasp of sovereignty, it is necessary to consider the nature of space, to see how this order turns inwards, on to those it assumes are ‘out of place’. In her work of auto-fiction, Stoneage (1990), Mariella Mehr recounts her experiences of institutionalisation in Switzerland as part of the Swiss authorities’ drive to eradicate the Yenish community, conducted as part of an official assimilationist anti-vagrancy campaign called “Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse” [Relief Organisation for the Children of the open road] from 1926 to 1973 (Meier 2008). The process of controlling and eliminating what was perceived as a dangerous and anti-social disease of nomadism resulted in a prolonged period of institutionalism, incarceration and enforced sedentarisation of the Yenish minority (Jourdan 1999). Mehr (1990, 4) relates the story of her detention aged five, and subsequent institutionalisation, as a consequence of the belief held by “the guardians of the sedentary order and their superiors [that] the gypsy way of life was […] asocial and dangerous to society”. The text reveals the false dichotomy that was established between the nomadic and the sedentary in which a Romani identity become synonymous with anti-social vagrancy in the eyes of the authorities. Nomadism was therefore regarded as a disease that required control, as Mehr’s (1990, 108) protagonist is informed by her doctor:

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here you can see a clanmember of that group of vagrants whose history allowed me to illustrate the theory of hereditary genetics for you. this clanmember is the third generation of mentally ill which that group of vagrants produced.

In the context of the program of electroshocks she is forced to undergo, Mehr (1990, 93) draws connotations between the legislative outlawing of ‘degenerate’ and Diasporic elements of society to the history of genocide under the Holocaust, or “Baro Porrajmos” [the Great Devouring] in which the European Roma population were persecuted and slaughtered under the Nazi regime: the ritual takes place with that same shocking, cold precision with which the concentration camp inmates during the third reich were tortured and murdered, delicately clean so that no waste would remain.

The managing of this excess as a matter of state practice reflects the expansion of sovereign power through the eradication of hierarchically and eugenically determined undesirable bodies, defined as a “disease” of the nation (Hancock 2004, 388). Within this paradigm, the nomad is constructed as an outlaw who is also a primitive ‘irregularity’ within the sedentary system of spatial order. This chapter will consider the outlaw in relation to Diaspora, being a (legal) subject out of place, bringing space with them. My analysis takes account of Jean-François Lyotard’s (1984, 15) argument that in the unpicking of metanarratives the legitimacy of the body as a construct in the space before the law is called into question, depicting corporeal legality as one narrative amongst a “fabric of relations”. However, if the space before (and after) the law is re-framed through Diaspora into the settled population and those out of place, then “when the law comes to me, with ego and language, it is too late” (Lyotard 1993, 179). This suggests that rather than regarding the body as a concept of disciplinary order within a normative system of social rules, the body becomes an outlaw at the moment it emerges in Diaspora (Curtis 1999, 251). Mehr (1990, 66) engages with this process of emergence in the text, where her protagonist is pushed to a point at which “the faces contort to grimaces, torment with unnaturally ordered limbs as if there were no more natural order to the bodies”. The concept of disciplinary corporeality is explored most powerfully in Kafka’s (2003 [1914], 137) short story “In the Penal Colony”, where the crime committed by the prisoner is violently inscribed on the body, an indelible mark of Cain, punishment which the individual “decipers […] with his wounds”.¹⁶ Kafka reveals that the vi-

 A reading of this text in relation to the concept of the outlaw and spatiality is distinctly pertinent when one considers the sense of spatiality evoked in Kafka’s short story, particularly

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olence of the law and the prior determination of the body is more complex than this simplistic and violent rendering of corporeal legitimacy (Curtis 1999, 252). In the story, the officer who previously administered the wounding inscription is accidentally ensnared within the machine’s cold embrace, but before he is mortally wounded with the insignia “Be Just”, the machine fails. All are marked, in the end, by space, even when a subject ‘takes space with them’. It is the prior and post conditionality of the body which most concerns Carl Curtis (1999, 254), who draws on Lyotard to argue that the body “is in fact in excess with regard to the law”. Therefore, it is both resistant to a totality of legitimate claims of the body, and yet simultaneously reflects a preordained source within a regimented system of spatiality. For Curtis, it in the reach of this limit, the primitive potentiality of the body, which is transgressive to the law. It is this limit that is most powerfully evoked through Diaspora, within which even nomadic outlaws are framed as transgressive. This framing reconceptualises the space allotted to Diaspora as a figurative echo of Kafka’s novel Amerika (1927), which features a plural spatiality in which a singular space can have, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986, 3) observe, “innumerable doors and side doors [and] entrances and exits without doors”.¹⁷ Mehr’s novel features a similarly nomadic structure, with some pages bearing no more than a few sentences, a single sentence, or paragraphs without indents. The style is further characterised by uneven, spasmodic punctuation and disjointed syntax compounded by a non-linear narrative that veers from a confessional re-telling to a mythological sub-plot, written in a stream-of-consciousness approach. Stream of consciousness has been considered a modernist technique in which “[m]an is reduced to a sequence of unrelated experimental fragments” (Lukàcs 1963, 26). M. H. Abrams (1993, 202) defines “stream of consciousness” as a particular narrative “mode” which portrays the internal world of the character “without a narrator’s intervention”. In contrast, however, this technique can be considered to be particularly evocative in Diasporic fiction, as it serves the “dual function” of reflecting migrant estrangement whilst simultaneously highlighting a sense of relationality within a “collective subcultural identity of similar immigrants” (Bentley 2005, 71). As a narrative mode representing both alienation and immediacy, stream of con-

where he describes the first encounter between the principle characters: “here in the small, deep, sandy valley, closed in on all sides by barren slopes, apart from the Officer and the Traveler there were present only the Condemned, a vacant looking man with a broad mouth and dilapidated hair and face, and the Soldier, who held the heavy chain”.  Kafka’s work provides an interesting source for comparison with the literature in my own corpus on the unsettlement of space, as his writing is concerned with “the immanent quest following the line of infinite flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, xxi).

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sciousness acts as a form of spatial and temporal deterritorialization, as a “liberating and ultimately empowering technique” (Bentley 2005, 72) which subverts the conventions of alienation and individualism as they are described in Lukàcs. In this sense, this technique of writing corresponds instead to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986, 17) recognition of minor literature as deterritorialization, where “the individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensible, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it”, representing a new form of reading which is, itself, out of place. Mehr recounts her experiences disjunctive and multiple narrative voices, reflecting the fragmentation she suffers following institutionalisation. The notion of the deterritorialized subject is signified through the use of a lower case subject identification – “i” rather than “I” – throughout the text. There is no attempt to privilege a hierarchy of separate identities, but rather an acknowledgment that, as for Mehr, for whom the divesting of legal rights from her and her parents equalled the act of being bound to the state, there is no rigid teleology of narrative voice. Thus we may “enter, then, by any point whatsoever: none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon” (Deleuze and Guattari 198, 3). To identify such a deterritorializing ethic is to run the risk of falling prey to a jurisprudential narrative that emphasises nomadic otherness. The substance with which Mehr disrupts form is constituted by elements, shapes, textures and colours reflecting a visceral materiality which can be read against this concept of a space of ‘nonlaw’ or immanance, articulated through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986, 49) assertion that “where one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire and desire alone”. In this context, all of Mehr’s multiple identities are not ‘othered’ but implicated as irresolutely present. If everything, everyone, is part of justice, if everyone is part of an auxiliary of justice, from the priest to the little girls, this is not because of the transcendence of the law but because of the immanence of desire (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 50).

Here, there is an attendance towards multiplicity rather than dissolution: if the immanent plane incorporates “everything, everyone” there can be no exile. There is no dialectical opposition in which this subject emerges from a sense of nothingness, a transcendental law that locates the diabolic “I” as a subversive ward of the state. Corporeal substance is recognized as that which is both universal and particular: a condition of belonging to a realm in which the law is not abyss but is it itself capable of an emptying movement, where the ideal figure of the outlaw becomes a Body without Organs [BwO] (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 165 – 184). The BwO in this reading is law’s ideal subject, an exile at the border of

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enunciation whereby law’s desire to sustain itself through absolute control over the corporeal state is revealed (Cheah et al 1996, xv). This is desire, then, which is not only “nondesire” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 166, 170, 175), but is also, simultaneously, a practice of “migrations” that is an unobtainable limit, and “a competent of passage” in which the organism is effectively emptied out whilst reframing its spatiality. Hence, the conceit of the Diasporic journey is that it is not about metamorphosis – in particular the nomadic impasse which blights the Yenish and thus situates Mehr’s identities as illegal elements requiring social control – but a dismantling or unsettling already achieved through representation. In this way, when Mehr (1990, 3) writes about the effects of discombobulating disembodiment – “faces begin to take shape, freakish at first, events of absolute deadliness attach themselves to the faces” – it is a recognition of the aspirational body of the outlaw and projections of corporeal space in Diaspora: the BwO invokes a conception of the body that is disinvested of fantasy, images, projections, representations, a body without a psychical or secret interior, without internal cohesion and latent significance (Grosz 1994, 169).

The absolute ideal of the BwO in Diaspora is arguably that which comes marked only by its genealogical trail. However, in this novel, although there is a pervasive sense of incohesive or dismantling corporeality, the subjected body that takes space ‘with them’ occasionally reterritorialises as resistance, where Mehr’s (1990, 89) “little girl bursts through the silence with a flurry of snarling noises”. Thus, the regulative ideal is exposed as aspirational: metamorphosis is explicitly anthropomorphism, the sibilant simile threatening to provoke a rupture not in the scene but in the space around and within the body. The sense of embodiment Mehr evokes resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004, 166) description of the body engaged in an internal battle with its own organs, just as the BwO is “already underway the moment the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them”. Mehr (1990, 29) describes in acute detail the way in which this process manifests itself as a cancerous growth: the memory grows like an ulcer in the belly, gray, fibrous tough, reaching about with gelatinous tentacles, consuming, devouring all from the inside out. the ulcer paralyzes. It paralyzes all that lives in silvana: the laughter, the crying, the singing, and the screaming […] what remains is the feeling of uselessness, being coincidental, spit out.

However, this sense of being “spit out” is not as a remnant – as if there can be no ontological space beyond law – as she is never fully devoured, but at times appears infiltrated with a current, “like a living, pulsing machine” (Mehr 1990, 117). The treatment the protagonist receives at the hands of the state seems to mirror

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legal theories of difference whereby the misrecognition of the Other under the law is a source of legal violence (Cheah and Grosz 1996, 5). The aspirational BwO cannot sufficiently recognise embodied differences, as it is not specifically a condition of embodiment but acts, rather, as a reflection of how nomadic identity may be represented in law as a spatial position. Indeed, the system of representation shifts from the located subject to the subject of location, in other words; “the body is constructed as an interest so as to occupy an object position in a plane of interests competing for space (Hyde 1997: 155). The conceptualisation of this interest is complex in relation to law, as the body itself necessarily loses its sense of materiality as an ontological and boundaried construction: it exists through representation, as a legal subject within Diaspora. This is not to say, however, that bodies are neutral configurations of a particular legal conditionality: law clearly makes distinctions between us and them on the basis of citizenship or gender, or “condensations and displacements of social relations over time” (Slabbert 2008, 73). Historical colonial practices explicitly incorporated the colonisation of the body, rendered as a spatial effect through a process of debilitative submission for cultivating proper behaviour from “the uncivilized”, a process not only authorised but enacted and enforced through the law (Rao and Pierce 2001, 160). The nomadic Yenish were effectively colonised subjects – and remain so, driven as they are off the road across Europe through relentless anti-nomadic legislation, in which they are dispossessed of their corporeality in an attempt to ‘tame’ their uncivilised behaviour as uncommon subjects. Mehr (1990, 135) explores this narrative in the text by envisaging a fiendish infiltration in which “on silvia’s skin the colonies of deathspiders expand, the fear nestles in black pores”. In this analysis, subverting the idea of infiltration as unsettlement (reading it as a spatial condition negotiating the production of the outlaw) provides a way of reading “the ‘other’ body’s experiences [of] stigmatization, vulnerability, and civic disenfranchisement” (Rao and Pierce 2001, 161) without collapsing this into a dichotomy of law’s subjects and transgressive Others. In order to interrogate these disciplinary technologies outside this binary, it is necessary to first dismantle overarching assumptions about (colonial) law. Assuming law exists as a discrete and determinate domain prevents us from understanding how it appears to assume this fixity, this force, which occurs through repetition (discipline as the repeated enactment of law’s violence upon colonial bodies) while masking the performative aspect of its identity by presenting law as the place where stable and disciplined subjects are produced (Rao and Pierce 2001, 160).

Hence, the site of stability before the law, can be deconstructed as “neither static nor untroubled” (Rao and Pierce 2001, 162– 164). The deconstruction of this fiction of the stable place underlying the sedentary spatial order is necessary for a

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re-framing of Diaspora as an operative principle within non-neutral spaces. If the spatial order regulated by colonial legality is revealed as bordered by exotic desire for the savagery of the uncivilized – and at the same time concentrated on the violence inscripted on the uncivilised as disciplined subjects – the desire to control the movement of nomadic peoples can be read as part of the same continuum of carving up space that pervades the colonial experiment, as a form of territorialisation imposed through bordered states of corporeality, and then a denial that such territoriality exists. It can be argued that this denial is manifested in the hegemonic conceptualization of Diaspora, which, in common with the contemporary human rights regime, can be regarded as a continuation of a territorial program of spatial ordering, through its reliance on the normative as a system that categorizes belonging (Simmons 2011, 6). The notion of the space within which this Diasporic subject is out of place thus pervades the text as a singularly sedentarising imperative, so that “Silvia is a frozen, little bird” (Mehr 1990, 94). However, when Silvia is subject to dehumanising treatment at the hands of the authorities, she becomes an uneven site of deterritorialization revealing the spatial “horizon”, or rather, that which constitutes the limits of the subject (Rao & Pierce 2001, 167). Within Postcolonial Legal Theory, the postcolonial subject is defined in alterity through the limits of the subject. It is this spatio-temporal positionality which is always marked as excess, that which it is never possible to contain. As Peter Fitzpatrick and Eve Darian-Smith (1999, 2) write, postcolonialism (and the subject defined through a colonial violation) “must speak from beyond a West that, in a sense, orginates it”. To “speak beyond” acknowledges the state of being before the law, in which law can be defined through its spatiality and its origins in the “capacious in-between” (Fitzpatrick and Darian-Smith 1999, 2). Law, then, is the determinant of relationality as well as the conditionality of that relation. Diaspora complicates this relationship by insisting on a dislocating source of movement, unlike postcolonialism, which “exists in an ambivalent belonging to the West” (Fitzpatrick and Darian-Smith 1999, 2). It is this incommensurability that Fitzpatrick (1999b, 48) identifies as a process without resolution: [s]o, although savagery and civil society are incommensurable, that very incommensurability, that impossibility of relating, is what sets them in relation. Yet that same incommensurability ensures that the relation is never fully achievable.

It is this apparent incommensurability – which can be classified as the need to speak from a beyond, or abyss – that authorises itself as perpetual yet resistant

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disruption in Stoneage, in which Mehr (1990, 21) evokes a sense of her protagonists turning on one another: what is happening to me? Silvana sits at the table, writes and screams and grins and foams. Silvana spits the last words out of herself before she goes mad […] silvana wants to do away with silvia.

The way in which the distinct personalities operating in a singular body are rebelling against one another refracts a sense of ongoing incommensurability. A singular narrative voice even emerges briefly in this scene – “what is happening to me?” [my emphasis] – yet is ultimately swallowed and rejected in the violent reactions of Silvana. Even language becomes a threat, which must be expelled from the body – Silvana must “spit out the last words”, the last rites, as a process of exculpating herself. This is an exorcism in impossible conditions: a Diasporic return in the manner of an ouroboros,¹⁸ an incommensurable metamorphosis which can be read as a reflection of how legitimate subject – particularly a subject in Diaspora who is contained and violated as a ward of the state – is structured through the contortions of exile. For Peter Fitzpatrick (2001, 4), law must be both fixed and yet capable of being responsive, formed “in negation” to itself, and it is in its construction of legal subjectivity that this paradox is most apparent: law must provide a space of recognition at the same time as being a site of disciplinary enclosure, whilst enabling movement to occur. In the text, this paradox is manifested through Mehr’s (1990, 38) repeated attempts at exorcising the other -“i tried to kill this violated silvia, this dirty, little girl”. The irredeemable failure of any legal construction of subjectivity is that spatio-temporal resolution is never possible. When posited as a neutral space, the subject always presents a challenge to the narrative of identity under modern law, as “the universal human utterly and incommensurably repels savagery away from itself” (Fitzpatrick 1999b, 50). Mehr’s protagonists are complex and legally dispossessed legal subjects, confined through the mandate of the state, constantly caught in the attempt to repel and be repelled. On the other hand, to read this simply as an ongoing act of transgression is a misreading of the Diasporic body as a space of struggle, where “silvia moves herself to the side, feels nothing anymore” (Mehr 1990, 144). This explicitly spatial metaphor reflects both the sense of the horizon and beyond, and the parallel movements (which are not migrations) of those who are oppressed. Indeed, to deconstruct the body as a site of struggle

 See Mandt (2000) for a discussion of the ouroboros as effective motif and metaphor for the self-consuming spectacle of the endlessly circular snake, swallowing its own tail, and the productive impact of such an evocative metaphor in revealing the illusion of totality.

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without a collapse into the easy rhetoric of transgression (as a preservation of a colonial dichotomy) is a key Foucauldian premise, recognising that the subject is always implicated in its own juridical construction (Foucault 1977, 25). The text itself is evocatively spatialised, as Mehr (1990, 144, 30) constructs a concrete sense of locationality in which “silvia moves herself to the side”. There is no totalising transposition in this scene, but rather an unsettling doubling of corporeality as “silvia moves herself” [my italics]. This pervasive paradox runs throughout the text, troubling the relationship between corporeality and power: how can one achieve to become a dummy of oneself? Yet no-one wanted the other, wanted me, silvia. for every occasion there was a ready-made sham set […] a grandiose spectacle, I was a good actress.

When Mehr’s protagonist performs as a grotesque, doll-like version of herself, this artificiality subverts the dual identity imagined in the homeland/hostland dichotomy of Diaspora. It is worth considering how this dichotomy takes account of Jennifer Wicke’s (1991, 455 – 462) delineation of the two halves of the legal subject “as a subject area under the heading of the law and as the human subject constituted by legal discourse”. Wicke argues that this duality is challenged by a postmodernist critique in which schizophrenia is the dominant ontological mode, and as such “the notion of the legal subject can be stretched beyond recognition by this new postmodern space”. She regards this as a dangerously destabilising threat, but it is this duality in Diaspora that would most benefit from what she terms “a fluctuating subjectivity”. Wicke misreads postmodern theorisation as a means of considering the law from a distance, where the law remains intact as the site in which all subjects are merely “billiard balls being played on random […] tables across a landscape”, a familiar repetition of space under Diaspora as the identification subjects operating on a canvas of “neutral” space. Although she then proceeds to usefully interrogate the meaning of the words “identity” and “subject”, the law remains a distinct and static formation in her analysis, a concrete conceptualization. On the contrary, deconstruction or “this new postmodern space” simply acknowledges – rather than generates – the instability that is always necessarily present in the legal spaces from which the outlaw is exorcised. Exploring spatiality through a narrative of multiple, conflicting protagonists, Mehr (1990, 78, 65, 116) constantly reminds the reader of the role of the outlaw through the transgressive performances they are witnessing – “silvia began to mime the intelligent, reasonable little girl. At times she slipped out of the role”. The text taunts the reader with their incomplete knowledge of the subject as she writes, “this, silvia, you have experienced this once before”. However,

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these protagonists are all distinct personalities, with recognisably different and identifiable traits. The fluid form and lack of punctuation, resulting in writing that is sporadic and disjunctive, forces a renegotiation with where the boundaries of an outlawed self might lie: who am i? where do i begin to be, where do I end? am i the sum of that which happens to me, or do i have my own life? am i a stone, falling, without possibility to pick a direction? where are the boundaries between myself and outside?

The description of “boundaries between myself and outside” emphasises the sense of an external limit from which she prohibited access; the spatiality of the nomad, here, is effectively internalised. The residual sense of embodiment appears as the echo of a presence when Mehr (1990, 42) writes of how, for example, “I feel rubbed out by this winter”. This echo is problematic in legal terms, as the withdrawal of the corporeal through law’s reliance on the signifiers of language makes materiality an issue of absence, rather than an acknowledgement of the Other. Panu Minkkinen (2008, 67) characterises this as the failure of law to either address or adequately respond to human suffering. Minkkinen’s argument draws on Levinas’ pre-ontological ethics in order to interrogate the condition of the human, in which “the Other abruptly appears to me as a face that resists my efforts to absorb her into my world”. In a sense, the dichotomy of nomad set in opposition to the settler is always pulling the subject towards absorption, in its efforts to assemble the subject always at an impossible distance from the law. This positions Mehr’s (1990, 70) protagonist(s)’s struggle in a wholly new light, as when she writes that “at times I withdrew into myself”, which can be revealed not as the insistence on a possible escape or transformative transcendence but, rather, as a focus on suffering comparable to Minkkinen’s (2008, 84) reading of Walter Benjamin’s notion of “the expressionless” as “the breach or interruptive silence that enables a work of art to reveal its innermost essence”. Taking this reading allows for a critically empowering analysis of Mehr’s protagonist(s), as an anti-assimilationist reading against a holistic reduction into an unsettling spatiality in Diaspora. In other words, as Minkkinen (2008, 85) argues, “[t]he Other’s expressionless suffering resists my attempts to conceive of my existence within a totalising whole because it refuses to drain its meaning into my efforts to assimilate it into my world”. The legitimacy denied here is the procreation and spread of the scurrilous fecundity of the nomad, spreading out to despoil and desecrate the corporeal space of the bordered nation-state. The nomadic body, in particular the female body, becomes a threat that must be contained: it cannot exist as the ideal body of law, the BwO, if it holds the possibility of reproduction. Even more threatening is the spread of reproduction with degenerative potential-

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ities, just as the spread of Diaspora itself can be imagined as a threat of metastasis (Pienta et al 2013). In the text, Mehr (1990, 90) carefully maps out the interplay between the female sex as the site of this threat: the little girl sits down on a seat with a crack in the brown leather. When silvia spreads open her legs, she observes the crack. It turns into a frightening maw, moves sinuously, wants to devour. Silvia pulls her legs over the grimace, opens them again, a play between desire and fear.

The effect of this, in a juridical sense, is most clearly highlighted in the context of Foucauldian (1978, 140) biopower, a disciplinary technology for managing spatial order through corporeal processes such as reproduction and death; Silvia’s sex is depicted as the source of her own illegitimate status, with the potential to “devour”. The appropriation of this part of the body as a spatial site of threat demonstrates the need to reinstate a more corporeal subjectivity in law, one that acknowledges alternative forms of biopower whilst maintaining the capacity to respond to the disparate juridical practices which control the body of the nomadic outlaw. If Silvia takes space with her that has the possibility to devour, she will be consuming rather than obliterated, as the threat of reproduction is also a threat to the space of the nation-state. This ethics of subversion, of reproduction acquired through suffering, reflects the categorisation of the Yenish nomadic group as a blight on the nation state, a minority population historically symbolized as a hereditary disease or disorder. This recalls the use of Diaspora as a metaphor applied to metastasis in cancer cells (Pienta et al 2013) which plays into the narrative of a stateless group which spreads dangerously, if left unchecked. Thus, the outlawing of this behaviour, as well as the use of law to restrict and contain these degenerative elements, demonstrates the incommensurability with reconciling other subjects within a singular space; mechanisms of biopower must always be manifest as either that which is managed successfully by the state (the aspirational BwO), or marginalized as a deviant category. It brings into focus what could be contained in the body’s absence: the marks or traces left “on her skin” are both residues of a dominating imposition just as the protagonist(s) has/have been located and confined through a policy of containment, replicating the sense of enclosure that is a prominent theme of Roma literature. This critique of Diaspora, then, is not trying to reinstate the presence of corporeality but rather to recognize the dialogic relationship between the body of the subject-who-moves and their inhabitable space, in order to acknowledge “the body’s ambivalent status as a trace, as both present and absent, everywhere and nowhere” (MacNeil 1998, 38).

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Where the body appears as the most explicitly contested site, the Diasporic gestures towards a potentially emancipatory re-reading of a form of belonging firmly marginalised outside the boundaries of national identity. This contradiction provides a means of considering the paradox implicit in law’s enunciation of the subject (MacNeil 1998, 39). If law constructs the BwO as the ideal outlaw, the problem with this process, as Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 170 – 171) identifies, is “not lack; its problem is the opposite: it fills itself to the point where nothing further can circulate”, as its Diasporicity has a clearly defined limit point. Hence, when Mehr (1990, 116, 88, 65) writes “i do not want this body, damned, so take it back” this is more than simply echoing dislocation: the boundaries of her body are threatened with total erasure. She becomes like a corporeal map, in which her identity is being gradually deterritorialized – “the contours of my body are erased, a mass of meat, expelled a few days ago out of a deranged belly”. Framed through a continuous process of grotesque rebirth, this expulsion mirrors the incommensurability of the Diasporic experience as ouroboric metamorphosis, where there is only the space of swallowed subjectivity in which “they shred my body, they torment me”. Adopting Peter Goodrich’s (2001, 242) perspective that the law is at is most explicit when read through the performances of the body, for Mehr (1990, 70) being “ripped apart at the middle of the body” depicts a doubly destabilising ontology: as one can never be ‘outside’ the law, one must be dissected – and desubjectified – through the spaces of the law. However, this process is interpreted as a corporeal becoming that represents “a shifting location, a space of making and doing” (Hoogland 2002, 220), metaphors of growth and re-growth become more than signifiers of degradation: leaves grow thorny in the heart region, wounding the remaining colours. they flake off smooth skin like bad quality whitewash. detritus, I am detritus, detritus of myself, without any utility (Mehr 1990, 118).

Such fragmentation does not reflect becoming as a negation of being however, even in its more abhorrent manifestations, when Mehr (1990, 89) describes how the “small hands show scratchmarks and the fingernails are chewed bloody down to their roots”. There are two conceptualisations of the BwO to consider here. On the one hand, there is the notion of the BwO as an assemblage of performativites, representing the collision of interrelationality along multiple rhizomatic ontological lines (Hoogland 2002, 220), in which Mehr’s protagonists are participating in a process of desiring as “a-devenir” [a to become] (Derrida 2005) reflecting a process of spacing which is endlessly becoming, emergent and transformative (Hoogland 2002, 221). On the other hand, the BwO as the ideal body in law is the bodily manifestation of mortal consummation, in

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which its relationality reflects the disinvestiment of the legal subject. In this sense, where “absolute boundlessness” (Hoogland 2002, 222) denies the specificity of agency in favour of temporal complicity, justification is provided for regarding the spread of Diaspora as such a threat. Hence, for example, Mehr’s (1990, 65) protagonist(s) are constantly being assessed, measured and categorised – “i have to strip naked, they give me a white shirt. They take my blood pressure. They measure my pulse”. Mehr (1990, 13) writes of the grotesque process of birth within the text, when “with a loud, horrible cry i push something black, bloody out of myself, it is my own coffin”. This act of splitting open is to render the BwO not only imperfect but anarchic; the absence of flight is, if perversely, an alternative form of resistance to the status of outlaw. When Mehr (1990, 63) writes of intrusive institutional practices visited on the body, the body contained within is housed in an explicit structure, a static place in which suffering is authorised by the rigid boundaries of the space itself: “while blue cold saws my skull to pieces, deep inside the body a baby is smashed against steel walls. I hear the bones breaking”. This visceral portrait of what happens when one is reconstructed “against steel walls” reflects the endless cycle in which the body is formed tortuously into an ideal BwO: a body without the possibility of producing degenerative Others after it has fulfilled its use, in an increasingly fatal space of enclosure. For Piyel Haldar (2007, 4– 5), because of the way in which the state is structured within a juridical framework constructing static and yet universal sources of authority, any resistance taking place within this site faces an impossible task. The subject alienates herself as soon as she stakes her claim as an autonomous subject. What emerges is a sense of ‘self’ measured against the law, and what remains is a radical failure to rise above this legal existence. Complaint is predicated upon an inextricable compliancy to law.

In this context, is worth considering whether Diaspora in its current analytical form has the capacity to unsettle the law, or whether it can only ever remain complicit with the nation-state model, as a reification of sovereignty rather than a challenge of its limitations. It is not, then, the nature of existence which is threatened by a performance of body-making, but the edges of the law which are forcibly exposed as far from able to construct a BwO as a suffering subject, in which each subject under the law must first be dismembered before they can be disciplined (Haldar 2007, 5). The term dismembered is used deliberately here – in contrast to Haldar (2007, 5) who describes this process as being “stripped down” – as a reflection of law’s need to sedentarise and sterilize the subject. This at its most prescient in the discourse of Diaspora, where despite

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a limited recognition of group status, you are alienated from your own skin through your membership within a threatening (if left uncontained) Diaspora. Thus, the unmaking of the outlaw as subversion is revealed through the protagonist(s)’ impossible “yearning to be invisible” (Mehr 1990, 3). This desire to be unseen threatens the normative coding of the outlaw, a recognition of the limits of the law in which the condition of being out of place is not to submit to a Kafkaesque indeterminacy, but rather to expose the failure of “law’s efforts at closure” (Davies 1996, 74). In the Diasporic experience, rhizomatic interrelations complicate notions of belonging centered on a single axis of rootedness to or from a particular place (Clifford 1994, 306). For Mehr, however, these connections are not Diasporic in the sense that they form across a geographically separated community, for once labelled as deviant the Yenish were deliberately quarantined into separate and isolated wards of the state. The communication between the disparate parts of her narrative subjectivities reflect a form of embodied mythology, in which even the more violent forms of interaction in Diaspora exemplifies “a lived tension, the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place” (Clifford 1994, 311).¹⁹ Multiplicity performs as the counter-strategy to a discourse of the centre as the only possible narrative of location in which there is always a loss or a denial rather than an ontology of being out of place, although to a certain extent it relies on the same limits of being before the law. There is, therefore, more than a transgressive capability embedded within Mehr’s (1990, 106) derisive provocation – “I pull faces, put out my tongue at her. I am deranged, I am allowed to do anything” – which presents this corporeality as a resistant and rebellious spatio-temporal inhabitation. Such resistance manifests in the text through a sub-plot featuring the dreams of her protagonist(s), in which “the worldmother gave birth to new worlds, pushed them out and destroyed them” (Mehr 1990, 64). These new worlds are neither a seamless connectivity between untroubled assemblages of disparate parts, nor a sign of the possibility of existing outside the confines and borders of the state. Although the theme of birth runs throughout the narrative, through the experience of containment as simultaneously regenerational and parasitic, it does not gesture at an emancipatory status but acts as a subversion of space: “all goes dark before my eyes, in the belly the voice of the woman can be felt” (Mehr 1990, 25). Such pangs of homesickness prior to giving birth can be read as neither internal nor external, as the sense of being out of place is instead experienced as a very

 This interpretation of Diaspora reflects the understanding of space as mediated through dialectical tension, which is central to this book (Harvey 2004, 6).

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specific form of emplacement. Thus, when Mehr (1990, 36) writes, “you stash me as homesickness,” it is not a manifestation of displacement but rather a rejection of the totality of the intuition which renders her an outlaw. When Mehr retreats into the seemingly ephemeral fantasy sub-plot, the condition of Diasporic homesickness is revealed as manifestation of a different form of trace, or what is left behind when the BwO is revealed as law’s impossible ideal. Mehr (1990, 64) writes that: [s]trange dreams grew like cities in the passing hours, crumbled, emptied of life, spiders devoured hope […] gleaming bright light left painful traces on her skin, endlessly cold.

For Mehr (1990, 37), the sentences implode gradually at places within the text, so that the words collapse into one another into a cacophony of assaulting sound – “screamslaughscrysyells, something that gruntswhimperslivesliveslives” [sic]. The clash of consonants and repetition are jarring elements that subvert the sense of disembodied subjectivity (Slabbert 2008, 79). Following the rhizomatic movement of sound as it is traced in the narrative reflects the task of tracing the Diasporic body in law, in order to determine how a critical reading should respond to this corporeal signification of deviant substance as it moves between the space between the reader and narrator, and across the physical spaces of the page. When Mehr (1990, 77) writes that, “the scream is everywhere, within me, outside of my body, a bestial scream with black, jagged contours”: it is both ‘here’ and ‘there’; inside and outside her corporeal state; just as Diaspora extends its rhizomatic roots into a place that is already rendered a perpetual absence through its departure. A search for the scream at the source (the source of emittance at the origin of the law) is thus obsolete, just as it is unproductive to consider the teleology of substance. Mehr’s (1990, 70, 77) dismembered protagonist is acutely aware of these limits or boundaries, observing “contours of human beings […in an] airless room, white, much white, tiles”. Her corporeality may be no more than “a rhythmic, beating going in my head, a booming” but it is a presence as it articulates an absence, challenging space to such an extent that the very “air is liquid”. Hence, a “human being is a conceived as part of a dynamic and interconnected whole” (Gatens 1996, 109) without enclosure – it both makes up and is made up by its environment, including other bodies that surround it. If colonization is thus understood as a process rather than a historically specific appropriation of a particular space, it is necessary to consider the way in which the mechanisms of law both conform to the making of identity and yet institute a colonial distance from its mode of emergence (Haldar 2007, 3). When Mehr (1990, 25) writes of “a giantmotherlandscape, a belly, a true belly, but

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one without roadsigns” [sic], there is no reference to a new being or a transformation into an Other, but rather, the reappropriation of space at the point of rupture, beyond the law. This reading of the Other reflects Derrida’s (1989, 60) gesture towards that which can never arrive. He reflects this aporetic state in his retelling of the story in which the Messiah arrives at the gates of Rome, who, despite being recognised, is asked only when he will arrive. Derrida reads this as “a way of waiting for the future, right now” (Derrida quoted in Caputo 1997, 23). Mehr’s scene of arrival moves beyond a material dialectic of life and death and attempts to construct new forms of subjective emplacement, in which “the all-mother will bed your beating heart between the roots of these primeval trees” (Mehr 1990, 25). This space is never separable from a Diasporic ontology, as law is not just a tool of regulating the boundaries of the subject and the space in which they inhabit but rather is that which “lies at the origins of all social institutions concerned with the subject” (Haldar 2007, 5). In this way, then, there is no ontological externality rendered in marginal or liminal space. The Diasporic subject, ontologically constituted through particular relationship to space, demonstrates the need for a reconsideration of how both space and the subject are continually colonised by and through the law, and how this is reflected back through their production of the space itself. In this context, when Mehr (1990, 3) writes that, “the city that occupies me, guts me, is called zero,” she reflects the multiple qualities and value that zero can have, if properly deconstructed. Whilst Mehr denotes its tendency towards dissimulation and nothingness, it must be acknowledged that zero is not only absence but the original placeholder, corresponding to the imprint remaining when a number counter has been taken away, acting as both shape and a mechanism for viewing the rest of the axis: “[i]f you look at zero you will see nothing, but look through it and you will see the world” (Kaplan 1999, 1; see also 4, 25). Zero is, then, not an absence or a reflection of being out of place, on the contrary; it evokes a dangerous potentiality within mathematics through its potential to contemplate infinity (Seife 2000, 5, 131). Thus, the depiction of zero as a violent occupying force here reveals the constructed nature of a space that lays its claim for legitimacy, and authority, at the point of all origins; law is set at the cohesive point of the axis, negating zero’s productive capabilities. This ontological graphology is, then, marred by the manifestation of a destructive presence at zero, challenging the notion of a stable place which can eliminate all traces that “the transgressive lies on the same surface” (Haldar 2007, 1). In this way, Diaspora mythologizes itself as a zero whilst manifesting synchronously as a point of emergence, dispelling bound subjectivity before the law. Any refutation of this mythology must insist that Diasporic movement through space can be accommodated if it acknowledg-

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es that subjects take space with them, and does not recognize zero as a point of departure but as a potentiality for an unsettling of space. The colonial segmentation of space could be seen as represented in this text as the “infinite rooms of despair” (Mehr 1990, 35) through which the protagonist (s) must traverse. The context of their incarceration, as subjects rendered immobile through the state’s persecution of the nomadic group of Yenish, makes the consideration of the bordered space in which subjects come to be colonised particularly problematic. Mehr’s (1990, 21, 63) text abounds with references to the material world inhabited by the protagonist, and yet whilst the prose is dense with visceral detail, she identifies another, unreal space, a “nomansland” [sic]. Turning no-man’s land into a run-on compound in this way suggests territory is semantically inseparable from nothingness, but this same space is also related as a liminal spacing “between day and night” and “between ice and fire”. Homi Bhabha’s (1994, 54– 56;1996) notion of “third space” is a potential way to read the inbetween spaces Mehr identifies within the text, characterised by a form of cultural translation or hybridity,²⁰ manifested in a disjunctive liminal space of the encounter between colonised and coloniser. This is a critique of essentialism in its recognition of ambivalence and acknowledgement of emergent possibilities. However, Bhabha’s concept of third space neglects to account for the need to re-consider the normative practices of interstitial exchange within which this encounter is spatialised, here as part of a ‘nomansland’. Although not inherently dualistic – in fact, avowedly its antagonistic opposite – the concept of hybrid space denouncing cultural translation as an implicitly binary process does not effectively critique law’s positivist assumptions. Instead, it reflects the consuming nature of law’s colonialist machinations, which are ouroroboric rather than encounters with other sovereignties – a reflection of the fact that under colonialism, law must not only “extend into new-found worlds but had also forcefully to bring them into a determined order” (Fitzpatrick 2001, 94– 97). Hence, as Fitzpatrick writes, the imperial objective was violently implemented through the law, which narrativised stability as a conceit of spatial order “miraculously wrought in a disordering violence”. Thus, the analysis of this “inbetween world”, which can be both liminal and zero (if zero is both placing and spacing, taking account of the origins of zero as that which, once lifted from its place: it leaves a mark but is no longer present, much like the notion of Diasporic roots) must first take account of the need to consider that law is forever turn-

 In this instance of “hybridity” acknowledges the disparate heterogeneous nature of collective identity formation, in which practices of belonging are mediated through local processes of experience and a negotiated association with other non-Roma groups (Bunescu 2014).

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ing towards the future to come, a teleological force of authority which “cannot be contained by what is or has been, by its history, but extends to all that it will be” (Fitzpatrick 2001, 94). To contend with this is to move beyond the binary of bounded space in order to expose the ontological violence predicated upon law’s positivist assumptions. Spatial order legitimated through colonial authority conditions the quality of the space so that no objection is possible without reifying this distinct spatial order; any resistance or objection must occur “within a juridically shaped social structure” (Haldar 2007, 4). It is in this way that Mehr writes about liminality as a form of unsettlement, which recognizes boundaries through the very possibility of crossing over them: perhaps you’ll make it this time, Silvia/Silvio/silvana, finally to step away from it all, to cross that boundary, to go in the direction where the pain should no longer be noticeable, where nothing should exist except infinite indifference.

It is worth noting that the ontological manifestations of nothingness are characterised by its explicit guise of an (un)fixed universality where “blind spots make a view of more impossible” (Mehr 1990, 88). If the “blind spot” is interpreted as zero, this axis will have the capacity to produce new spaces. The layering of multiple worlds in non-tangential patterns reflects, to some extent, Mehr’s (1990, 127) constructive evocation of immanence, through a form of ever-expansive and ever-responsive borderlands of interaction: into this world another is woven, a green operation room, blood and meat, faces, twisted to grimaces, light that lets red rings dance deep behind the eyes, walls of glass and noise.

Within this literary jurisprudence, then, it is the condition of the space within (and seen through) “walls of glass and noise” that is the focus, rather than the corporeal process of incarceration or synthetic aftermath of a dualistic interaction. This articulates a Deleuzian monism in which all disciplinary processes are born out of their very failures at enclosure. Mehr’s (1990, 10, 103) text exemplifies this as she traces the Diasporic journey of her protagonist(s) through disciplinary processes that are always embodied and nonetheless located, “in the detention halls, in the institutes, in prison”. The protagonist(s) are constantly subjected to invasive surveillance in these spaces: doctor blumstein’s eyes coldly follow my slow movements. He scrutinizes me openly, i stand naked before him, he looks briefly down the swollen throat, into the ears, measures the blood pressure, and counts the pulse. He examines my kidneys with a karate chop of his hand, then examines with disgust my chewed fingernails before he commands me to lay down on the cot.

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This extract resonates with movement, as her subject is constantly being deterritorialized and reterritorialised at the point of contact, placing the reader in uneasy symbiosis with the hand that cleaves and inspects her bodily parts. The movement that is contained is cut into short clauses that seem to trip over one another, a peristaltic process in which the words seem to throb along with the pulse of the body being studied. Here, then, the authority which contains her, “the invisible machinery of the white institution has me in its grasp” (Mehr 1990, 103, 35), is presented as a site of violation, of murderous and devouring – near cannibalistic – intent, in which the protagonist must remind herself that “they will butcher you like an animal if you give up”. The institution that rendered her without legality, outside the law, thus legitimated itself with the power to dissolve her to a point beyond recognition: “i am being de-ranged, now I am being de-ranged for good” (Mehr 1990, 78). If “law is an effect of a stasis of power-relations” (Cheah and Grosz 1996, 19), this drive to contain thus derives from its incapacity to move beyond itself. Catherine Dauvergne (2008, 18, 37) asserts that this is the means by which “[t]he law and the nation name the other in this way as not-us and not-legal”. Within this mutual rendering of authority, both law and nation operate through a motion of elimination and prohibition, acting as a restricted singularity. Dauvergne’s argument suggests that there can be no elsewhere outside the particular configuration or cartography imagined by the space of the nation-state. Conversely, Mehr (1990, 34) is exploring a sense of boundariness as an outlaw neither from a vantage point on the margins nor as a subject contained within a singular formulation (though she is institutionalized), for silvia claims that “all my life I had to sneak, through my landscape, with a bit of life beneath my arm, a bit of life I feel I have stolen”. This achieves the seemingly impossible task of recognising spaces outside the law, challenging Dauvergne’s (2008, 183, 44, 166, 170) argument that the only alternative to the spaces of human rights doctrine is through the emancipatory potential of the rule of law by suggesting that the focus should be the way in which the space itself operates within this mutually-authorizing narrative. Although Dauvergene recognises that law itself is a complex and layered bundle of norms, she also argues that there “is no empty, non-national space where people can live beyond the reach of nation”. Hence, according to Dauvergne, the only solution is to decentre sovereignty through securing interests guaranteed through the rule of law. However, it can be argued that her argument rests on a static idea of the state, which not only leaves the space produced within and by the state curiously intact, but also presupposes all other spaces are illegitimate, or at the very least non-normative. For Dauvergne, the failure of human rights lies in the way in which these norms are built in to the narrative of the border and the right to exclude. Whilst to some extent this exclusionary rhetoric

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is a recognition of the limits of Diaspora, it also threatens to obscure the way in which a right to unsettle space could expose this narrative – particularly if it is not framed as a counter-strategy to sovereignty, following on from Dauvergne’s argument that sovereignty is in fact a “barrier” to the successful application of rights – but rather as a reinscription of the radical potential of the abyss in the recognition of spacing that occurs when the idea of space is properly unsettled. This latter emancipatory aim is portrayed in the text through the protagonist (s) battles against the idea of a teleological hierarchy of territorial legitimacy, an external authoritative narrative source proposing that Mehr’s multiple identities are both contained within and yet simultaneously constituted by this system, in the same way that Diaspora is mythologised through departure. A cyclical and implicit legal-corporeal discourse speaking beyond the law reflects the way in which a literary jurisprudence must, in the end, return to the theorisation that “the law is just because it is the law” (Douzinas and Gearey 2005, 123). In other words, law does not exist simply because its opposite (injustice) exists, it is called into being simply because it authorizes itself and in doing so, sets the limits for Diaspora. Hence, the very paradox of law is that it exists at the level of the zero axis: in other words, it “must be attuned and receptive to a plurality that is ever possibly of itself” (Fitzpatrick 2008, xxi). This is not to reiterate Dauvergne’s view, then, that there are no spaces beyond the state; there are normative spaces both within and outside the state if one extends the spatial paradigm beyond the dichotic of territorial conformity predicated upon a singular cartographical authorization of legitimate space. As the challenge of contested origins are built into the storytelling of persecution within the Roma Diaspora, authors such as Mehr resist this paradigm through the identification of nomadism as a proto-sovereign ontology, rather than a critique of nation-state modernity which must always be bound up in the narrative of the state’s origins. This unsettling of space not only contests originary thinking but also subverts the framing of those who are out of place as a prevalent theme in the dominant discourse on Diaspora. Mehr’s (1990, 5) protagonist(s) is/are embodied through their Diasporic status, enacted at the level of zero as an intersection between the persistent label of “vagabond” and a nomadic process of entanglement. The point of what can be determined as zero is represented through a sequence of dreams within the text, whereby Mehr (1990, 84) explores a sense of disorder through the subversion of hierarchical categories of spacing: when lethar touched the black rim of being, she saw the fire. It seemed to come out of the earth, deep below this tortured landscape she felt the boiling of wild, destructive forces. [Italics in original]

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This unstable and tempestuous environment contrasts with the cold and uniformly cauterizing world of the multiple institutions her protagonist passes through. The stream of consciousness narrative device and the discombobulating reams of disjunctive description distort this juxtaposition and make the slippage between order and disorder more apparent; the clean lines and shapes of the material environment become transformed into a layered, fluid and inconstant “tortured landscape”. Although the continuous narrative of overpowering corporeal containment pervades the text with the sense that “silviasilviosilvana cannot flee” (Mehr 1990, 25) [sic]. This challenges the simplistic binary of law as authoritative order versus the fragmented subject as unruly disorder (Douzinas and Gearey 2005, 43). The absence at the centre of this paradox is that the marginalized must be brought in and subsumed within a sedentary system of settlement, exposed in this instance through what could be described as Mehr’s abyssal thinking. Abyssal thinking is defined as the manifestation of the modern Western framing of society, a “socio-political paradigm founded on the tension between social regulation and social emancipation” (Santos 2007). For Boaventura de Sousa Santos, law represents the epitome of abyssal thinking through its ability to construct a dichotomy between a space of the chaotic/uncivilized/illegal, and the order/civilization/legality on “this side of the line”. Santos explores how the precision of colonial cartographers determined what was true/false about the spaces of the world, to construct the colonial as lawless through a dividing line between the state of nature (past) and the civilized future on the right side of the line. This line separated “regulation and emancipation” within the former from the “appropriation and violence applying on the other side of the line”. One side of the line relies on the lawless side of the line to affirm its universal authority, constituting a hegemony of approval. However, as is made clear through the dreamscapes Mehr articulates within the text, even though these lines are heavily protected and under surveillance (as she is always a ward of the state), these lines are shifting (Santos 2007). For Santos, the colonial return (manifested in the body of the terrorist, the migrant and the refugee) provokes this abyssal thinking, as “each carries along with her the abyssal global line that defines radical exclusion and legal non-existence”. This form of trespassing demonstrates a level of mobility that threatens the abyssal line of the law, so that, as Santos argues, “the abyssal metropolitan sees herself trapped in a shrinking space and reacts by redrawing the abyssal line”. According to Santos, we must first recognize abyssal thinking in order to move beyond it through “radical co-presence” as a form of temporal abandonment as well as observing counter-hegemonic strategies of knowledge production. For Santos, modern abyssal thinking is the exemplary narrative of spatial order, which is called upon to deal with the way in which the uncivilized/savage colonial interacts within the spaces on the

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right side of the line. This book contends, however, that this form of abyssal thinking neglects to account for the violence that occurs when this intrusion – and the subsequent redrawing of abyssal lines – transforms the space in Diaspora (and furthermore, can be be produced by the colonized subject in turn). In Mehr’s (1990, 79) dream sequences, the violence is visceral yet experienced in the fluctuating malleability of a fluid landscape inviting a retreat into emptiness: She was imprisoned in a black ball. Lethar’s sensory perceptions were being sucked up by this black ball until nothing remained except all encompassing emptiness. Lethar knew this was one of the deaths destined for her. She observed with equanimity as the LONG BLACK sucked up her body. [Capitals in orginal]

This “all encompassing emptiness” ought to be read not as an external abyss, but as a sign of abyssal thinking revealing the production of space at the zero axis. In other words, Diaspora fails to take account of this space. Mehr’s (1990, 109) frequent articulation of the impossibility of flight – that “you cannot escape […] being de-ranged, they wall you in” – can be read through a spatiality beyond the law yet narrativised as present, to take account of a state of non-teleological indeterminacy that is simultaneously an emergence. This disturbance is thus not to be read “as a process of movement but also as a process of production” (Luksaite 2010, 13), in which migration represents a deterritorialized journey taken by Mehr’s (1990, 5, 8) schizophrenically split protagonists, “an odyssey through institutions whose task it was to force assimilation at any price”. This journey is portrayed in the text as an unsettling amorphous condition to which her protagonist is frequently reduced, as when, for example “silvia lies near the door, a shapeless mass of flesh”. In this sense, whilst for some “being Diasporic” represents a co-ordinated accommodation of multiple corporealities, in which materiality is mediated through migration (Luksaite 2010, 21– 23), in Mehr’s text these transformative possibilities are subverted: her body is not inscribed through Diasporic conditionality but is forcibly and explicitly unmarked by its absence. As Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 179) argue, “not ‘my’ body without organs, instead the ‘me’ (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds”. If Diaspora is indeed about embracing a perpetual “crossing [of] thresholds”, the nomadic can potentially be recast without the ontological violence of representation, but only after being “hollowed out, [to the point of] absolute emptiness” (Mehr 1990, 65). It is worth considering how this threshold-crossing is encountered under international law, which has little to say about the status of Diaspora.

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If the essence of the Diasporic experience here conceived of homelessness, the closest concept in law might be “heimatlos” [loss of homeland],²¹ now defined as “statelessness” in international law discourse. Article 1 of the 1954 Convention against Stateless Persons defines a stateless person as “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”. International law does not offer significant remedies to those who fall into the gap between de jure and de facto statelessness, which include many from the Roma Diaspora (O’Nions 2007, 114). The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness paid little attention to the issue, despite the High Commissioner for Refugees who considered the inclusion of de facto statelessness to be essential if the Convention was to have a meaningful effect. Despite this, the Roma are often considered as a de facto ‘stateless Diaspora’, where evidence of lack of documentation in countries of the former Yugoslavia, for example, and without legal claims to land or property means that Roma families are both de facto and de jure stateless. Often the problem of definition lies in the need to prove an absence: “[p]roving statelessness is like establishing a negative. The individual must demonstrate something that is not there” (Batchelor 2004, 13). The aesthetics of statelessness can be witnessed thematically in a plethora of literary texts: the concept lends itself to the borderless zone of fiction, as literature is in fact one of the few sites not bound by conventions of ideological nationality or indigenous authenticity (Bhabha 1994,12– 13). Statelessness has come closest to being addressed by postnational literary theory, with its focus on challenging the primacy of the nation-state construct, yet it is not explicitly addressed in Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies. It can be said that this lack partly arises from the fact that although postcolonial literary theory critiques the borders of national literature, it does not attempt to radically interrogate the spatio-temporality of the nation-state, but rather unsettle its territorial certainties (see Gabilondo 1999; Kearney 2004). In this way, postcolonial and Diaspora literary theory is yet to take up the phenomenon of statelessness as a radical spatio-temporal challenge to the concept of the nation. In this context, this analysis of those considered out of place (those who fall outside the boundaries of the modern nation state) can be read as a radical critique of unsettling the juridical hesitation to acknowledge Diaspora.

 The German term “heimatlos” derives from the word Heimat (‘homeland’ or ‘motherland’). The transition is notable due to the significant psychological and emotional connotations attached to the latter, and particularly in the way in which the obligation is transformed if, instead of a call to acknowledge an affiliation to a state, the emphasis was on the lack of a home, or that “huge migratory populations would have to be accorded [rights] regardless of ‘homes’” (Davidson 2012, 261).

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In the novel, Mehr (1990, 122) explores homelessness with a temporality that extends the metaphor of the body into a spatialised zone of movement: silvana creeps through the maze of silvia’s brain, past steep, black walls, washed through abysses, along the thoughts, deep down into the depths where a black werewolf spits out images, wild black images

To some extent, this reflects Lily Cho’s (2007, 11,16) reading of Diaspora as a condition of experience, as subjectivity emerging out of “heimatlos”, effectively a “turning, turning back upon those markers of the self – homeland, memory, loss – even as they turn on or away from them”. For Cho, then, to be Diasporic is a condition of endless emergence in which “[w]e cannot presume that a Diasporic subject exists prior to the external forces which have produced Diasporas”. Hence, this condition of “homelessness” can be read as neither extraterritoriality nor a negation of belonging, but rather as a condition of the space rendered salvageable to the outlaw. This reflects a sense of dispersed anatomy from within the state, where the authenticity of corporeality is mediated through the ambivalence of representation: you homeless brain, poor in your pinkvulnerability, bedded in the uselessness of many lost years, experiences, bedded in a mass of body that splits itself into a thousand pieces. skinless, without protection, they float into the gutter of the night. silvana cannot go on any more (Mehr 1990, 122) [sic].

Here, the body is Diasporic, floating into the gutter of the night, only held back through the flattening of space in legal regulation reliant on the drawing of abyssal lines, and the negation of uncivilized others (Douzinas and Gearey 2005, 182). In this sense, entitlement to certain kinds of space must commence following the stripping of organs. Separate and divisible organs that can penetrate her, along with boundaries which are not limited edges but porous contours perform this ritual, so that, in effect “silvana belongs neither here nor there. They’ve turned me into a homeless hermaphrodite” (Mehr 1990, 61, 70). Even when Mehr’s protagonist(s) appear(s) to be writing from beyond the boundaries the relationship to space is never passive: she/they are described as “endlessly falling […] where the falling ends, there is absolutely nothing”. If this exposure of incommensurability – or rather, the lines of abyssal thinking at the point of zero – is regarded as a continuous aspirational movement evoking a new literary jurisprudence in which law “opens […] a new place or non-place” (Douzinas and Gearey 2005, 76). In this instance, a horizon acknowledging immanence whilst accommodating entanglements is depicted in the dream sequences, when Mehr (1990, 105) writes that “lethar looked into the black eye in which the promised world reflected itself

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as an inaccessible make-believe”. The ontological condition of inhabitation (Cheah and Grosz 1996, 16) is portrayed as an irrevocable abyss for all those who reveal their role in the reification of neutral space. Applying abyssal thinking to Mehr’s (1990, 66) abyss is, then, inherently radical; locating inhabitation within an absence within space recognizes that “the world lost me – so it is, betweenworld, nothing fits”. To consider the possibility of unsettling the idea of space by acknowledging how it can be taken with you could be seen as a threat to the law itself. Indeed, if law is unmasked a multidimensional process of spacing constructing interior and exterior classifications “of sameness and deviancy” (Davies 1996, 15), then attempting to rethink Diaspora is, itself, a means of trespassing on hegemonic discourses of the nation. Reimagining the outlaw as unsettling the outlines of a normative system is also, then, a means of “rethinking the nature of law itself” (Davies 1996, 4): i feel i am not here, the objects lose their significance, doors, restroom, bathtub, they all seem to exist detached from their functions, fear, i cry, hear myself cry, want to get out. but what is outside is still more horrible, there silviasilviosilvana looses her bearings absolutely (Mehr 1990, 11).

Mehr raises the question of what possible ‘bearings’ this defined space she brings with her (and exists within) may have. Reading through Emmanuel Levinas (1991, 3 – 4), this spatiality could be theorized as an immanent site of something “otherwise than being”, provocation for a site of absolute alterity (Zylinska 2009, 120). Matthew Stone (2011b, 94– 103) argues that this normative alternative does not necessarily have to be set indirect opposition to law, and in fact, he suggests that a reading of Levinas reveals a connection between anarchy and law that is not about order and disorder. In fact, he suggests, Levinas finds space for the other in the “anarchic and pre-ontological” foundations of the law itself. In this way, the concept of law is made manifest as that which is omnipotent yet also ambivalent, through the spatialising of the Other as an intrinsic part of its constitution. Hence, for Stone, this immanent site of absolute alterity reveals primarily the way in which Levinas presents anarchy to be both inseparable from law and part of the unravelling of law experienced through the spacing of the subject. This leads a critique of space towards an unsettling which is neither naively messianic nor replicating an alternative form of spatial ordering (Rose 1996: 10, 130), but instead seeks to discover a sense of anarchic proximity located at the zero point, where the Diasporic could confess that “in my dream world there would be no time, no end” (Mehr 1990, 15).

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1.5 Plasticity in Louise Doughty’s Fires in the Dark The deterritorialization of law is, to a certain extent, becoming increasingly necessary in a globalized society (Benda -Beckmann et al 2005, 2), where transnational theorizations provide a means of exploring the boundaries of the Diasporic. Louise Doughty’s novel Fires in the Dark (2004) reflects these deterriotorialisations within a Diaspora, interpreted in this chapter through destructive plasticity as “the methodology of deconstruction” (Malabou 2012, 11).²² Reconciling the concept of robust deterritorialization with the destructive impulse of Catherine Malabou’s traumatic plasticity enables a re-framing of the spaces of Diaspora in the same way that decolonialisation represents “a new mode of power born from the lineages of decolonisation, modern developmentalism and the ‘universalisation’ of international law” (Pahuja 2011, 5). Fires in the Dark is set in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, prior to the second world war, and follows a nomadic tribe of Roma attempting to follow their traditional pastoral route – as Doughty (2004, 44) writes, “[t]here was no better feeling than that first lurch of the wagon” – until they are subjected to anti-nomadic laws and incarceration under the Nazi occupation (1938 – 1945). The third person narrative initially focuses on Josef, the head of the familial tribe, and then diverges into multiple perspectives in the concentration camp until only one family member remains (Emil, Josef’s son) who makes his escape to Prague. The novel’s exploration of the disintegration and persecution of familial, nomadic life can be read as the contortions of spatial ordering at its most malignant. These contortions of sedentarisation made manifest in the genocidal institutionalisation of the Third Reich mirrors the violence with which colonial orders employed legislation in order to classify spaces, or in other words, the way in which territorial legitimacy through violent occupation maintains the fiction of universality (Pahuja 2011, 7). Exploring spatiality through this prism concentrates on the contortions of spatial ordering rendered visible in the Holocaust, as a reflection of the collapse of the

 Malabou (2008, 16) derives this concept from a neuroscientific definition of brain trauma, which she then uses to explore post-traumatic form. Malabou explains that “[t]he word ‘plasticity’ has two fundamental meanings: it designates the capacity to receive form (clay, for example, is considered ‘plastic’) and the capacity to give form (say in the arts or plastic surgery). To speak of plasticity of the brain is to consider the brain as something that is at the same time formable and forming. Cerebral plasticity operates then on three levels: 1) the establishment of the neuronal connections (plasticity of development in an embryo or a baby); 2) the modification of the neuronal connections (plasticity of modulation of synaptic effects that takes places throughout one’s life); 3) the capacity to repair [the neuronal connections] (post-traumatic plasticity).”

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universal and a demonstration of the violent instability contained within territorial claims. The spatio-temporality of the void experienced by Emil and his family are a manifestation of Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004, 421) claim that the nomad, unlike the migrant, has no afterward: rather, they are “vectors” (BwOs) which “reterritorialize […] on deterritorialization itself”. To valorize the anachronistic narrative of nomadism, therefore, risks prolonging the dangerously ambivalent categorisation that continues to plague the Roma Diaspora. Exploring the material through which the subject moves challenges the way in which nomadism is encountered in the context of Diaspora. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology can be useful here in order to focus on the “nomadic and sedentary are pure tendencies that are real, yet […] are experienced only in various mixed states” (Bogue 2004, 173) as a means of theorizing space, particularly as an attempt to provide anthropological categorisation about mobile populations rather than an attempt to consider abstract states of spatiality. For Deleuze and Guattari, the nomad holds and shapes this smooth space as a form of deterritorialized becoming, and – in conjunction with Malabou’s concept of plasticity – embraces the point of collision so that the idea of space as absence is rendered powerfully present as an ethical possibility. Malabou (2008, 80) writes about plasticity as that which: on the one hand, attaches him originally to himself, to his proper form, and with what, on the other hand, allows him to launch himself into the void of all identity, to abandon all rigid and fixed determination.

Understanding this “void” is central to any theorization of the legal spaces implicated in a literary jurisprudence of Diaspora. Explosive or destructive plasticity is not about a revelation, or an unfurling, of another identity: it is “a form born of the accident, born by accident” (Malabou 2012, 2, 42), a rupture characterized through an absolute fissure. The “void”, however, is not a designation of perpetual instability, as there is no pre-ontological space in which law is born “ex nihilo” [out of nothing] (Pahuja 2011, 260), but rather an explosive re-texturing of the idea of absence as resistance against nomadic exile. This re-texturing is made possible through the novel’s explicitly spatialised narrative, as Doughty (2004, 7– 8) constructs a series of diametrically opposing and overlapping shapes: rows and squares and columns embossed on the page; the frenetic movement of swirling swarms of turgid insects kept at bay by the weaving of an elaborate spider web between wagons; juxtaposed with static wheels bogged down, embedded for years in the thick mud.

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The tabor was squeezed between marshland at the southerly edge of the village and the river. The wagons were enormous square things with flat roofs and wheels sunk deep into the mud […] In the summer the camp was plagued with huge swarms of bluebottles, plump and iridescent […] Each family would string washing lines around their wagon and hang up sheets of flypaper in rows […] When the flypaper became so dense with insects you couldn’t see what it was any more, it would be taken down and burnt on the fire. Charred flakes would shoot upwards in a hot column – the area around the fire would become engulfed in a cloud, the puffing ash of little legs and wings.

Here multitudes of lines seem to stretch out over the space, rhizomes of connectivity building a convergent network of multiple possibilities woven into rows and lines; but the fire brings a latent violence to this process of abstract tracing. Deleuze and Guattari ask us to think of such accidental forms in the sense of alchemy rather than trauma, when the degree of intensity challenges the form of composition so that destruction is embryonic; explosive plasticity is more than this, for there is no scar, only changed form. The rupture of the Holocaust is expressed through the different sense of connectivity manifested through Emil, where the broken syntax and confluence of lines or points can be read as explosive plasticity. Doughty’s text, dissected by uneven punctuation and the partial asyndeton, can be read as the strangeness left ‘after the wound’ (Malabou 2012, 2). This is observable when Emil has left the camp: dizzy with grief, his face an upturned, broken wheel, turning beneath the night sky. After the howl, there was silence; not even a breeze; moon but no stars; and the blackness of night everywhere. He was the only Rom left in the world. (Doughty 2004, 437).

The sibilant silence and stillness here is misleading – with these short clauses and curt punctuation Doughty constructs a peristaltic process of motion, a series of sharp breaths amidst a spinning wheel of Diasporic deaths playing itself out disruptively through Emil, in a form of chromatic distortion. This distortion subverts the spatial ordering constructed through the pervasive interruption of antinomadic legislation, allowing us to re-imagine the way such space is constructed beyond the narrative of a singular journey. For Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 420), the nomad epitomises deterritorialization and it is therefore “false to define the nomad by movement”. In this sense, the nomad is not a passive transient who traverses space but both constructs and subverts form, through a deterritorialization in which the subject is unsettled through their collapse into a nomadic, unsettled collusion of space (Bruns 2007, 703). This “amorphous” and anarchic “event” (Bruns 2007, 704) deviates from the concept of plasticity, as for Malabou there is never an instance without form – indeed she argues that the Hegelian subject “trans-subjects itself constantly” (Malabou and Vahanian 2008, 4).

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Therefore, metamorphosis carries different connotations: for Deleuze it is a folding, a movement, whilst for Malabou metamorphosis heralds a rupture that is not a death but rather signals another kind of opening (Malabou and Vahanian 2008, 9). Both interpretations of becoming therefore centre on transformation, but whilst Malabou’s plasticity “implies mobility, molding, forming and flexibility” it is also an ontological process which “suggests a certain dynamite” (During 2000, 192), whereas for Deleuze and Guattari the process of becoming makes no distinction between spaces that precede or come after it (Bruns 2007, 704). These competing reflections on material transformation as a spatial ontology when the Diasporic takes space with them are, in this instance, both shapeless and destructive: the process of becoming in both cases unsettles law’s universal claims to shape space “through the erasure of the gesture of cutting” (Pahuja 2011, 256). In other words, a destructive and violent impulse is not what law prohibits from legitimate spaces, but rather, is crucial to spacing as legitimate. Thus, a deconstructive deterritorialization can be employed to re-frame nomadism as an acknowledgement of this violent authorization through the paradigm of the “void” as unsettled space. Hence, nomadism can be reimagined beyond its signification as the antithesis of settlement or a migratory relationship to territory, taken instead as the catalyst for redefining territorialization in such a way that neither migration nor metamorphosis is prevalent: instead, Diasporic space is read as deterritorialization of already unsettled space. In this way, the “void” is interpreted through its composition as a process of lines and points, disjunctive rather than linear movement without end. Such space exists beyond the point of deterritorialization, as the aftermath of explosive plasticity (a subversion of the point of departure narrative critical to Diaspora). If the “void” is characterised, however, as a partial turning in on itself, a decolonisation of law always risks reverting to problematic categories of nomadism, exile, and subversion (Pahuja 2011). In Doughty’s novel, the character of Josef represents a nostalgia for nomadism, as for him movement is escape. The question that is pertinent in this context is one asked by Malabou (2012, 10) of metamorphosis intervening in place of flight, as she claims there is no transformation or transcendence. Josef articulates this destructive plasticity, as “the formation of an identity that flees itself, that flees the impossibility of fleeing itself” (Doughty 2004, 11, 19), as he instructs his family: never to tell a “gadjo” [non-Roma] where you are going or where you have been. If they know where you come from, they will close the road behind you. If they find out where you’re heading, they will have a gallows waiting.

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Here, the reader is also reminded of the space of threat beyond the page, where for the moment we stay suspended in the pages of the book, with only proximal risk. Josef’s wife, Anna, perceives the sense of threat in a different way. Anna does not perceive the space around them as a topography mapped out as a broad nomadic plane, but as a series of punctuated moments and closed-off dead-ends. This shift in perspective is emphasised through Doughty’s use of short sentences, which contrast dramatically with the flowing enjambment of Josef’s inner monologue in which nomadism is the defining theme. Anna can already envisage the threat of the end: each full stop is a point not in a network, but of incipient mortality, exemplified by the mythological omen of crows signalling their impending demise. How close we are, she thought, how nearly we walk the edge of that precipice […] It could happen in a moment. Another law. All it takes is a moment, and suddenly we are tumbling, the end a cluster of trees by the side of the road and a tent so derelict that nobody even bothers to stop and take a look at what is inside. The crows are waiting (Doughty 2004, 108).

The way in which the palpable motion of the penultimate sentence is framed by two short sentences, the first symbolizing the juridical bureaucracy which pins them down – “[a]nother law” – and the latter a fearful omen emblematic of a fateful end – “[t]he Crows are waiting” – evoking a sense of the familial group “tumbling” to the point of invisibility, a reflection of Malabou’s (2012, 10) “impossibility of flight [pushing] towards an outside that does not exist”. It is the form left when neither escape nor transcendence is possible, when the very act of taking space with you transforms the void – for it can never be empty or a form of (nihilistic) containment, whatever the law commands. This sense of disintegration pervades the text as explosive plasticity, “the formation of a survivor’s identity” (Malabou 2012, 19). Moments before Josef’s death, he reflects on the various forms his name has taken, one name for registration in each country, nicknames, and private names, “as if in that litany he might find a part of himself that was the essential core, the heart of him, the part lost” (Doughty 2004, 309). He is sculpturing himself, but as he fades, as he disintegrates, as if he is naming himself only to confirm he exists. How strange a thing to have forgotten oneself, to have become a shell, a husk, to know intently that there was another self somewhere, in a place where he had really existed, lost in the past (Doughty 2004, 310).

In the novel, we can see the culmination of this dissolution in the shape of the text on the page. Here Josef, representative of the nomadic link, becomes only his

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last breath in a spatio-temporal unravelling: he is unbecoming, becoming a, in becoming. The repetition of “I am” here creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, as he continuously reasserts his presence even whilst he is unravelling: I am reduced to this. All else is gone. I am nothing. But the next small. Breath. It is all I am. Perhaps All I ever Was. (Doughty 2004, 312)

There is a metamorphosis, but not a movement, nor flight: Josef disappears into an absence on a page, in which the blank spaces swallow the recurring “I”. Josef’s narrative is replaced by Emil’s, as Emil’s form is the subject “that frees up a way out and allows the resurgence of an alterity that the pursuer cannot assimilate” (Malabou 2012, 12). After his horrific death at the hands of the Nazi regime, Emil’s mother Anna advises Emil not to move and make the world malleable but to become malleable to himself, to slip into the world and find a point of exit. However, we see this objective is impossible, as for Malabou (2012, 12) “the flight identity forged by destructive plasticity flees itself first and foremost”. Anna advises that him to “stay away, however lonely you get. Live amongst the gadje. Become a gadjo for the rest of the war. It is no sin when you are doing it to live, to live for all of us” (Doughty 2004, 319). When Emil escapes from the camp, the only surviving member of his family, his body becomes the conductor of his past Diasporic routes, a genealogical history he is trying to walk from. He is not walking to the edge but to an entrypoint outside his corporeal state, as although he will no longer be marked by his nomadic relationity he still carries the space with him. He walked until the forest ended. He gave no thought to the direction of his walking, or to anything other than the need to place one foot in front of the other. He did not think of anything. He scarcely breathed. He knew that if he stopped to consider the possible consequences of his actions his legs would turn to water and he would collapse. So he concentrated on moving the legs, to and fro, one after the other in that strange scissor motion which he realised he had never before examined. Odd to think that there was still enough muscle somewhere beneath his pallid chicken-skin to move his bones and propel his body forward. He could almost hear the joints of legs grating together. How long was it since he had walked anywhere of his own volition (Doughty 2004, 341).

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His legs are mechanical joints left behind after the rupture and his flesh is reduced to water, but here there is no flight: the spatial order has seemingly carried and confined him to a void, a no man’s land or an in-between world. When he finally reaches Prague, Emil (or Yenko, the Romani name he begins to use once again), attempts to follow his mother’s wishes and blend into the environment. He is grateful for a costume to disguise himself, in clothes donated by a friend of the family, and exclaims, “[a]t last; to look like the people around him, to be able to walk down the street” (Doughty 2004, 417– 18). His reaction to what has happened is to celebrate metamorphosis rather than fluidity, to the point where he resents any bureaucratic legitimisation of his person, even new post-war registration practices. Once reunited with his young lover, he tells her, “I will teach [our children] never to let anyone write anything down about them” (Doughty 2004, 539). This is not about hiding in or slipping into another world as Anna encouraged him to do, but is instead about expunging originary trauma through going incognito, “characteristics of destructive plasticity” as a form of “change without redemption, without teleology, without any meaning other than strangeness” (Malabou 2012, 24). As Malabou (2012, 6) writes: [s]omething shows itself when there is damage, a cut, something to which normal, creative plasticity gives neither access nor body: the deserting of subjectivity, the distancing of the individual who becomes a stranger to herself, who no longer recognizes anyone, who no longer recognizes herself, who no longer remembers her self. These types of being impose new form on their old form, without mediation or transition or glue or accountability, today versus yesterday, in a state of emergency, without foundation, bare-back, sockless.

There is no open Diasporic route remaining and yet, Emil is always spatio-temporally in Diaspora. Here, then, “a power of annihilation hides within the very constitution of identity” (Malabou 2012, 37), and it is this ontological condition that is negotiated as an entryway into a place with no exits. To refer to a nomadic subjectivity would privilege a point of departure, which is an ontological impossibility: as Malabou (2012, 69) argues, “we form ourselves to death”. This is not a redemptive escape into the back streets of Prague but a glimpse at the synaptic lesions created through explosive plasticity, in which “the individual’s history is cut definitively, breached by the meaningless accident” (Malabou 2012, 29). For Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 35) this space is an assemblage, part of an “immobile voyage that stays in one place; it only lives and is comprehensible as an intensity”. Thus, although the nomad is deterritorialized through metamorphosis, as destructive plasticity is a condition of formation, becoming still becomes form “which can do nothing but freeze becoming” (Malabou 2012, 17). The void, then, is still about the space in Diaspora as destructive metamorphosis, a form of world-making where Emil framed within an irrepressible cacophony of space, ar-

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ticulating the mutability of form and “the impossibility of fleeing” (Malabou 2010, 81). Perhaps in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, Emil and Josef are nomads of re-territorialisation, but as unsettled sites within a malleable condition of formation rather than vectors of deterritorialization. In this way, reading the “void” as Diaspora space neither represents a return to origins nor a violent denunciation of being able to settle space as “the exhaustion of all possibilities” (Malabou 2012, 89 – 90). The issue, therefore, is not what is lost or left behind, but rather what kind of space is sculpted out of this unravelling.

2 The Sedentary Order 2.1 Nomadic lex specialis: from dale farm to detention Even in Diaspora, territory must be carved up according to the extent of a subjective border (Reynolds 2009, 136). Indeed, “[t]he occupation of land and the demarcation of borders are the original juridical acts” (Filc & Ziv 2006, 72), colonizing space through the enunciation of imperial cartography authorized by law. To acknowledge that “[p]ower is always territorial and always proceeds through territorial partitions” (Seri 2004, 82) requires an alternative methodology for reading boundaried space differently. One way may be to draw from Hannah Arendt’s (1998, 63) reading of nomos as the “boundary line [between households] which in ancient times was still actually a space, a kind of no-man’s land between the private and the public, sheltering and protecting both realms while, at the same time, separating them from each other”. This, rather than, the threshold, is more receptive to the politics of boundary lines, focusing on law as a border which is also a spacing (Chryssostalis 2013, 167). In Arendtian terms, then, this space neither denotes a specificity of space nor a real claim to place; this nomos cannot be transcended as it is grounded by its relationality, with which it acts to make explicit the rhetoric of inhabitation by virtue of its expose of a limit. In other words, “it secures the very space in which men can move in freedom” (Chryssostalis 2013, 170). Nomos in this reading is thus both spacing and spatialised (Derrida 1972), as its material mechanisms of constructing normative space rely on an authorization of presence at the border of the limit. The notion that the concept of Diaspora could challenge “the everyday boundaries of international law’s conceptual maps” (Nesiah 1998, 377) requires a necessary objective: to move away from the concept of a grid (which still presupposes a certain neutrality of space that can be marked and allotted accordingly) in order to engage with what could be termed a different reading of absence. This point of departure reveals the relationship between the law and space, and the contorted conditions of sovereignty as both register and affect. A focus on the construction of limited spaces and the narrative of spatial order through an auto-fiction of the nomad could be regarded as a means to test the impact, therefore, of “high-stakes trespassing” (Mitchell 2010, 252) in the grid, and the way in which these spaces are operated and in operation, particularly if (urban) space is recognised as preserved and quarantined (after Foucault 1977). As a stateless heterogeneous Diaspora, the Roma have historically been subjected to a pattern of exclusion and marginalization in every country in which they have settled. Their ambivalent position in socio-political narratives of noDOI 10.1515/9783110544251-003

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madism has seen the Roma denigrated whilst simultaneously being described in hyperbolic excitement as “the epitome of global postmodern European citizens” (Silverman 2012, 44) in their representation as a cluster of Diasporic communities within a transnational, non-territorial network of connectivity (Gheorge and Acton 2001, 58). This complex mosaic of ethnic groups have been called “path-breakers in this new Europe” (Castle -Kanĕrová 2001, 127), depicted as advocates of a post-state, post-sovereign fluidity whilst being reviled, marginalized and discriminated against. They are the ‘dispossessed’ who, though supposedly long past a history of being ghettoized or “instructed to remain outside the walls of the town at which they arrived” (Tebutt 2001, 268) still live in a form of ‘legal limbo’ legitimated by their designated nomadic status.¹ Attempts to address this have resulted in the application of self- determination rights and programs of inclusion for minorities, as a means of acknowledging substate groups without conceding to territorial claims. It could be argued that this cleaves identity in two: one cultural, and the other constitutional, where the former is merely of a facet of identity requiring temporal protection and the latter designates embeddedness within the nation state and a recognisable legal identity. From the nascent birth of the modern nation-state, cemented in the Treaty of Westphalia 1648, any subdivisional autonomy is narrativised as a problematic withdrawal. To concede to minorities […] the right of withdrawing from the community to which they belong […] would be to destroy order and stability within States and to inaugurate anarchy in international life; it would be to uphold a theory incompatible with the very idea of the State as a territorial and political unit (Commission of Rapporters 1921, 22– 23).

The allocation of nomadism as both an implicit and explicit legal category reflects the passive attribution of ‘withdrawal’: the implied threat to sovereignty is thus invalidated by means of an anti-territorial designation, negating any claims of belonging. The way a nation is forged by a mythic sense of territorial continuity inseparable from territorial settlement (following the development of a feudal system of linear property and entitlement interests) establishes a sense of history in which, “in the depths of nationalist-phantasmagoric time, [there] is an autochthonous beginning of each nation, a mythical origin which links the two legitimating charters of national integrity: genealogy and territory”

 Helen O’Nions (2007, 21) writes that, “[t]he very words ‘national minority’, although not specifically defined in international documents, presuppose the existence of a national identity and perhaps even a homeland, forcing the construction of a separate nationality. It has further been argued that an emphasis on ethnic distinction and separatism enables states to evade responsibility to minority groups by reinforcing the validity of the nation-state”.

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(Stewart 1997, 85). Thus, any interpretation that challenges this connection between people and territory is fundamentally disruptive to the narrative of the nation, in its demonstration of fallibility. Just as they problematize hegemonic conceptions of Diaspora, where there is no territorial claim or cohesive strategy, the Roma are easily exorcised from definitions of citizenship, as sovereignty is irrevocably intertwined with territorial claims to sovereign belonging. Jérémie Gilbert considers the development of a specific corpus of law relating to nomads as a means of potentially problematizing this narrative of a singular connection between people and territory. He refers to the etymology of nomad (from the Greek ‘nemein’, meaning ‘to pasture’), and it is worth considering its morphological resonance in relation to issues of growth and cultivation as a form of territorialisation. Gilbert (2007, 682, 714) addresses the issue of territorial entitlement and concludes that the lack of provision for nomads, due to frameworks centered on property and conceptions of ownership, can be dealt with through the recognition of the “development of a ‘nomadic lex specialis’” under international law. He points to human rights law – specifically in relation to Indigenous rights – as the forum in which jurisprudence has developed reflecting “the idea that different cultural legal systems could co-exist” within a single territory. This could be seen to reflect the way in which, following a model of cultural (if adequate) minority rights protection, human rights discourse validates “the internal coherence [of a distinct culture] alongside or in opposition to other dominating cultures in the same geographical and political space” (Okely 1997, 191). In the light of evictions, expulsions and ongoing discrimination, it can be argued that although the recognition of cultural space challenges political thinking which defines identity solely in terms of “neatly demarcated land ownership and settlement” (Okely 1997, 190), this is not going far enough. Greater disruption of this connection and its impact on legal identities is therefore necessary as a critique of the idea of a settled or constant spatial order. Gilbert (2014, xv, 92, 162) contends that the definition of what constitutes territorial connection has been primarily challenged through Indigenous rights cases, and this is a connection reflected in the literary texts discussed here. The exclusion of traditional nomadic peoples from territorial entitlement was authorised on the basis of the minimal status accorded to those without a “fixed abode”. In this context, proper occupation of territory was defined only through the sedentary cultivation of land, and the subsequent misrecognition of alternative tribal laws governing territory led to the misrepresentation of nomadic peoples as existing in a pre-lapsarian state. Similar arguments were used to justify colonialist endeavours and to negate the rights of Indigenous nomadic groups, in which the principle of terra nullius provided legitimate grounds for conquest. Viewed from this perspective, with cultivation not as pasturisation but rather

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as a form of enclosure, nomadic people became legally invisible. The terra nullius approach was rejected in the case of nomadic peoples by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1975, in which the court validated the existence of rhizomatic legal ties with territory evidenced through patterns of migration. However, the ICJ did not affirm autonomous claims to the nomadic tribes’ ownership of this territory, but rather attempted to determine allegiance to a specific state (Gilbert 2014, 96, citing Western Sahara [1975] Advisory Opinion, ICJ GL No 61, ICJ Rep 12). Legal occupation is thus consistently legitimated through the method of enclosure and the sedentary planting of roots, silencing alternative conceptions of territorial links; in this way, trans- territorial roots and tendrils are not recognised formally in international law, as differentiated tribal land use falls outside positivist assumptions of the relationship between people and territory. Although the sedentary hegemony of state territorial sovereignty has been affirmed in indigenous rights cases, Gilbert (2014, 07) suggests Indigenous rights may prove a lucrative source of territorial claims for nomadic peoples. Such a proposal would give precedence to alternative links to territory that have been previously marginalised or silenced, links which derive from tribal customary laws. Gilbert does acknowledge, however, that pursuing claims under Indigenous rights law would be difficult in the case of the Roma, which is why he advocates the development of a specific body of nomadic rights, in which multiple scales of law can be recognised as operating within a single territory. Gilbert (2014, 110) identifies significant jurisprudence in this sense deriving from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through the recognition of territory as a collective space. Gilbert considers the two most important components of nomadic rights as usufructuary rights and the freedom of movement. It is this very point of juxtaposition that a revitalization of Diaspora is necessary, as a status that recognises both complex national alliances and a rootedness which features many offshoots and tendrils, as well as the potential to find new stems and new roots operating within space; shifting, in other words, from a narrativisation of the nomadic as the embodiment of being out of place to a recognition of space itself in flux. To move away from a nomadic lex specialis to a recognition of Diaspora is to acknowledge that a re-reading of sovereign space is not to reify a prelapsarian transitory status, but to deconstruct the aporia inherent in the assertion that “sovereignty assumes the state” (Loughlin 2013, 34), even if there is increasing acknowledgement of new mutations of Diaspora. Prohibitions against so-called vagabonds in the form of anti-nomad laws dating from the Egypcians Act 1530 (under the mistaken belief the Gypsies came from Egypt). Under the Act, “[a]ny Gypsy attempting to enter England had his property summarily confiscated and was ordered to leave within two weeks” (Quarmby 2013a, 15). Punishment included expulsion, deportation and

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even death (Fraser 1995, 123 – 126). The effect of enclosure on the commons from the 1820s onwards prevented the migration of Gypsy groups who would settle and move following seasonal labour routes, marking the gradual erasure of public space available to these communities. Vagrancy was denounced as an “infestation” (Magistrates in Sussex 1799, quoted in Quarmby 2013a, 21), increasing the hostility and entrenching the belief in Gypsies as “vagrants in disturbing the social order” (Quarmby 2013a, 23). These “vagrants” were constructed as vehemently antistate, rejecting the social obligations of a postfeudal society in which each subject must play a role in a sedentary hierarchy (Bardi 2008, 113). However, despite the disobedient spectre of “the nomad [as] profoundly, dangerously unsettling to settled society” (Quarmby 2013a, 24), they were simultaneously romanticised as wandering strangers, living off the land in opposition to the rigid conformity of the modern industrial grid, trapping Roma within an ambivalent idealisation which was “objectified through the law” (Sigona 2005, 749; see also Sigona 2003). The itinerance of this pastoral community was recast as resistance to industrial civilisation, reinforcing notions of a pre-lapsarian idealisation to calm anxieties about a disappearing rural heritage (Hancock 1997, 204). At the same time, this quixotic representation was framed through criminalisation by a series of increasingly restrictive laws on free movement in the industrial period, such as the Vagrancy Act 1824 and the Highway Act 1835. Indeed, since the nineteenth century, various Highway Acts have prohibited movement to those who travel or attempt to camp on a highway. In 1960, the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act stated occupation should be determined on the basis of a license and could be prohibited through council order, which prevented Gypsies and Travellers from “using the vast majority of their traditional stopping places” (Quarmby 2013a, 48). The use of nomadism as a metonymy for ethnicity was established in Mills v. Cooper [1967] 2 All ER 100, when the court declared that in fact “gypsy means no more than a person leading a nomadic way of life with no, or no fixed, employment and with no fixed abode” (cited in Greenfields and Home 2007, 136). The nomadic definition used to categorise this minority group was simultaneously identified as an aspect of criminal non-belonging, and established a rhetoric of spatiality which was both enclosing and ambivalent. The Caravan Sites Act 1968 upheld this judgment, so that Romany ethnicity was sublimated by a status based on nomadic behavior under planning law, which meant that from now on, paradoxically, “ethnic Gypsies could lose their legal status if they ceased to travel” (Greenfield and Home 2007, 137, 149). This still presents a problematic form of labelling for the Romany in the UK, as the emphasis on nomadic behavior as an identifying characteristic that is essential for the designation of minority status continues to dominate the official narrative. Judicial decisions have continuously emphasised this aspect of

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their identity, which creates a heavily specific form of spatiality by “impos[ing] an increasingly restrictive reading of the definition [and thus] making it harder for Traveller families to set up legal sites”. The 1968 Act placed a duty on councils to provide stopping sites legitimated through the narrow entitlement “to live nomadically”. This “right” ushered in a more explicit emphasis on isolationism, however, as evictions and resistance to provide suitable halting sites led to the establishment of a conflict where the interests of the Gypsies and Travellers were set against the interests and entitlements of the “settled community” (Quarmby 2013a, 64), coming to fruition in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which “effectively tore up [the] Caravan Sites Act” (Quarmby 2013a, 70). This draconian legislation, although ostensibly directed at raves and New Age Travellers in a Thatcherite era, criminalised the lifestyle of all those dependent on nomadic patterns of movement and itinerant labour. Suddenly, “[e]ven the shortest of stays at a traditional stopping place was now a criminal offence” (Quarmby 2013a, 72); as one Meriden resident relates, “we’ve stopped on waste ground and had the caravans stoned at night” (Noah Burton quoted in Quarmby 2013a, 208). This reflects a significant moment in the revelation of how space is constructed: this Diasporic group were intentionally kept perpetually in motion, so that the space allotted to them was forever closing in, as an unrelenting, unyielding, yet forever present spatial proximity of delegitimation. This movement in law can be recognised “as the writer George Monbiot termed it, [as] the modern equivalent of an act of enclosure” (Quarmby 2013a, 72). In the UK, Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers are legally recognised as ethnic groups, and protected from discrimination by the Race Relations Act 1976, (amended 2000) and the Human Rights Act 1998. However, despite a raft of domestic and international obligations put in place to protect the rights of this minority group (Richardson 2007, 9), the European Commissioner for Human Rights stated that a strategy of exclusion was evident; in other words, “[a]lthough the Strasbourg Court […] imposed a positive obligation on the United Kingdom to “facilitate the Gypsy way of life” (Connors v. United Kingdom [2004] 40 EHRR 189 at para. 84), this is predicated upon the premise of Diasporic outsiderness and isolationism. Indeed, O’Nions (2007, 81) argues that “the limited protection of cultural identity offered under the provision [demonstrates the lack of] awareness of the importance of minority identity when balanced against the planning interest of the state”.² The paradoxical and flawed formation of a majority/mi-

 It must be acknowledged that the right to housing is guaranteed under international law (under article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 11(1) of the ICESCR,

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nority paradigm was exposed under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, instituting a framework in which forced eviction and regulated spaces were privileged above public access. This Act took away the duty to provide sites and simultaneously authorized the police to request trespassers to leave private land, which, along with the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 ensures the power to evict is distinctly enshrined in law, and set into motion the process of containment and criminalisation reflected in the selected texts. This Act was not, evidently, an aberrant anomaly, but rather legislation that indicatively exposes the ways in which possession is mobilized through violence (Blomley 2003, 126). As Nicholas Blomley (2003, 122) writes, it is important to stress the role of power in constructions of spatiality through the matrix of particular configurations of planning and property ownership, for as he emphasizes, “[p]revailing arrangements of property in land have important implications for social ordering”. Thus, although the law can be seen to emphasise sedentary obligations – the Housing Act 2004, for example, imposes a duty on local housing authorities to produce a strategy for dealing with the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers – ³ research commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found that, whilst planning permission had increased, overall progress on providing adequate sites was slow (Brown et al 2010, 4, 6). This was not due to limited funding, as over ninety-seven million had been set aside through a grant intended for Gypsy and Traveller site provision (Topping & Muir 2011), but rather as a result of an unimaginative and limited planning framework often refusing permission to build or declaring land unsuitable for development, as well as significant opposition from the surrounding community rarely dealt with con-

Similar provisions on the right to adequate housing are contained in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees). ICESCR general comment 4 identifies this right as a prerequisite for numerous other entitlements: “The human right to adequate housing […] is of central importance for the enjoyment of all economic, social and cultural rights”. However, this right is sufficiently muted in practice through policy and legislation that validates the paradigm of ownership rather than residence.  Government circular 01/2006 para 12 identified the need to “ to create and support sustainable, respectful, and inclusive communities where Gypsies and Travellers have fair access to suitable accommodation, education, health and welfare provision; where there is mutual respect and consideration between all communities for the rights and responsibilities of each community and in which they live and work” , whilst “[protecting] the traditional travelling way of life while respecting the interests of the settled community” [my emphasis], which included acting to “reduce the number of unauthorized encampments”.

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clusively by the authorities (Brown et al 2010, 7). The issue of illegality is in fact relatively minor, as about seventy five percent of Gypsies and Travellers live on authorised encampments (Government Task Force Report 2007), and yet the shortage of adequate accommodation is widespread. Legislative policy appears to demonstrate the emphasis on a balance between two halves of society – in which the sedentary majority, represented by elected councils and authorities must provide sites, but in return for “the responsibility of Gypsies and Travellers to respect the planning system” (UK Gov, para 18).⁴ Thus, the positivist affirmation of “the boundaries of space [as] reinforced by the concepts of law” (Holder and Harrison 2003, 6) determines that the community is obliged to have respect for a system which purportedly marginalises and excludes them. It is not only an unbalanced scale, but a scale based on a limited demarcation of belonging. All legislation constructed against this artificial boundary line thus reflects: the contradictions in everyday discourse surrounding Gypsies and Travellers [ through the suggestion] that this is a binary debate on the needs of the communities versus the needs of the wider ‘settled’ population. Approximately two-thirds of the Gypsy and Traveller population of England today live in bricks and mortar accommodation and are thus effectively hidden within the wider community (Richardson and Ryder 2009: 246– 247).

Hence, the dynamic of proportionality, crucial to any decision on the rights and interests of Gypsies and Travellers (as a by no means homogenous) ethnic group weighed against public interest,⁵ becomes part of a discourse on inside/outside spaces of legitimacy rather than a condition of the space itself, unevenly configured in terms of planning, accommodation and proper land use.⁶ It is this balancing act O’Nions describes as the “negative non-discrimination paradigm” (O’Nions 2007, 47) which effects no challenge to the evictions that take place regularly across the Roma Diaspora, where the sedentary/nomad boundary line is

 Similarly, the local conservative MP in the Dale Farm case claimed “[i]t is not about the Travellers, it is about planning laws being upheld” (Bates 2011b).  In Chapman v. United Kingdom [2001] 33 EHRR 18 the court recognised that it could not decide for itself how the balance of interests between the community and the rest of the population should be ascertained, acknowledging that it was only possible to adopt a purely supervisory role.  One could argue the environmental defence against building on green belt land is often conveniently forgotten when it comes to corporate land ownership or large scale industrial programs.

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frequently evoked.⁷ Calls for increased protectionism are simply not enough until the sedentary spatial order is expansively deconstructed. Minority rights protection in a sense validates the myth of a single space, threatened by the presence of multiple communities (Okely 1997, 190 – 191). It is apparent, therefore, that in a context of evictions, expulsions and ongoing discrimination the recognition of the colliding plurality infiltrating the boundary line is needed, though it risks inflating the instability in juridical discourse about cultural spaces. A more robust critique of a sedentary spatial order would, for example, acknowledge that rather than being seen as an aberrant anomaly to the progression of assimilation, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act can thus be read as the truest manifestation of the focus of planning– a singular delineation of legitimate form of belonging that frames all alternatives as disorder, reflecting that “[a]t its core, property entails the legitimate act of expulsion, devolved to the state” (Blomley 2003, 130). The Act therefore exists as a manifestation of repressive regulatory mechanisms, used to distort the notion of legitimate space (Bancroft 2000, 45).⁸ This highlights the way in which the Gypsy and Traveller community were effectively victimized through a system of enforced neo-colonial capitalism, where the Conservative government eradicated the duty of provision in favour of an emphasis on the need to purchase land (Okely 2014, 67). The frequent rejection of applications for lawful purchase put forward by Gypsy and Travellers illustrates the ways in which this antagonistic relationship of control is manifested in sociolegal discourse; In R. v. Lincolnshire County Council ex parte Atkinson [1995] 8 Admin LR 529 at 534, Sedley J. declared that the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was the inevitable result of “[t]he culmination of the tensions underlying the history of non-compliance”. Whether or not either adequate accommodation is provided or planning permission is granted, this reinforces the normative framing of an inside and outsider space. For Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat (2013, 13), this can be resisted by re-thinking the spatial in law, suggesting that “[o]ne potential form of resistance to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between the […] inside and outside”. It is in this rejection of the need “to bow to colonial cartog-

 As Thomas Hammerberg (2012) states, “[i]t is paramount that all efforts be deployed to identify sustainable solutions, which are acceptable to both local communities, Traveller and nonTraveller, which local authorities are supposed to serve”.  Indeed, Angus Bancroft (2000, 48) identifies the continuity of this juridical narrative when he argues, “the 1994 Act is not so much an aberration or a rejection of the spirit of the 1968 Act. Rather it acknowledges that the 1968 Act failed to discipline Gypsy-Travellers into a settled way of life and intensifies the regulative practices targeted at Gypsy-Travellers and other outsiders”.

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raphy” that the sedentary order can be contested. Focusing on a specific case is a means of exploring how the sedentary order reveals itself in local spaces, and in so doing address Edkins and Pin-Fat’s call to resist the drawing of lines. This book has already visited the site of Dale Farm, on the outskirts of Basildon in Essex. Dale Farm became well known following reports in the press of the legal battle to evict the residents, the protests and campaigners drawing both support and condemnation. According to reports, Dale Farm “had all the trappings of a place under seige” (Quarmby 2013a, 1); the violence in response to the gathering of a number of activists in the dale farm eviction can be regarded as playing into the positivist framing of nomads v. settled citizens, the disobedient anti-state trespasser v. the sedentary, civilized citizen. The Court of Appeal rejected a final request for an injuction, reiterating the that the encampment was a “breach of the law” (Quarmby 2013a, 130), with bailiffs and police working collaboratively as if to enforce the narrative that they were merely enforcing the idea of legitimate occupation. As Katherine Quarmby (2013a, 154) notes, this case was “a pyrrhic victory for Basildon District Council” as it presented a high-cost to the taxpayers. Many of those evicted moved to a nearby site, whilst others returned in later months, subject to continuous enforcement notices. Although legally occupied, this encampment had grown from a site of three or four pitches, without planning permission for the extended occupation: “it was, right from the start, contested land” (Quarmby 2013a, 3). Evictions were ordered and then postponed, subject to judicial review. The juridico-political narrative of illegitimacy reflects a dichotomy that haunts the Roma Diaspora despite that fact that indeed, in the UK alone only a tiny minority of camps are in illegal, whilst the majority are legally occupied yet facing considerable and considerable battles over planning permission (Quarmby 2013a, 9). The local MP said in parliament that he had “no problem’ with ‘law-abiding Travellers,” (quoted in Quarmby 2013a, 10) it was the outlaws misusing the space whom he disliked. Home to around a thousand residents, including ninety families – mainly Irish Travellers – Dale Farm had been a site of residency since the 1960s, gradually swelling to accommodate greater numbers following a reduction in the number of halting sites and other stopping grounds. The council began to take legal action against the Travellers under Section 127 of the Town and Country Planning Act 2005. In 2008, the High Court ruled that evictions could not take place until alternative accommodation was found. However, this was later overturned following an appeal by the council, until finally in 2010 bailiffs were appointed to evict the residents from the plot. Basildon council argued that illegal development of green belt land had necessitated eviction, although reports of village residents claiming abusive behaviour, adverse affects on property values and a decrease in academic results at the local schools were also heavily prominent in

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media reports (Bates 2011a). Despite an intervention from the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, who in a statement urged “the UK authorities to halt the evictions process and to pursue negotiations with the residents until an acceptable agreement for relocation is reached in full conformity with international human rights obligations,” (Rolnik 2011) evictions went ahead in 2011. Police clashed with protesters, with reports of tear gas being used on protestors (Topping 2011).⁹ Only three pitches were protected by the court order on a temporary basis, and those who moved to a nearby legal site soon faced evacuation due to the council’s claim the site had become “overcrowded” (Topping 2012). The way in which this land was spatialised as a site of resistance and unsettlement counteracts the narrative of indispensable containment within a sedentary landscape. As the residents were legal owners of the land, the issue was not one of ownership, but of a planning system that enacted a grid of belonging into which they simply could not be accommodated. Here, then Diasporic spatiality is framed as criminal misappropriation or illegitimate occupation, when in fact the focus should be on the lack of provision, the gradual and wide-ranging restriction of access to land and the ongoing privatisation of public space.¹⁰ In his ruling on Dale Farm in 2008 (para 10), Justice Collins emphasised that although a circular following the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act “told Councils to encourage private site provision on the basis that Gypsies should help themselves […] it was made clear that planning applications should be determined solely in relation to land use factors”. This demonstrates the way in which particular constructions of ownership as the proper usage of

 In BSkyB and others v. Chelmsford Crown Court and Essex Police [2012] EWHC 1295 , broadcasters were exempted from being forced to hand over incriminating footage of the police actions during evictions.  Katherine Quarmby (2013b) relates, as an example, a case of similar conflict over a site in Wales between “a handful of families of Welsh, English and Scottish Romany Gypsy heritage […] moved on to a field in 2010 which they owned but for which they did not have planning permission, and some in the local settled community”. Campaigners objecting to the sites – arguing they were protesting against inappropriate development – subjected them to harassment and surveillance in the form of constant pickets and a website that monitored the residents constantly. According to a local counciller, the website voyeurs monitoring the site were both “defend [ing] the green belt” and preventing “further illegal acts from taking place”. Although the planning committee voted eventually to evict those picketing, the discomforting thing here was that, as Quarmby observes, “[o]ne set of residents – the “legitimate” – were permitted, even encouraged, to police unwanted groups, just so long as they had permission to be on the plot from which they were doing their monitoring. It wasn’t the surveillance that was a problem; it was the encampment on green-belt land”.

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land are at the heart of the sedentary spatial order. Territory, in this way, is effectively spaced through the sedentary.¹¹ As Nicholas Blomley (2003, 122) writes: [p]roperty also offers an important means by which we assign order to the world, categorizing and coding spaces and people accord- ing to their relationship to property [ …] When we talk about land and property, we are not simply talking about technical questions of land use, but engaging some deeply moral questions about social order.

The “coding” of space through nomadism is consigned to a nostalgic past for prelapsarian space. As a Traveller facing eviction recently stated, “[t]he camps we used to pull in to have been closed and barricaded up. Travelling life is finished” (McCarthy in Stevenson 2010). Such authorized denigration reflects the flaw in proprietorial order, as the use of violence to quell unsettled spaces reveals its problematic foundations (Rose 1994, 296). In this way, the self-authorised narrative of legitimate access to a heavily delineated spatiality displays the paradigm of unsettlement from which law ultimately emerges: “[l]aw is a creature of both literal violence, and of imaginings and threats of force, disorder, and pain […] in the absence of such imaginings and threats there is no law” (Sarat and Kearns 1992, 1).

2.2 Mogoş v. Romania and the poetry of Mariella Mehr This section will broaden the discussion from the theorisation of the abstract spaces of the law implicated in Diaspora space, to a close reading of texts in relation to specific cases of dispossession, statelessness and eviction. What is crucial to this analysis is that this shift in spatio-legal reading (Blomely 2003b, 29 – 30; Delaney 2004: 851)¹² renders claims to possession as indicative of a spatial

 Sudesh Mishra raises an interesting perspective on how spaces (such as the threshold) can be “differently coded” through the micro-cultural and the macro-national and dependent on how these are negotiated by Diasporic subjects – which also risks diverting attention from those non-Diasporic subjects who simultaneously are located in complex liminal spaces (2006: 87). This therefore takes the issue of “coding” in relation to Brah’s conceptualisation of Diaspora space, in which all are implicated in the messy interstitial production of space. My argument here, however, is that the sedentary order effectively and deliberately superimposes a form of “coding” as spacing in which all other micro- and macro- spatialites – including all those brought into the space are obscured (though never subsumed).  Conceived of here as a specific interpretation of the way in which space and law intersect and collide as reciprocally self- authorised narratives within the text, in addition to offering a frame through which to view the text itself.

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aesthetic, centered on an unstable notion of what it means to reside in a particular place. Deconstructing literary interpretations of the spaces of the dispossessed (the transit zone, the campsite and the settlement) opens up new ways of configuring spatiality in the context of Diaspora. This chapter will begin by focusing on a specific case of detention – in which stateless Roma were detained in the transit zone of the Otopeni airport (European Roma Rights Centre [hereafter ERRC] 2002) – as a productive site in which to examine the tangible limits of that which is designated “transnational” space (Douzinas 2000). This analysis emphasises the need for a shift in paradigm from statelessness as an issue of absence to the development of a spatial literary jurisprudence as a critical intervention, unsettling territorial legitimacy and the borders of jurisdiction. A critical theory of Diaspora takes into account the spaces in which subjects are left seemingly (‘outside’) the law in the construction of a permanent state of exception and the continuous violation of human rights. In order to examine these “spaces in-between” (Boana and Martén 2013, 7), this chapter will deconstruct the conditions of the spatial as a rhetoric of exclusion, evoking the nomos through “the spatial dimension of law [which] in its stabilising and localising aspects is both ‘worldly’ and constitutive of the polis while being itself pre-political” (Chryssotalis 2013, 163). The thematic focus here is one of the condition of containment, rather than absence or the implied suspension of the law in these localised spaces. A literary jurisprudence invites a spatio-legal reading to expose the relationship between the juridical and the spatial order as they are played out in the literary text, to explore how this “realm of lawlessness [is] spatialised” (Boano and Martén 2013, 7). Such spatialisation is a key aesthetic in the poetry of Mariella Mehr, whose work is a literary articulation of the exclusion, segregation and discrimination she has experienced as a consequence of her Yenish identity. Rather than positing an outside in relation to the law, the spaces of exception she draws in the poem simply demonstrate an implicitly striated spectral paradigm of shapes with shadowy corners, whilst at the same ambivalently resisting the limits of confinement. Only through recognising the complexity inherent in “the refusal to draw any lines at all” (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004, 13) may we find a potential and effective strategy for a literary jurisprudence of Diaspora as a reading of unsettlement, and an examination of the spatialities of the “juridical order” and its reliance on the state of exception (Agamben 2005, 58). From this perspective, depictions of stateless Roma represent them as the archetypal figures of exclusion, reflected in the ambivalent caricature of the wandering, rootless nomad used to legitimate discrimination and segregation in which Roma are housed in “places that resemble the shantytowns, slums and favelas of Africa and South America […] pushed even further to [the] peripheral”

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(Valentino and Orta 2010, 9). This is highlighted in the recognition of their cultural resilience despite endemic marginalization. Despite the extreme difficulties, the Romany resist, apparently passively, planning and employing strategies for survival, to continue their existence in the countries that they retain as their places of abode […] Their settlements resist when they find themselves in non-secure areas, near of indeed inside rubbish dumps, beside working or disused and polluted industrial estates […] Their communities border prisons, canals, and psychiatric hospitals. They are tolerated under the bypasses of highways, on the banks of rivers and in many other places where they remain hidden – invisible – and where the Gaje (non-Roma) have no self-interest (Orta 2010, 9).

In this instance, resistance is read as a spatial power relation (Edkins and PinFat 2004, 2) and thus plays into the narrative of Diaspora as a specific ontology of peripheral space. Indeed, although the move towards integration and the implementation of the Free Movement Directive 2004 suggests a broader access to space, a strategy of eviction and containment of Roma communities demonstrates the reality behind the rhetoric.¹³ The paradoxical process of expulsion and control is evoked in the theorization of spaces of exception as “a relation in which something is included solely through its exclusion” (Agamben 2005, 58). Reports of Roma tolerated only if “hidden” in empty or “invisible” spaces can be compared to the notion of the zero point of axis Mehr evokes in Stoneage. In her poem “A red foundling strolls into this dream” (1998, 61– 64), the empty space she evokes can be regarded as a form of black hole, with its powerful evocation of “singularity” (Hinton 2007, 433 – 434), and its connotations of absence and nothingness which can, like the zero point of the axis, also point to future potentialities, or “possibilities for becoming that are not yet represented”. Mehr (1998, 63) writes: quarries of words grow upward in time into fossils of placeless hopes ˜ painless *** at the end of the world

 In Germany, for example, swift amendments to migration and asylum law have enabled the ‘return’ of Roma migrants to Eastern European countries (Cahn and Guild 2010, 55 – 56).

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Here the spatial is immediately acknowledged as both a concrete force that can be “quarried”, and a definite limit – “at the end of the world”. The text’s structure is claustrophobic, with the sparse lines and broken syntax indicative of a cut in spatio-temporal genealogy, and yet Mehr’s insertion of symbolic and literal space suggests a boundlessness beyond form. The stone which roots the speaker into quarries is replicated in the “fossils” which suggest rootedness to a past and gesturing towards temporal linearity – as “words grow upward in time” – and yet there is a strong sense of being uprooted or displaced, as these traces of the past are “placeless”. Hence, to some extent, we are left in a non-place, a liminal site of absence “at the end of the world”. It could be that this placeless zone of lexical abandonment, at the limit point, is “a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations – and above all the very distinction between public and private – are deactivated” (Agamben 2005, 50). There is hint of the speaker here, only enunciations of the soon-to-be extinct: the one without meaning facing the void, as the words themselves take flight without a subject. The claustrophobia of such an ambivalent space, tied to the idea of roots and yet transiently unsettled, provides a productive framework through which to read a recent case of a stateless Roma family detained in a transit zone. In 1993, three years after arriving in Germany, the Mogoş family successfully applied to give up their former Romanian nationality, and thus became legally stateless. Once in Germany, they reportedly received “Duldung” [tolerated persons] status enabling a temporary stop on expulsion (ERRC 2002). In 2002, the family were arrested by the police and forcibly deported to Bucharest, under an agreement between the German and Romanian authorities on stateless persons of Romanian origin. Upon arrival, they refused to sign repatriation documents and were consequently transferred to a room in the closed transit centre at Bucharest Airport, where they remained for the next five years. Discrimination against Roma in Romania is pervasive, with evidence of a high infant mortality rate and substandard housing confirming that the “socio-economic situation is continuously degrading” (Botonogu 2010, 64). As a method of immigration control “[d]etention, or internment, has a history almost as long as that of the state” (Bloch and Schuster 2005, 499). Despite the fact that there are preventive and prohibitive measures against detention under international law, it remains a common regulatory strategy across much of Europe: in this sense, as long as there are borders, detention will exist as an operative strategy. In the UK, for example, “[p]owers to detain are very wide and there is no automatic or independent scrutiny of the lawfulness, appropriateness or length of detention” (Bloch and Schuster 2005, 499 – 500), and similarly, in Germany, prolonged periods of detention over many months are common practice. Detention is employed as a

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counter-strategy against the notion of a potential – yet always proximal – threat requiring a response of either containment or eviction. The use of detention as a “painless” strategy of containment of the threat is exemplified in the transit zone, as it is in the “end of the world” apocalyptic etymological locality of Mehr’s poetry. In the context of Mehr’s placeless, voiceless yet temporally located subject it is worth considering what political agency can still be acknowledged and, indeed, whether indeed the “administration of bare life, exemplified in the concentration camp, [can still] usefully be regarded as a power relation” (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004,5). Without such a relation, the site is characterised only through violence: whilst Mehr’s evocation of the “painless” is kept separate through the form of the poem, severed onto a line of its own, the space highlights a genealogical etymology which is indicative of further lines of identity, known but lost to history. The allegation that the family set themselves apart is what renders the nature of this construction at its most complex and inviolable, and moreover, tests the limits of spatiality in the context of Diaspora. Just as Mehr’s poem “quarries” temporality through space, here Diaspora can be seen as challenging the notion of borders that paradoxically prevent you from leaving and simultaneously deny you entry. It is worth noting that proceedings against the Mogoş family were discontinued on the ground that Romanian criminal law was not applicable in the territory of the transit centre. The Mogoş family alleged that their living conditions were inhuman and that they were denied access to medical treatment.¹⁴ The ERRC observed the insubstantial living conditions over several visits and recorded lengthy testimonies from family members, cataloguing a series of complaints regarding ill-treatment by the Romanian authorities, in addition to details regarding their illegal deportation from Germany.¹⁵ The Mogoş family took their case to the European Court of Human Rights [hereafter ECtHR], submitting a complaint regarding living conditions at the transit centre and their treatment by the authorities, relying on Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment). The ECtHR found, however, that there had been no violation of Article 3 on grounds of insufficient evidence of injuries sustained after the alleged assault, and furthermore argued that as the applicants were, crucially, not

 The complaint documented details such as that the family “were obliged to do their washing by hand; that the plastic bags left by the front door in the absence of litter bins attracted rats, cockroaches and flies; and that until February 2003 they had not had permanent heating or hot water” Mogoş v. Romania [2005] application no. 20420/02.  The Mogoş family filed separate civil complaints with the Romanian Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, requesting confirmation of the illegality of their detention on Romanian territory.

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being “detained” they could have sought external help. The court concluded that any violence used by the authorities represented a legitimate use of force demonstrating necessary restraint and was therefore proportionate in the context of the claimants’ best interests. The court also held that the complaints about living conditions at the transit centre were inadmissible due to a lack of evidence. The ruling emphasised that the family could not be defined as being “detained” as, although the family had allegedly been free to leave at any time, it was they who “firmly refused to set foot in Romanian territory or to enter into a legal relationship with the Romanian State”. This was similar to the response the ERRC (2002) received from the Border Police, who declared that the family were “foreigners […] free to go to any state, including Germany, if that state accepts them” [my emphasis]. The Mogoş family were therefore “not being deprived of their liberty” according to the response. It is important to consider what the notion of the privilege accorded only to the right to leave does to the condition of placelessness at the border, particularly in light of the criticism that the access to space permitted under free movement directive often designates only this right alone, operational only once engaged yet limited in its applicability (Harvey and Barnidge 2007, 2). This positivist narrative implies that it is not the border that draws the limits of the space in this instance, but rather the narrative of self-imposed purgatory. The juridical fiction of the border thus exists to conceal the way in which placelessness is legitimized, as “the border draws the limits of the space where law is suspended, the locus of the exception” (Filc and Ziv 2006, 72). In other words, the suspension of the law both derives from and authorises its own limit through a residual conditioning of space. In this way, as Giorgio Agamben (2005, 51) writes: [o]n the one hand, the juridical void at issue in the state of exception seems absolutely unthinkable for the law; on the other, this unthinkable thing nevertheless has a decisive strategic relevance for the juridical order and must not be allowed to slip away at any cost.

Agamben’s (2005, 51) “absolute non-place with respect to the law” is not a suspension of the law in respect of its absence, but can possibly more accurately be described as being before the law in the context of a Kafkaesque “existential quest for spatial apprehension: what means to be in or out, who decides what is inside and what remains outside, where the perpetual exception of not being able to cross the border, and not understanding why, remains the character’s personal doom” (Boano and Martén 2013, 6). Taking on board the unsettling of space in the context of Diaspora, this analysis attempts to consider what this act of resistance in the case of the family – of refusing to cross the line – does to the way the transit zone is spatialised. Mehr (1998, 62) encapsulates this notion of the threshold and the unwillingness to cross in her poem:

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i’ve carried myself across the river of fire as the brand of a wayfarer’s broken staff remembering evaporated words […] i’ve drunken laughter found abysses they were black but finite – with time’s legs around me i’ve searched for that one abyss

In the extract there is a sense of resistance through the agency of a singular “I” who has “carried themselves” across a delimiting boundary, a “river of fire” to search for “that one abyss”. The concreteness of the earlier stanza’s quarries and fossils has been slowly dismantled here, the static enunciations becoming ethereal, “evaporated words”, leaving behind a cacophony of spatial contradictions: from the solid line of the river to the open space of the multiple abysses, and the endless stretching shadow stopped short by the “finite”. These truncated stanzas evoke the flawed distinction between order and chaos in the lingering sound of “drunken laughter”, reflecting at once both a singular journey and multiplicities of voids that are full and empty; an abyss which is impossible to contain manifests itself is though the conjunctive construction of an “I” that is active, and an enveloping space which responds through the infinite limit point. Space here can be read as more of a spacing or a “dynamic of power that materialises in space” (Boano and Martén 2013, 9). The false binary between the space that is carried and the voids that retract but are expansive and the limited linearity of migration is made risible in spaces of exception, for, as Carl Schmitt (1922, 13) writes, “[b]ecause the state of exception is always something different from anarchy and chaos, in a juridical sense, an order still exists in it, even if it is not a juridical order”. However, it can be argued that Schmitt is overly reliant on concrete order that will restore itself (Derrida 1997, 88). For Schmitt you always need sovereignty (indeed, suspension brings about sovereignty): as a confirmation of a heavily regulated boundary that is never threatened. This is the order of the spatial “as an ongoing imperative to colonise life itself” (Boano and Martén 2013, 6); the concept of spatial order is not only a materialisation of the extralegal abyss but an implicit manifestation in Diaspora. Hence, it can be said of the slums, shantytowns and nomad camps that:

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[n]o one knows anything, only that “that place is where Gypsies are”. We pass by these places, but we cannot see them. It as if these slums were surrounded by a ghostly wall that separates one world from another, or rather a cloak that renders them invisible (Floris 2010, 55).

This act of acknowledging how law attempts to disappear the subject is crucial to a rupturing of legal spatiality. It is useful to consider, alongside the transit zone, comparative cases of “campi nomadi” [nomad camps] established for Roma in Italy. In Milan and Rome, these segregated and overcrowded camps house more than 4000 Romani, in ghettoized and isolated conditions and with limited access to services (ERRC 2013). These so-called “temporary” settlements soon become permanent sites where a “combination of poverty, discrimination, and lack of legal documents” has the effect of “increase[ing] their susceptibility to continued statelessness” (Hammamberg 2009). This is the abyss then, without movement, where waiting becomes a suspension, in Agamben’s (2005, 41) discussion of the term “iustitium [as the] ‘standstill’ or ‘suspension of the law’”, conceived of as a kind of emptying out. If it is argued that zones of exception reflect an amorphous space (Seri 2004, 79), it follows that law must structure the dichotomy of legitimate v. illegitimate through modalities of the peripheral. To recognise, then, that “the camp’s diffuse character makes exclusion more than an inside/outside relation” (Boano and Martén 2013, 13) invites an altogether different reading of how law is enacted through its own suspension. Thus, the conditioning of space in the attempt to authorize a void that is not an absence is part of law’s ordering strategy, in the same way that Hannah Arendt (Hayden 2008, 255 – 256) measures statelessness not only as the “deprivation of national legal status” but also through “the qualitative condition” [my emphasis] of spatiality itself. In Italy forced relocations of Roma from these temporary camps were stopped twice by two different court orders, leaving “[t]he affected Romani individuals […] living in a state of uncertainty” (ERRC 2012). Although declared illegal in 2011 by the Council of the State, the State of Emergency (or “Nomad Plan”) under which the camps were built “to combat the so-called “Roma menace” (ERRC 2013b), had presented the authorities with extraordinary powers of eviction and evacuation. The Plan classified the Roma as a “threat to public security” (ERRC 2012) and as a nomadic disease in need of containment. Despite European-wide measures instituted to improve Roma integration, and condemnation of discrimination in the courts,¹⁶ many NGOs have highlighted the persistence of

 The ERRC (2012) refer to the Italian government’s “National Strategy for the Inclusion of Roma, Sinti and Caminanti Communities” as one such measure, explicitly describing the “pre-

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contemporary eviction and exclusion measures in Italy. In 2013, ERRC and Amnesty International (along with others) appealed to the Mayor of Rome to urge the authorities to end the segregation of Roma and allow access to social housing , highlighting Italy’s binding legal obligations under EU law (ERRC 2013c).¹⁷ In this instance, it is apparent that the narrative of the Roma as a threat was used to justify the validity of containment. Although some court cases managed to successfully halt evictions (Amnesty 2013, 11), these were only temporary stays or situations in which some camps were closed due to inadequate living conditions, resulting in greater numbers being moved to La Barbuta, a stretch of land effectively “isolated from the world world” (Amnesty 2013, 31), described by the ERRC (2012) as a place: situated in the far outskirts of Rome and [outside] international legal standards regarding housing: it is under constant surveillance by cameras and private guards contracted to city authorities; it is segregated by fences; it offers residents inadequate container housing and it is far away from essential services such as schools, hospitals and public transport.

These nomad camps are indistinguishable from historical Jewish ghettos, or can be seen as “analogous to the segregation of lepers in colonies” (Floris 2010, 55). Foucault’s analysis of the plague city provides a productive theorization of this particular form of exclusion, however, rather than the segregated exclusion experienced by lepers. Although the latter were effectively sent outside the boundaries of the city, the spatial order of the plague was one of containment and control. As Foucault describes, this was thus the privileging of a paradigm of quarantine, which was not about “driving out individuals but rather of establishing and fixing them, of giving them their own place” (Foucault 2003, 45 – 47) [my emphasis]. In this utopia of the perfectly governed city, it is the principle of movement – not contagion – that instigates the risk. Crucially, therefore, there is space allotted to the contaminated within this system, but it is the spacing of this operation that provides the context for the “penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life” (Foucault 1977, 198). This was, then “a strict spatial partitioning”: it is not empty space, non-place but a site of designated places for each subject, with any attempt at movement risking se-

vious emergency and security approach a failure” and setting out the government’s intentions to work towards “more integrated policies”.  The obligations referred to were Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000, which implements the principle of equal treatment irrespective of racial or ethnic origin; the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

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vere punishment. However, despite this fixity, plague cities are not solid forms but instead reveal their operations of power as immersed and interactive collisions, shaped “to the requirements of the ruling bodies that produce them” (Boano and Martén 2013, 13). In this way, then, just as there is neither disappearance nor absence, there is no solid form denoting the outline of Diaspora, nomad camps, and detention centres. This can be evocatively elucidated through the linguistic slippage attributed to the word “camp”, which in Italian not only designates the site of the camp, but also an uninhabited ‘field’, “a provisory sort of habitation, something interrupting normal life in a provisory fashion, somewhere where it should not be” (Floris 2010, 54). These camps exist in a “permanent transit through temporary spaces in a sort of extra-territoriality” (Floris 2010, 55), thus paradoxically acting as both a non-place and a distinguishable site of biopolitical spatialisation (Boano and Martén 2013, 10). These sites are not symptomatic of an absolute absence, but rather reflect the infiltration of the black spaces or zero point of axis within the state (Filc and Ziv 2006, 73; Boana and Martén 2013, 13), the archetypal representation of Diasporic spatiality. The depths of Mehr’s “found abysses” reflect the spatiality of transit zones as rooted “placelessness”. The ECtHR have ruled that these representative cracks in the abyssal lines of the void are derogations of human rights. The court rejected an attempt by France to designate a transit zone in a Paris airport as “extraterritoritorial” pending asylum decisions in Amuur v. France [1996] Application no. 19776/92, confirming that there had been a breach of Article 5 (the right to liberty and security of person).¹⁸ In this case, the court described the applicants as existing within “a legal vacuum” and concluded that despite being designated an ‘international’ zone, there was no associated “extraterritorial status” (Amuur v. France [1996] at 51– 52). Transit zones and “campi nomadi” thus represent spatiality in the context of Diaspora at its most explicit: they are not cases of isolated lepers or exiled subjects but rather indicators of the plague city, writ large. Those that bring stateless space with them are both threatening and expendable, and as a consequence, are “forced to remain in “institutionalized “limbo” spaces which serve as the preparatory conditions of possibility for their eventual elimination” (Hayden 2008, 265). The question thus becomes: what if no claim is made to the space? What does this to the space: not to be outside it or placeless;

 In Amuur, asylum seekers were held in the airport’s transit zone for twenty days without the opportunity of judicial review. Just as with the Mogoş family, the government claimed that they had been free to leave at any time and therefore the obligation to prohibit deprivation of liberty under Article 5 of the ECHR could not be engaged. In this case, however, the EctHR recognized that even a hypothetical right to leave a transit zone “cannot exclude a restriction on liberty”.

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to bring space with you, to be spacing in space that is already unsettled? This question is explored in Mehr’s (1998, 61) poem, in the second stanza: fear between title and text – an empty trench also called paragraph break naked red-spiked openings icebergs that merge over flowers vanishing point black space devouring me

There is a sense here of the invisibility of the limit, the isolated and receding yet paradoxically ever-present “vanishing point”. Rather than an empty space, however, this can be read as a manifestation of the threshold, a space in between in which the text is liminally positioned at the site of hopelessness, between words, inside those stark white gaps on the page. There is no sense of an ambiguous withdrawal here: Mehr describes the conditions of bare life as they are constructed through violence, rather than power relations – a ‘naked’ body is levelled against “red spiked openings”. The space is active, “devouring” the speaker therefore not as a juridical void, but, rather, as a movement of containment (Floris 2010, 55), or in Agamben’s (2005, 40) terms, “a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos”. The contention here with Agamben’s articulation of logos as a topology in the context of Diaspora, is that it attempts to reify the notion of an originary presence, reflecting a dangerously universal tendency towards the eschatological. Whilst this analysis adheres to the notion of Diaspora as a limit point of multiple collisions, it aims to disrupt the mythology of Diaspora space as a teleological concept and reveal an illimitable paradox of assemblages, an “empty space” in which enunciation is always present at the threshold. Exploring this abyss opens up the possibility of new potentialites (Hinton 2007, 436), although this book posits than rather than highlighting the way in which this spatiality is representative of a lack, it is the issue of recognising that which is already unsettled. What is “the vanishing point” if not the pervasive spread of space fashioned as containment within “red-spiked openings”? As Arendt observes, “the international system has normalized the condition of displacement” (Hayden 2008,

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250), which is why Diaspora discourse emphasizes a liminal spatial imaginary in which “[s]tateless persons are not simply found “outside” society but instead are a by-product of the society of states, an “inevitable residue” of the nation-state system which relentlessly produces superfluous human beings” (Patrick Hayden 2008, 257). In this way, spaces made explicit in Diaspora, such as camps and transit zones in which it is not so easy to regulate non-nationals as an externality, become defined by the same organisational strategy which regulated “state borders [then, as] internal regulatory zones” (Seri 2004, 80). Although such zones are explicitly condemned in international jurisprudence, member states can insist that they are not obliged to provide access to those “[p]hysically present within [the country’s] geographical borders, but yet not ‘in’” the state (Human Rights Watch 2009, 1). This legal fiction persists despite rulings such as Amuur have declared that the transit zone cannot be identified as an “extraterritorial” space. Therefore, rather than being marginalised as excessive spaces, sites of border control or temporary sites for nomadic not-quite-citizens necessitating an emergency response, they are central to the state’s conception of itself. Indeed, the construction of statelessness did not depend on the isolated exclusion zone of the airport. Had the Mogoş family remained in Germany as they wished, they would, for example, have been subject to Germany’s jus sanguinis citizenship laws, with the consequence that “Roma who have been in Germany for generations have only a temporary status that must be frequently renewed, known as duldung status” (Parra 2011, 1679). This suggests that the transit zone of the airport detention area is not, in fact, an exceptional state with “arbitrary legal status” (Human Rights Watch 2009, 4), but is, then, much more comparable to the nomad camps. Both are evidence of the so-called smooth space of border gates contrasting majestically with the static duration of time in temporally disjunctive transit zones.¹⁹ These particular stateless subjects are rendered absent far beyond a threshold of waiting: the Mogoş case involves neither active suspension nor potential citizenship, for the family claim to belong where they are unwanted and make no claim to any other nationality. The enhanced mechanisms of control could seem to reproduce a Foucauldian system whereby “[e]veryone [is] locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked – it is the great review of the living and the dead” (Foucault 1977, 198). Within this system, the contaminating threat is designated life without ju Human Rights Watch highlight this temporal distortion in a 2009 report, where they state, “one might be subject to an entry refusal and removal within the course of only a few hours, while never leaving airport terminals. Such speedy procedures thwart meaningful assessment of the […] situation and undermine any targeted intervention to protect them”.

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ridico-political status, positioned as if stranded outside the law (Seri 2004, 83). However, this is an outside that can never be a placeless absence (Agamben 2005, 35). If the condition of space is regarded as that which is “always under construction” (Massey 2005, 9), this literary jurisprudence recognizes Diaspora as a useful term for the productive “vanishing point” as neither originary, nor teleogical. Diaspora, then, is perhaps the recognition of reproduction as the unsettling of juridical space, opening it to expose the biopolitical contradiction of law’s foundations and the incommensurability of the spatial order, in which Arendtian “superfluousness” – whereby “undesirables who have been deemed to belong nowhere are condemned to inclusive exclusion” (Hayden 2008: 258) – becomes the operating principle of all spatialising strategies. A potential strategy of recognizing the limit point of Diaspora demands that “the subject at one and the same time both acknowledges its status as nothing but life and demands recognition as such” (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004, 18). Resistance is reinterpreted through spatiality in this interpretation of Diaspora: there is, simply, no claim made to space, for one is always taking space with you through a spatial paradigm, and in doing so exposing its unsettlement. Hence, in making no claim, therein lies the potential; this is partially the “withdrawal” that Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2010a, 211, 213) describes when he defines an attribution of justice through spatiality as “the command to withdraw yet remain”. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos outlines a vision of law as a creature of “spatial ingestion”, a condition open to exploitation in which a withdrawal may yet be turned in on itself to acknowledge both Mehr’s “empty space” (which is never truly empty) and the “limit point” without teleology, starting from the recognition that as“[z]ones of exception are formless” (Seri 2004, 79), the “vanishing point” of Diaspora may well be an “abyss”, but it is defiantly not at the end of the world.

2.3 Moving through the lawscape in John F. McDonald’s Tribe This chapter will further explore the sedentary order determining the context of legislation and policy in the construction of space.The argument will be framed through a reading of the novel Tribe by John F. McDonald (2000, 2002), a work of fiction tracing the complexities of being an “itinerant Gypsy” in contemporary society, theorising what it means to move through the lawscape. My intention is to go beyond a critique of the construction of a minority rendered permanent outsiders in the demarcation of marginalised spaces, in order to ask wider questions about foundational concepts of the law structuring belonging. McDonald’s

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(2002, 22) text examines what it might means to “settle”, exploring the notion that ‘settling down’ represents a transition to real life. As has been discussed, Gypsy and Traveller ethnicity in the UK is defined primarily through nomadism despite the fact that around two hundred thousand of the estimated three hundred thousand strong population now live in settled housing (Crawley 2004, 6). As Helen O’Nions notes (2007, 7), the condition of mobility has become the key concept in the ambivalent identification and control of this particular Diasporic group across European member states, as a reflection for the fact that “[f]or centuries legislation has sought to eradicate this aspect of their culture as it is seen to pose a direct challenge to the glue that holds the sedentary society together”. As O’Nions acknowledges, placing an emphasis on legislation based on the premise of endless movement designed to control nomadic mobility authorizes a paradoxically self-narrating rhetoric of prohibition. The form of paradoxical identity this constructs is explored in the novel, where the anti-hero Owen inhabits a liminal space moving between different identities, from the “tinker” looking for work on roadside sites with other “Gypsies”, to living in a “poky little flat” (McDonald 2000, 17) with a girlfriend who hopes to ignore his Traveller identity. Owen bears a hatred of being confined, and only feels as if he is truly himself when he is on the move again. However, this is no nostalgic narrative of transition or adaptation to the modernities of bricks and mortar. McDonald (2000, 65) writes that as he “covers the miles I feels as if I’m becoming part of something again” [sic], and yet it is movement with a “head full of confusions and contradictions”. The depiction of the narrator as one caught between worlds reflects the obtrusive and relentless dichotomy of settler (defined through violent authority) v. nomad (as illegitimate minority), settler violence manifested in the text when locals call the travellers “cannibals and child-stealers [and would come] down at night with their guns and their fucking petrol bombs” (McDonald 2000, 71). This, I argue, is the crux of the construction of sites of legality in the context of Dale Farm: it is a recognition of the narrative “that every Traveller family must find an approved place” (McDonald 2002, 51) within a sedentary order in which only specific, legitimate identities are allowed access to space, predicated on flawed notions of outsider identity. The pervasiveness of this sedentary order interacts with memories of the past within the novel, in which the narrator expresses nostalgia for a life that has been taken away. McDonald (2002, 354) describes a scene of sedentarised living using romantic language imbued with references to colourful nature as the only living, moving entity overlapping with a static space, following the erosion of nomadic practices as in his languid description of “[w]inter flowers hanging in coloured wooden baskets from the fences and grass growing tall round the wheels of a few ornate vardas that will never see the road again”. The text is

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heavily thematised through the death of nomadism or “the old ways” (McDonald 2000, 18) and is thus characterised through the internal and external re-drawing of space and social order. Owen is constantly feeling claustrophobic, hemmed in by the “poky little flat” he lives in with his girlfriend, remarking that a “Traveller can’t hold himself together in a small confined space” (McDonald 2000, 17, 157– 158). Owen’s predicament can be read as emblematic of a politics of stasis, a liminal space caught between resenting road-side camps and remembering the crossroads of a past long gone, and a resistance annexation by the sedentary order, represented primarily in the novel by disciplinary institutions such as “gavvers” [police], the authorities and the council. Owen’s resistance against these bodies of power is emphasised in a tirade against institutions he sees himself as pitted against. Hounded by town councils and district councils and county councils and borough councils and rural authorities and urban authorities and sanitary inspectors and agents and landowners and vigilantes and local residents’committees and an assortment of wobs and gavvers and muskras (McDonald 2000, 32– 33).

This unpunctuated invective reflects a flawed system of disciplinary governmentality that will forever be incomplete.²⁰ Although this extract refers to a story of fragmentation and destruction, of stoppage and attempts to generate order, the enjambment of the sentences and stream-of-consciousness narrative mode replicate a sense of chaotic disorder, the impossibility of flight and the simultaneous impossibility of containment. It symbolizes a form of spatiality modified continuously by its own failure to set limits, challenged by the space our bodies take with them. The inclusion of untranslated Romani dialect juxtaposed with McDonald’s use of enjambment reflects a form of dialectical tension in which multiple tongues are colluding on the space. This unsettling style creates a cadence of collision as McDonald (2000, 23 – 24) shifts from flowing sentences to terse sentences, aggressive curses and sharp consonants: a milieu of other cunts around me now […] Some a sort of black colour and others off-white. Brown and half-baked. Slushy skinned and shite stained. The air full of Shelta and Cant and Gamon and Romany and spitting on the ground.

 Governmentality is a premise playing on the meaning of ‘government’ associated with Michel Foucault (2007, 108), focusing on the process, practice and conceptualisation of power, historical mechanisms of control and the production of a subject who allows themselves to be governed.

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McDonald disrupts and complicates the idea of the Traveller site as one of either provision or containment. The narrative troubles this reading of space as easily segmented, even when the weight of criminalisation and the power play of order versus disorder is used to legitimise this thematic bias. McDonald’s focus on commonality and divergence, with a plurality of languages and dialects filling the air around him, subverts the notion that there is an inside and outside at all. Owen’s doubtful concerns about the nature of belonging, particularly to a stridently defined and delineated world, are reflected in the questions he asks: “why not some other world? Why this particular one? […] Why here?” (McDonald 2000, 96). For McDonald (2000, 97) all space is implicated in a process of chaotic disorder, as instructs the reader to “[s]tep out into the long back yard with isolated islands of gaunt grass fighting for survival in the desolation of sand and gravel and pigeon shite”. His use of sibilance and repetition emphasizes a sense of spatiality, personifying the “gaunt grass” to represent the Gypsy and Traveller community, “fighting for survival” amidst a corrupted wasteland of death and detritus. McDonald (2002, 587) evokes the similarities between this fatal erosion of access to space and the reservations used to sedentarise and devastate America’s Indigenous population. Siobhan Spencer (2012) acknowledges the parallels between the nomadic Métis culture from Canada and the Gypsy and Traveller Community in an overview of legislation implicitly designed to sedentarise, highlighting in both cases the groups’ resilience and maintenance of their own minority culture despite endlessly pervasive attempts at annihilation by a colonising authority. Spencer advocates this comparison in order to construct a more adequate system of protection for the Gypsy and Traveller community. However, whilst drawing on similarities through the emphasis on nomadic identities may be useful – particularly as an indication of contested sovereignty competing over a single space – it also persists in reifying a majority/minority culture in which the sedentary order retains its privilege. A sense of resistance is rendered explicit through Owen’s vituperative monologue in which he challenges the paradigm of possession upon which the sedentary order is built. McDonald (2002, 555) catalogues an inventory of disciplinary punishment and hostile acts levied at his community, through syntax that is both fluid and yet like a rallying battle cry, reciting an endless series of offences as if he is reversing the role of the executioner in Kafka’s “The Penal Colony”, and they are being imprinted onto the readers’ very skin. And ethnic cleansing is a fucking euphemism in which language disguises official violence – like holocaust and apartheid and clearances and final fucking solution. And Travellers over the years has been subjected to everything that could be thrown at us. Murder and enslavement and imprisonment and extermination and sterilization and seizure of the

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chavvies and expulsion and laws restricting intermarriage and forced conscription and the banning of our languages and them all hoping we would just disappear altogether from the face of the fucking earth. And the Travelling races is an ethnic minority – a mobile community surviving in a settled world. On the receiving end of an endless series of fucking bye-laws and acts of parliament and private bills and codes of good practice and all kinds of other legislation.

The enjambment of violent colonising practices of implicit and explicit subjugation (Fanon 1963) runs on like a torrent, in which the outcome is not sedentarisation but in fact, complete withdrawal and total dematerialization. To be subject to – and subjects of – such a regime leaves the Roma as perpetually Diasporic, “a mobile community”, whereas under colonialism, they are reduced to “individuals without an anchor, without a horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless’ (Fanon 1963, 218). The narrator takes it further than this however, suggesting a community not only prohibited by law to practice a historical identity but furthermore, fundamentally nullified by a governmentality which aims to threaten their very existence. The violence McDonald evokes here reveals law’s narrative qualities as a different and more complex reading of property and space, in which violence is not an anomaly but is, rather, a policy objective legitimating the enclosure of space. Law’s role in the novel is of restricting access to space and enforcing containment, so that violence and force are internalized as a necessary correlation of governmentality, and externalized as a limit establishing territorial boundaries. However, McDonald dispels the notion that only Diasporic space is implicated in this contamination. Wandering about a site he knows well, Owen observes: [a]n atmosphere of private pride and public squalor – like a ghetto. Forced to live in these gudgell conditions and it’s us Gypsies who considers the Gorgios to be the dirty ones – with their shitty cities and their slums (McDonald 2000, 23).

McDonald is dismissing the binary and exposing everything, everywhere, all at once, as mutually implicated in a polluted and chaotic space, in which a sense of order is reciprocally imposed. This is a subversion of the perception that law exists within a highly segmented cartography, whereupon “[i]nside lies stability and order, outside disorder [and] violence” (Blomley 2003, 124). Within such a definition, proprierty is a key determinant of legitimacy (Fitzpatrick 1992, 77), yet no attention is paid to what a frontier would contain if it were neither lawless nor liminal, neither inside nor outside. In the text, a frontier does not represent infinite space nor is it a state of exception: ownership is striated but not through the grid-like matrix of possession. To read this space through a literary jurisprudence rejects the very basis of a proprietorial doctrine, and crucially, an origina-

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ry source which stipulates that “[i]n the beginning, all the World was America” (Locke 1988 [1698], 301). Diaspora discourse flows from this formulation, reinforcing the sedentary paradigm which serves to reinforce the self-authorising framing of a spatial order in which “[p]roperty and law are born together, and die together” (Bentham 1978 [1843], 52). McDonald’s (2002, 698) text is structured as an alternative shaping of space, mapped beyond the originary. Somewhere back there is a marker on the turnpike between the open roads and my little flat. And I knows there’s no going back. Heritage and history fades fast in the swirling mainstream of this gobbling grunting hog of a world. I knows that eventually I’ll step finally over the line you’ve drawn on the ground [sic].

Connotations of a devouring violence—reminiscent of Mehr’s “zero city”—and the metaphor of the whirling, enveloping current bears connotations of a disruptive space between order and disorder, through its juxtaposition with the strictly delineated markers of spatial cartography. This juxtaposition is frequently displayed through the narrative of evictions, where the sense of being out of place is imprinted through the rhetoric of illegality, evoked viscerally through highly performative televised scene of authorities enforcing order on a disordered space (Quarmby 2013b). A demonstration of “the line […] drawn on the ground” in the case of the Dale Farm, for example, was the depiction of a spectacle of a battle between settler and nomad, in which the parameters of the dichotomy itself were never questioned, sequestered as they were against a background of disordered violence. The dichotomy between the settler and the Gypsy and Traveller community thereby becomes a smoke screen for the dominant paradigm of spatial order, in which the only option left open to the Gypsies is to claim an illegitimate role as “the old amorphous brood – the doorstep third-world tribe [… p]laying a little part in the economics of a hostile society – yet keeping apart from it” (McDonald 2002, 1320). The Diasporic space evoked here is that of a totality, as the world in which Owen travels is marked by rituals and blood-lines and networks and a reaction to being marginalised by a “hostile society”. The space mapped out within the text is never an empty void or segmented neutral space, as Owen moves in and out of properties and campsites, but recognizes where the “lines are drawn” around him. It is perhaps worth asking Massey’s (2005, 179) questions here, to register her potent analysis on the spatiality of power. The real socio-political question concerns less, perhaps, the degree (i) of openness/closure (and the consequent question of how on earth one might even begin to measure it), than the terms (i) on which that openness/closure is established. Against what are boundaries

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erected? What are the relations within which the attempt to deny (and admit) entry is carried out? What are the power-geometries here; and do they demand a political response?

Massey’s suggestion that the focus should shift from the “boundary” line to the way in which boundaried space is constructed reflects Owen’s journey in the text. Although the reader is always made aware of the “boundary” between the sedentary and the nomadic, Owen’s physical movement and stream-of-consciousness interpretation of colonial violence pushes against a binary narrative. Whilst recent case law suggests the boundary line of the sedentary spatial order is unrelenting, Owen can be seen to shape his own space, whilst exposing the illegitimacy myth preserving the sedentary order which allows violent racism to masquerade as protection of the land by preservational locals claiming, “[w]e bear no malice to the travellers. They have a right to live somewhere” (Quarmby 2013) [my emphasis]. This “somewhere” is identified by Owen’s friend Litzy as peripheral sites on the wasteland, “near rubbish-tips or flyovers or sewage plants or dangerous railways lines. Places that’s useless to anyone else” (McDonald 2002, 2606) [sic]. In this sense, the only access to space permitted to this “doorstep third- world tribe” are those deemed “useless to anyone else” by those whose duty it is to carve up space (McDonald 2002, 1320, 2606). McDonald constructs a narrative in which Owen lives in two different worlds, only to subvert this dualistic segregation. Instead, the text reflects a potentially radical framing of space when Owen gazes down at a beach in Ireland. Here I strands then – on the edge of a continent. Surrounded by the barren acres of wild will-o’-the wisps and hearing in my head the lonely keen of a pagan piper from the side of some soulless hill. Looking up at the free sky and wishing again that I could fly. Not this time to love but to the face of the fucking sun. And from there laugh down at these poor cunts. Scuttling in their everlasting struggle to be free. Just like me (McDonald 2002, 2921) [sic].

McDonald narrativizes space as a form of emptiness that can be both “barren” and “free” without also being an absence, as it is full of the potential of anonymous subjects also inhabiting the same space. Owen is firmly located as a voyeur, but his sense of locatedness is also revealed as an “edge” or limit point, and marred by an ambivalent sense of above and below in which Owen is also implicated. The potential to move freely into the sky – “wishing again that I could fly” – is not a reflection of the possibility of moving outside the space, but rather a means of acknowledging both himself and others as complicit in the production of a space in which they are perpetually contained. Hence, belonging is conceptualized at a distance from planning policy and adequate provision of sites, as an issue of inhabitation of space, unsettling the parameters of neutral space im-

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plied in all depictions of the Roma as a “mobile community surviving in a settled world” (McDonald 2002, 572). Effectively all modes of belonging should be spatialised, not through a binaric determination of marginality and exclusion but through a rendering of space as conditioned by violence: and therein, lies the potential for spatial resistance against the ideology of disorder, as well as the source of its unsettlement. As Owen says, “[s]omewhere I knows the sky is blue and the world is wide open” (McDonald 2000, 266) [sic]. This spatio-temporal dislocation demonstrates the attempt to forge a distinct path for himself “somewhere” between an itinerant nomadic identity and his sedentary ‘gorgio’ life with his girlfriend. Subverting the exclusionary rhetoric of sites pushed to the wasteland of a “somewhere” outside the local enables McDonald to evoke a sense of disorientating spatio-temporal collision in which Owen “sees the present and following in a dissolving mist – the future” (McDonald 2002, 2921). Here, Owen’s attempts to flee are simultaneously encounters with the impulse to return, where he is “[f]alling in fright along the lanes of blackthorn and bramble until I’m completely lost and there’s not a fucking sinner in sight to ask the way home”. Despite the presence of Gypsy and Traveller communities in the UK from the fifteenth century onwards, unremitting strategies of sedentarisation have led to legislative measures that persistently enforce settlement. Identities have been spatialised through the trope of the nomad and “[c]aravan sites have become an integral part of the state’s regulatory power over Gypsies” (Greenfields and Home 2007, 137). This is not merely a figurative construction, as the trope of nomadism is used metonymously to describe Romany ethnicity as a means of regulation (Greenfields and Home 2007, 139). McDonald (2002, 392) subverts this synecdoche through an inversion of water imagery so frequently exploited to demonize the disordered flood of nomadic Roma. And the river water running away in the opposite direction as if it knows something I doesn’t and chuckling as it flows with little cross-currents and bits of broken water and backwashes and whirlpools and the whole world wearing me down into the ground.

In this extract, the water signifies both a current of preordained movement, and similarly a space in which multiplicities are colliding and interacting, disrupting the stronger path of the current with interruptions and breaks and new directions. McDonald’s use of alliteration – “the whole world wearing me down” – introduces a sense of fluid continuity, gesturing towards an assemblage of unity; this is however subverted through the finality of a definite end point, a mortal limit to the space, as he is “worn into the ground” by the huge expanse of everything he is battling against. This metaphor reflects the juridical techni-

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que of enclosure, which McDonald explores within the text, reflecting the way in which the Gypsy community was often punished harshly and unforgivingly for their association with mobility defined juridically as “vagrancy” (Greenfields and Home 2007, 136). Some have argued that this historical nomadism reflects the fact that contemporary Roma communities “possess a continuity, rather than a community, of culture” (Hawes and Perez 1995, 7) in which they are then spatialised as outsiders, regardless of settlement. McDonald (2002, 587) identifies the mythology of this reading of continuity through his positioning of nostalgia as a dreamscape, in which as he imagines a former life lived by many. Thoughts running back a hundred years to the hopfields and hazel branches of the bender tents and ‘tilters and the roadside verges and the broomdashing and colourful vardas drawn along at a leisurely pace by the little banners and the fift of the gum-sha-lack. Head dropping and eyes half-closed and don’t even notice the soft little paws of sleep stealing (McDonald 2002, 587).

The evocative use of enjambment reflecting the movement of a unified and yet disordered and desubjectified cavalcade demonstrates the need for a spatio-temporal critique of the narrative of culture as a form of continuity which can escape the act of spacing, and enables a pernicious discourse of passivity to take hold, excluding the way in which temporal episodes emerge in the present, unsettled spaces of modern law.

2.4 Trespassing in the city with Django Reinhardt The process of marking and segregating the metropolis has been productively explored, through the examination of the ways in which these spaces are regulated (Blomley 2004; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2007b; Valverde 2012). Legal Geography has also focused on the production of legal orders in increasingly complex urban spaces (Von Benda-Beckman 2002; Azuela and Meneses-Reyes 2012), in addition to taking into account the role of law in the construction and transformation of the city (Santos 1992; Torres 2009), the spatial dimension of place in a legal context (Ford 1999; Blomley et al, 2001; Sarat et al 2003, Benton 2009), and the way in which the urban landscape is physically structured through segregated practices of citizenship and belonging (Delaney 1998; Razak 2002; Van Gelder 2010). This chapter will attempt to build further on the exposure of the relationship between law, power and space (Braverman et al 2014) though a critical spatio-legal reading of a literary text, in order to consider “the pragmatics of world making” (Delaney 2010, 24) and the rhetoric of the sedentary order in the context

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of Diaspora. This literary jurisprudence reveals the delineation of containment as fallible and unsettled, if only because it is predicated on the notion of who reigns sovereign in the production of space. Reading the spatio-temporality of Diaspora through the figure of a nomadic Manouche musician growing up in Paris asks us to attend, therefore, to the ambiguous question of exclusion and spatial access, asking whether this subject is “standing outside at the gates” or, indeed, is “already here” (Volpp 2012, 1).The governance and delineation of the spaces of the urban will be explored through a reading of Django – The Life and Times of a Gypsy Musician by Michael Dregni (2004), a biographical account of the life of the famous jazz guitarist. Born on an encampment in Belgium, Django Reinhardt was part of a nomadic Manouche French family who settled on the outskirts of Paris in 1918. Dregni begins by recounting the early years of Django’s life as he roams in and out of the centre of Paris from his home in the outer-limits, a ramshackle collective of shanty towns known as la Zone. Cultivating a particular style of “vagabond music […] a bastardized string jazz [which] allowed the dispossessed to speak” (Dregni 2006, 7), Django’s apparent positionality as an outsider invites a distinctive close reading of spatial models of power, in order to suggest new ways of thinking about the impossibility of containment in the context of the law and space. Drawing on Michel Foucault, this chapter will argue that the site of la Zone is symbolic of wider disciplinary practices manifested through a pure vision of law and the construction of space in the urban context. As Mariana Valverde writes, “the urban is best seen as a jurisdiction, a jurisdiction that is as much functional as it is spatial, and that is furthermore characterized by certain habits of seeing and governing” (2009, 140). In other words, the legitimacy of the city is protected by the paradigm of power implicated in a jurisdiction “characterized by […] seeing and governing” as part of a wider emphasis on preserving the unity of the legitimate, pure space of the city and protecting it from contamination from the unlawful Other. The slums of la Zone rested uneasily beside the site of one part of what were originally fortress rings, the building of which became more vociferous in the nineteenth century, designed to protect the city in a strategic topography of enclosure (Sutcliffe 1993, 24). La Zone was effectively a strip of wasteland in front of the bastions of the old Thiers wall, which remained a site of contested battles over legal and political responsibility (Morton 2000, 161). The vision of a city shielded within such fortifications, even when they have since become obsolete, is a reflection of the historical need for containment or enclosure, whereby territorial acquisition masquerades as protection (McLaughlin and Muncie 1999). In the case of the Roma Diaspora, a system of sedentarisation explicitly reveals the ongoing colonial impulse to contain as a mechanism of control (O’Nions 2007, 7; O’Nions 2011, 361). Indeed, the classification of the

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Manouche as “nomadic” can itself be read as a “de-ethnicizing process” (Liégois 1994,194), enabling the label of “without fixed abode” to be applied as a classification of dispossessed status (hence a slum on waste ground, outside the city limits, could be deemed not only necessary but ‘appropriate’). Whether defined as “Gens du Voyage” [Travellers], nomads or “tsiganes” [Gypsies], itinerancy became a defining legal characteristic of de facto statelessness (Warnke 1999, 359). Angus Bancroft (2001, 147– 148) traces a particular “topography of exclusion” in which Roma communities have been defined by their place within a “spatial order [whereby] those on the outside edges of society usually find themselves restricted in their ability to use and manage space, to move freely through it or to remain in it [through] the ordering of space”. Thus, a hegemonic spatial order constructs a paradigm of marginality that prohibits access to the city, and in so doing denies the inhabitation of those defined as dispossessed. In this way, the spatial order seeks to obscure the reality that “all residents of the city, even the least powerful, are involved practically (to greater or lesser degrees) in the production of space” even whilst some are “alienated from the oeuvre they are active in producing” (Garbin and Millington 2012, 2071). This denial of a “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1991[1974]) is exposed as fallible through the dynamic and fluid interdependence of the law’s relationship to the city, and the figure of the itinerant outsider. A critical approach to law and the city can enable a mode of inquiry that remains observant to the spatial constructions of the law, and the way in which a complex dynamic of legal codes reveals the Foucauldian operations of power in urban spaces. A close reading of the biographical text challenges the construction of zones of exclusion within the cartography of the city, thus exposing the fallibility of the flawed dichotomy of the pure and legitimate inside in opposition to the degenerate marginalized outside. This reveals the unsettled assemblage of normative codes implicated in strategies of containment, informed by Foucault’s (1977, 45 – 47; 2004, 46) paradigm of the “plague city”, as part of a process of movement which exposes the invisible dynamics of quarantine. Django demonstrates an alternative way of reading the spatio-temporal production of la Zone as a marginalized space and thus, the segmentation of power in the living city. These counter-hegemonic narratives of inhabitation are a means of revealing the invisible interrelationship between law and space as a disciplinary process of fallible quarantine, and reflecting upon this symbiotic production in the context of Diaspora discourse. In his capacity as legal professor at Westminster, Andreas PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos (2012, 11) asks his students to take a walk around the city in which they live. He instructs them to “get tangled in places you do not know, feel a little lost”, to immerse themselves in an exploration of the spatialities of

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the urban. Such an exercise demands that you notice, for example: where you are stopped; where access is restricted; where you cannot go, and, conversely, where you make your own space, where you might, as it were, see the sign and step on the grass anyway. The results are the recognition of a spatial cartography which seemingly separates the city into sites of order and legitimate public space and the illegal city (Datta 2012), zones of the public and the private, a division of “the liminal zone of the ‘known’ city into a realm of illicit encounter” (Garrett 2011, 272). Nicholas Blomley (2003, 124) argues that law can be ultimately perceived as a reliance on the binary division between the safe and secure centre and its unsettled externalities: “[i]nside lies stability and order, outside disorder, violence”. For Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, this exercise is a way of getting his students to unsettle this dichotomy between disordered or ungovernable spaces and legitimate sites, suggesting alternative means of mapping the urban in order to explore what he calls the “lawscape” of the city.²¹ He describes the lawscape as “a connection of reciprocal invisibility between law and the urban space” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012, 4): through this task, he is asking his students “to remap it by throwing themselves in the middle of its folds”. This represents a heightened version of interlegality (Santos 1987) a concept addressing the recognition of multiple legal codes operating in a single space, or “the process through which new legal regimes emerge from the interaction between what are often, misleadingly, through or as discrete legal systems or social entities” (Ballard et al 2009, 23); in this instance, these systems are acknowledged as spatial configurations of power. Hence, a focus on the city is a focus on “the legal production of urban space and the urban construction of normative presence” (Fitzgerald and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2008, 437). As a constructed system of rules (Green in Hart 2012, xv, xx) the law can, theoretically, be cartographically mapped, and thus finds its perfect double in the broad alleyways, straight lines and boulevards of the regulated city. As a form of enhanced legal pluralism Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ (1987) concept of interlegality re One way to explore this further may be to consider the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Wrenching this theory away from its positivist proponents, Anders La Cour and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2013, 4) suggest a new way of thinking about Luhmann’s “concept of encounter, seen now through an autopoetic lens [which] does not distinguish between encounter and encountered but allows the generation of space on both sides” to be conceived “as the preludes to potential structural couplings”. Drawing on Luhmann’s later work, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2011, 49 – 51) describes this re-thinking of systems theory as “critical autopoesis” which turns away from the appropriation of normative closure – in other words, a “fetishization” of or “an excessive emphasis on the system itself” – towards an understanding of a system as rather “an assemblage of sorts without promise of future form, consistent boundaries, identifiable characteristics or positive functions”.

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flects an awareness of the co-existence of different legal orders recognizing what could be termed a living map of the law, as it pays attention to the interstices between the multiple codes and normative fields that structure our daily existence. When read against Foucault’s (1977, 45 – 47) concept of the plague city, in the context of technologies of control known as quadrillage [dividing the city up into governable sites of quarantined zones], taking account of interlegality reveals the resistant capillary movement of productive power against the utopian political moment of the city in its most prohibitive manifestation of disciplinary governmentality. Thus, despite the intent to quarantine and contain – where law is pervasive in its authoritative restrictions of movement – the Diasporic exists as part of an infected, sprawling, voracious spatiality in which power never rests. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2007a, 83 – 84) is both evoking the sense of interplay at the crux of this paradigm and distorting it further, by asking us to consider interstices in the urban as a reciprocal and dialogic convergence which highlight the way in which “law’s normative surplus of categorizing, naming, organizing […] is manifested in the materiality of the urban [just as] the city is reflected onto the legal internalisation of power struggles”. Within this framework, we must attend to the spaces of the law by acknowledging that “law is spatial, corporeal and more broadly material, and that this spatiality makes the law at the same time hyperpresent and absent” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012). Thus, to explore the spatiality of the law demands a focus on the structures of power and conditions of normative regulation operating on different scales within the singular jurisdiction of the city. The sense of alienation from the visceral environment in which we are living has deadened our ability to engage with the ‘scapes’ (sound-, smell-, colour-, land‐) which are – or should be – a part of our process of inhabitation (Porteous 1990). The disciplinary practices of legitimised and delegitimised place, as enacted through “zones of control” in which that which is “repugnant” is “screened off by being situated on the periphery of cities” (Urry 2011, 354 [in reference to Bauman 1993]). Reading the lawscape is thus a form of resistance to the “strict spatial partitioning, careful surveillance, detailed inspection and order” (Elden 2003, 243) enacted as a means of prohibiting contamination. This is not, then, reading the city walls as a mean of separating outlaws from insiders, but rather first acknowledging this practice of governmentality as one of instituting “multiple [spatial] separations” (Foucault 1977, 198). In Michel Foucault’s distinction between the leper and the plague, the former represents isolation but the latter containment, separation and absolute control: in other words, the leper designates “rituals of exclusion” (Foucault 1977, 198). This is why the paradigm of the plague can incorporate the recognition of interlegality in order to critically deconstruct the law and city, as although the model is a utopian non-place, its

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urge to contain means that all normative codes are implicated in its construction. Drawing on the critical recognition of interlegality as a means of reading legal spaces as “superimposed, interpenetrated and mixed”(Santos 2002, 437) provides a means of unsettling the capillary network of power at work in the plague city. In this context, a close reading of la Zone in Dregni’s text explores this space not as the dead end of the city or a no-man’s land of exclusion but as a part of the city, or a space of “domination/resistance [which is] always in a process of becoming” (Garbin and Millington 2012, 2070). This is important for the close reading of the settlement of la Zone beyond exclusion, as a means of exposing the fallibility of the city as enclosure, whereby the infiltration demonstrated within the text unsettles the myth of spatial purity. Domestic laws in France, in common with the rest of Europe, have historically focused on the need for containment or enclosure, restricting the movements of Roma (including the Manouche) from the fifteenth century onwards (Hancock 2002, 53; Simhandl 2009, 77). Containment worked as part of a broader “strategy of spatial governmentality” (Sanchez 122) in which the legal construct of the city symbolizes the successful establishment of “order against disorder” (Picon 2008, 6). Django’s movement through the city exposes the intricacies of the lawscape as a form of resistance, to emphasise “[t]he exercise of continuous control over a plague infested town, with its […] division and subdivision of power” (Davidson in Foucault 2004, xxi). Reading the text through a Foucauldian theoretical framework of interlegality is thus a means contesting the idea of la Zone as a site of exclusion. In this first extract, Dregni (2004, 11) firmly spatialises the city through what seems to be a firmly located cadastral grid: Paris was still protected by its ring of medieval ramparts, and it was here on the doorsteps of the city that Django’s family lived. Outside the fortifications, the city’s glory came to a dead end. Surrounding Paris was a vast nether region known as la Zone.

The city is “protected by its ring of medieval ramparts”, the strong and solid “fortifications” of a defensive cartography. The text sets up a rigid distinction between the spaces which are inside this border: la Zone is positioned through a hierarchical metaphor of scale, located as an externality “on the doorsteps of the city”, as if held waiting at the point of entrance to the centre. Moreover, it is spatialised through a depiction of temporal distance as a site of eschatology: outside the City of Light, was a city of blight: It was in la Zone that Paris’s cesspool cleaners dumped their waste each night and here as well that the human refuse of the city found refuge. Here is where you come to die, it is the place where the ‘waste’ is ’dumped’ (Dregni 2004, 11).

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The text constructs a space of death for the disposal of the plague victims’ sorry corpses. Unlike the city, which is firmly shaped and identified, this space is that which surrounds, it is conditioned distinctively through corrupted mortality. Where the inside of the “City of Light” provides a clinical topography of “broad boulevards, monuments, and cathedrals” (Dregni 2004, 11) – material symbols of colonial power, longevity and hierarchy – the outside is a chaotic and corporeal confluence of many personified places, unnamed “cities of shantytowns [which] crowded the fortification ports” (Dregni 2004, 11). This, as Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2012, 9) observes, is where law’s unsettlement reveals itself, as “[s]patial uncertainty, the lack of direction or destination, and the resistance to given measurements and spatial divisions, is precisely the kind of thing the law fears”. The personification of the numinous here creates an interesting juxtaposition: where Paris is read through the solid linearity of cold stone, the “vast nether region” of la Zone is a living, breathing space; the shantytowns are anthropomorphized so that they cling to the stone walls “like beggars holding out their hands for the smallest offering” (Dregni 2004, 11). Materiality is challenged and subverted, as “homes to the dispossessed” are constructed out of “castoff boards and stone rubble” – habitation fashioned, in other words, from the detriment and the waste of the centre. This paradox of a living, corporeal externality manufactured from the detritus and effluence of the legitimate reveals that in fact la Zone represents both the end and the beginning of mortality for those in the centre. In contrast, then, to the narrative of a non-place beyond society and civilization in which la Zone exists as a “separate space in which undesirable activities could take place in order to preserve the purity of dominant, ruling space” (Nelson 2002, 219), the “crowding beggars” of the external spaces are revealed as both origin and locus of mortality and departure. This sense of law’s paradoxically futile tendency to obscure its reliance on a fatal spatial order reveals its desire and simultaneous negation of closure: it has to be there, to receive, but at the same time, this process must remain unseen. For, like death, law has an “intrinsic claim to fix, determine, and hold life” (Fitzpatrick 1999a, 120), but it must not be bound. It is itinerant, uninhabitable. Thus, as Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2012, 8) observes, attending to the way in which the law authorizes the urban space is key as “spatial materiality, affects first and foremost the disciplinary closure of the law”. The task of locating the law in the city is complex due to its concealment – it must be everywhere and nowhere all at once, hence, “[a] legal city is full of procedural labyrinths, representational nooks and crannies, loomed over by a towering sovereign in whom all originates and to whom all ends” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012, 21). The law is marked by its linearity in the recognition that spatiality in law pro-

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vides “a certitude of destination” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012, 8) whereby it demands both closure and simultaneously a receptive site for the deposit of its hidden excess. The space allotted to outlaws beyond the frontier must, therefore, act as a limit point spatialised as both an irredeemable elsewhere and as a non-productive site. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2007a, 87) writes that, indeed, the “city lacerates itself by constantly dividing its entrails, distinguishing between inside and outside, safe and unsafe, ’abatement’ and ’enhancement’ areas where the law ploughs the land and gives birth to abysses of fear”. In this sense, the disciplining of corporeality must always remain a prerogative of the law, for if left exposed it reveals the visceral human processes of reproduction, digestion and death conditioning space as fecund, living, and dangerously reproductive. Dregni creates a second, subversive interpretation of this space through the insistence that it is also a place of refuge. This challenges the concept of the space of the dispossessed, as it gives a new meaning to the context of possession: what it is to live within, but outside, to be what may be called a possessed possessor, a real in/habitant. Yet again, this space is revealed as more than a relegated marginality; rather than a passive site receiving the posthumous it is depicted as both an interrogative threat to the city and an active space of refuge. This portrayal establishes a sense of dialogism in power relations: these personified externalities are, in their multiplicity, more than simply a reminder of the passage of life processes (through the powerful metaphor of digestion and waste), as they represent a critical manifestation of the analytics of power in the construction of the futility of seeking an ending in that which spreads, challenges, and demands. In this text, la Zone therefore represents a realisation of spatiality as something unmappable and uncertain. The city must then always be read a peculiar site of encounter, with what is exorcised emphasising only that the urban space is, as Derrida (1998, 16) writes, an “axiom of incompleteness”. Thus, whilst “the zone was a place apart, taboo, and marked by the supernatural and the sacred” (Morton 2000, 157) it is a manifestation of the inescapable contamination of space that remains intrinsic to the construction of the lawful city, in which “[t]he urban is a myth, a desire and an ideal […] but one that has a distinct temporalization [as] a legal assemblage” (Valverde 2009, 153). Dregni (2004, 11) quotes a passage from the French poet Serge, in which the latter draws a densely textured, vibrant picture of la Zone. Down there in the Gypsy camp a guitar juggles with a popular melody. One can hear distant dance music, dizzying waltzes, the sweetness of an accordion. Campfires are everywhere.

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The enjambment and peripatetic syntax highlight the convergence of multiple sites; the passage is highly sensory, as we are told of the discordant auditory assault of a “guitar juggling with a popular melody” set against “dizzying waltzes” competing with the smells of cooking and the smoke of distant fires, evoking a visceral sense of spatiality which emphasises its complex structure is indeed an “immense assembly”, a metissage of vitality as opposed to a passive enunciation of last rites or eschatological nothingness. Serge captures this vibrancy with the insertion of multiple clauses and the sounds of different tongues – for him la Zone is “a colourful puzzle of an itinerant city”, a converging site of “crazy disorder”. This is not a narrative of utopia, however, the power relations which condition (and are conditioned by) the space are never absent. For Serge there is always evidence of rottenness superimposed over the conflux of sensory enchantment, resonant perhaps of Santos’ description of “contact zones” as assemblages, or “social fields in which different normative life worlds meet and clash” (Santos 2002, 472) as a useful means of theorising the spatialization of law. In Dregni (2004, 11) the space is productive and never in stasis: the markets, for example, are “blossoming out of the mud”. This extract undulates with movement, as it is not only Django’s family who are weaving in and out of the places he names, bringing their own space with them, but the space itself which is in flux; it is a site of “glorious anarchy”. Acknowledging the spatial inevitably draws on a form of deconstruction to recognise such anarchic constellations, in order to deconstruct the qualitative condition of “a certain ‘elsewhere’, a ‘non-site’, ‘non-place’, or ‘atopos’” (Wigley 1993, 184). Exploring space as a process of production is to consider the concept of an “opening not understood as a new space that can be occupied but as an opening in the very idea of space” (Wigley 1993, 185). The idea of an opening disrupts the idea of the city as firmly boundaried, with outlaws situated beyond its borders, as power relations are instead invoked in a visceral performance of infiltration from la Zone to the contaminated city. The detritus and filth invade everything, here is a pile of chicken carcasses, further a heap of old Camembert boxes, elsewhere a small mound of rags; the same filth covers the walls, the pavement of the streets and all that lives in this empire. The humanity that swarms in this refuse seems to form a body with it (Warnod 1926 n.p cited in Morton 2000, 158).

This “swarming empire” defies containment as a method of control, part of a broader system of “territorial strategies” designed to impose order (Beckett and Herbert 2010, 2). The principle of order is not, however, negated in favour of anarchic dissimulation but in the complicity of an assemblage: movement here is resistance, rather than a denial of segmentation.

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In any discussion of resistance within a spatio-temporal model of the city it is important to consider how the conflicting convergence of disparate legal orders is negotiated as a form of counter-hegemonic practice, what might be defined as Lefebvre’s “right to the city” (1991 [1974]) as it is manifested through the category of the undesirable outlaw. This analysis considers how Django can inhabit this world, where inhabitation is interpreted as world making, within the plague city. Dregni (2004, 11) describes la Zone as “Django’s world”, firmly territorialised through a narrative which antagonizes familiar narratives of possession. Django leads a gang who tie their identity to a hierarchical positionality conditioned through class structures – the gang call themselves “les Foulards rouges” [red scarves] and wear these to symbolize their identification with “the Parisian working class”. They are therefore are firmly located in a spatiotemporal framework of resistance, as they defiantly inhabit a strata of society defined by capital and labour, identified within a specific historical hierarchy, although they still lay claim to a unique group identity. In this way, whilst they symbolise local resistance, they represent more than a manifestation of counter-ideology. Django’s gang fearlessly stole pears from the walled orchard of the Saint-Hippolyte priory, sweet juice dripping down their faces as they ate the forbidden fruit […] Other days, they tried to derail trams on l’avenue d’Italie (Dregni 2004, 11– 12).

Dregni’s exploration of illegitimacy is heavily spatialized; stealing occurs from within a “walled orchard”, and in attempting to “derail trams” they are subverting the structured and delineated routes of the city. This evokes connotations of a rhetoric of criminality in which restricted access to space conforms to a particular paradigm of prohibition (Beckett and Herbert 2010, 2). Their crimes occur in identifiable locations, streets which are named – such as the avenue d’Italie or the avenue des Gobelins – and yet the ease and fluidity with which Django and his gang are able to “fearlessly” trespass over the boundaries of acceptable access to space, pushing at the boundaries of legitimacy and challenging the rigid contingency of the city’s cartography, exposing its reliance on disciplinary rituals of power. Exploring this cartography through the figure of Django and his gang reveals the way in which “norms determine limits and borders of exclusion by creating categories such as owner and trespasser” (Torres 2009, 287). Through their subversion, the gang does not simply display an anarchic disregard for a system of rules, but a contingent system running in parallel with norms of legality, with their own territorial codes and hierarchies. These actions unsettle the paradigm of regulated movement, their divergent trajectories exposing “the spatial regulation of the law, the boxing up and locking in and separating and puri-

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fying” (Philippopoulos- Mihalopoulos 2012, 20) [my emphasis]. The concept of purification is particularly interesting if considered in the context of the plague city (Foucault 1977), particularly if their movements across the city are read in part as a perversion of sacred rituals, such as the stealing of the forbidden fruit and the way in which the gang “prayed with religious fervour for a spectacular crash” after they “jam the rails with iron bolts stolen from the nearby Panhard factory” (Dregni 2004, 12). The text demonstrates that adopting a convergent system of codes and norms is more than simply mimicry of a particular social order or a perversion of traditional hierarchies: it is evidence of inhabitation and the porous and indefinable construct of legitimate spaces. Here is a visceral demonstration of the impossibility of containment through an emphasis on unsettlement, a negotiation which reflects the work done by Santos (2002, 287, 289, 426) looking at the recognition of diverse legal orders operating on distinct scales and “creat[ing] different legal realities”. Santos’ research demonstrates that local legal orders exist as an operative system of adaptability. This is made apparent in the context of reading oral legal traditions and, importantly, disparate strategies of dispute resolutions across the heterogeneous legal cultures of the Roma Diaspora (Weyrauch and Bell 2001, 46). Santos (2002, 99) writes about his experiences looking at the law of the favelas in Brazil, exploring “the creation of an internal legality, parallel to – and sometimes conflicting with – state official legality”. Making the spatio-temporality of law uncomfortably visible in this way addresses the conceptualisation of law in spatial terms (Twining 2010, 478), as the unsettling of the relationship between law and space exposes law as a particular spatial construct in which one can observe “a plethora of often competing normative frameworks” (Buchanan 2009, 35).²² In this way

 Simon Roberts (2005, 2– 13, 23) explores the articulation of different norms that may exist within the state. He argues that legal pluralists seeking law beyond the state often fail to acknowledge the difference between negotiated orders (global/local) and legal orders (state). He provides a brief historical overview of the development of negotiated order between states (’international law’) and local acephalous orders (native law) in a critique of the idea that the nation-state consists of “multiple, inter penetrating legalities”. Roberts argues that far from being emancipatory, this approach leaves a depleted sense of what law actually consists of. Roberts acknowledges that the normative domain is heterogeneous, and systemic claims to singularity by state law are problematic, as the nation state is part of a larger constellation. He suggests that the ways in which we talk about power must acknowledge a genealogy of the normative but he argues that we must recognise the way in which autonomy was always localised. As such, he cautions against a situation where “law loses analytic purchase”. However, it can be argued that Roberts’ denigration of what he calls “native” or “folk” orders reflects a hierarchical Westphalian ideology. Roberts argues against a totalising reductionism, which obscures what it claims to subvert and neither subsequently denies heterogeneity nor provides a full account of

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the paradigm of the plague as envisioned by Foucault is productive, as it turns away from the pure space of exclusion characterised by a singular wall and the excluded leper, because “[w]hen the city is plagued it is impossible to move the plague victims outside” (Agamben 2005). Reflecting upon the manifestation of collisions reveals the way in which narratives of inhabitation interact within an itinerant network of power. Django’s resistance is not, then, a negation of this model of disciplinary power but rather reflects how bringing space with him, subverting and producing space through these legal orders exposes “not exclusion but quarantine” (Foucault 2004, 46) as the paradigmatic model of containment and transgression. The critical aim of this reading of unsettled inhabitation is not to deny law’s role in anticipating quarantine but instead to expose the spatiality of law and the mutual authorization of city and law in a segregation of the false dichotomy of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ space, or as Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2012, 21) argues, to write against the law and the city’s prerogative to “dissimulate their legality [by making] it hyperpresent”. It is not only, then, that Django and his “clan” are living in the boundaries of Paris, for the motif of unsettled inhabitation is much more fluid than that. The outlying region of la Zone has its own law: indeed it is its own “world”. It is not merely the shadow of Paris or the city’s receptive Other, as the way in which they negotiate the boundary line is a complex negotiation of territorialised survival. This reading has aimed to hint at a peculiar kind of revelation of a city through the negotiated traversal of its disciplinary spaces, making visible the coupling between the two. Exposing this relationship is inherently problematic, as it renders explicit the way in which “the city fears the law while inviting it [as it] fears the way in which its urban mapping thematises the world” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2007a, 87). The suggestion here is not, then, that Django inhabits a utopian world, but that he inhabits an already unsettled space, and in doing so interrogates the normative boundaries of the urban space as it is conditioned through the law (and vice versa).²³ It is neither law. However, legal pluralists such as Santos (2002) account in more nuanced ways for the issue of multiple normative orders and legal configurations, whilst Roberts both derides the simplistic model of law as governmental power, yet seems to present a similarly binary view of the state as absolute. There is an argument that the critical framework of postmodern theory leaves in its wake a not utopian wasteland but the negotiation of legal orders from the perspective of the marginalized other (Simmons 2014), not with the aims of providing a de centralised systemic ontology but rather to acknowledge a form of virulent anti-universalism.  It is worth taking into account the trial of the academic Bradley Garrett, part of a group of urban explorers describing themselves as “place hackers”, who were taken to the magistrate’s court in London on charges of conspiring to commit criminal damage. The group claims they primarily exist to gain “access to derelict, secret or otherwise off-limits parts of the city” (Self

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illegality nor trespassing which threatens the limits of the city, but the exposure of the relationship between the two and the capillary operations of regulation: Foucault’s plague as paradigm is a reflection of power as disciplinary segmentation and its complex operations of infiltration, rather than a binary mode of exclusion. In this sense, the itinerant city is both the consequence of critical inhabitation through a Diasporic display of regulatory structures that are supposed to remain outside. Indeed, the absolute mode of pure spatial order free from contamination can never be realized, as: [w]hat makes possible the living community of the generations who live in and construct the city, who are permanently exposed to the stress of even projecting a city to be de- or re-constructed, is the paradoxical renunciation of the absolute tower, of the total city which reaches the sky (Derrida 1998,16).

Despite these claims for the productivity of the dispossessed in remaking or unsettling segregated worlds, the topography of la Zone still persists through the rhetoric of exclusion. Though the wall is long gone, the route of the Thiers wall – the Boulevard Périphérique – is a road which continues to separate Paris and its “banlieues” [suburbs]. Dregni (2008, 18) continued to observe the proliferation of quarantined space when he went to search for traces of the famous jazz musician on the streets of modern-day Paris. Even today this other world endures. I make my way through the Clignancourt markets to the north where Romani encampments hang on. Near the Stade de France […] a pathetic handful of Gypsy caravans huddle in a triangle of unused land beneath a highway and the shaking embankment of the railroad tracks. Roofs and walls of discarded plywood connect the trailers […] scraps of rugs carpet the mud pathways. A bonfire of burning junk emits a noxious black cloud in the center of this little ville, a scrum of Romani standing around it, joking and laughing. A little further on, in Le Bourget, a vast no-man’s land has become a nomads’ land […] la Zone lives on in scars and scabs that refuse to heal.

Dregni reveals that la Zone still exists in the banlieues which, though no longer slums clustering the ramparts, are marginalized and segregated, with high levels of unemployment and poverty amongst their migrant inhabitants (Garbin and Millington 2012, 2068; Chrisafis 2015). The ghostly remnants of la Zone also haunt the temporary encampments housing Roma families forcibly evicted by 2014). Their trial exposed “conflicting visions of urban space”, in which the “aggressiveness of the authorities’ response reflects a deeper level of anxiety about the city and the way we all live in it”. Activist strategies such as those employed by Garrett demonstrate the ways in which prohibition quarantines the city, mandating a narrow access to space through a juridical framework of spatiality.

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the French government, in direct contravention of the free movement directives of the EU (Bennett 2011; Samuel 2014). The refractions of the spatio-temporal city in the text thus render vivid the symbiotic relationship between contamination and containment in Diaspora, and the way in which law constructs a version of temporal universalism through an ommission of its spatiality (FitzGerald and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2008, 436). Hence, it is clear that law relies on a notion of absence which is only disrupted through Diaspora, when “a spasm in the way one moves […] out of one’s normal lines of movement brings fits of legal presence centre stage” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012, 15). However, Foucault’s paradigm of the plague does not preclude resistance to this inclusively normalizing gaze: disciplinary power is, in effect, multifluous and productive. Whilst the plague city is the impossible utopian non-place in which contamination is kept at bay through the dynamic process of segmentation and division, contamination is paradoxically critical to the vision of a sedentary spatial order: for, “in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague” (Foucault 1977, 198). Thus, contamination is defined not by exclusion, but the exposure of unsettlement in the crucible of the literary text.

2.5 Nomads, outlaws and frontiers in Ronald Lee’s The Living Fire This chapter will attempt to deconstruct the ‘organizing framework’ of the sedentary order through a critical analysis of the novel The Living Fire (2009) by Ronald Lee. The Living Fire is a work of auto-fiction portraying the “saga of a Canadian-born Rom” (2009, viii). This reading will reflect upon the narrative as it both resonates with and resists multiple forms of Diasporic spatiality in the lawscape, reading the condition of the outlaw through a spatial frame (Mitchell 201, 241). The novel is theorized here as a critique of the sedentary spatial order, and an articulation of the inherent complexity in Diasporic space, interpreted as a “plane of consistency peopled by […] infinite bits of impalpable matter entering into varying connections” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 282). In other words, it is the “plane” itself that will be deconstructed, without rendering it obsolete. The numinous perspective of Baruch Spinoza provides a means of addressing spatial ontology without rendering it unreal or making only abstract claims to space. Hence, this analysis proposes to consider the textual aesthetics of the corporeal and the spatial in a way which acknowledges their role as potentially “infinitely small, ultimate parts of an actual infinity, laid out on the same plane of consistency or composition” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 280) whilst analyzing their po-

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sitionality in the broader construction of Diasporic space. A Spinozan ethics is an attempt to emphasise the peculiarly contorted condition of Diaspora in the context of space, which may provide a framework for deconstructing Diaspora by reflecting upon the way in which Spinoza’s work explores spaces of collision, multiplicity, and incommensurability (Klein 2003, 188; Mack 2010, 3). Exploring the Roma Diaspora in this way runs the risk of elevating the singular Diasporic body as a totem for a non-homogenous entity, justifying juridico-political definitions of a non-territorial minority as a conglomerate whole. Spinoza’s work effectively focuses on what could be termed this particular post-human ethics, whereby, “[i]n affirming the infinite multiplicity of animation, Spinoza withdraws the special status of the human being, yet not in the name of an univocal life or essence” (Klein 2003, 196). This perspective is deeply rooted in presence and the concept of interaction, set against the concept of an exteriorised metaphysical space, creating an effective frame in which to think through the concept of spacing beyond a focus on the deviant or illegitimate body in space. The novel is about a character known as Yanko, a Canadian of Romani heritage who hitchhikes, engages in itinerant labour practices, engages with other Roma and encounters many impoverished and nomadic individuals as he travels across urban Canada. The narrative is not about a gradual revelation of genealogy – for Yanko frequently introduces slippages between assertions of status and simultaneous negations of belonging (Lee 2009, 126) – but rather, a subversion of performances of heterogeneous and layered anti-genealogies. His sporadic employment as a manual labourer is juxtaposed with a personal hobby of building models of ships in great detail – “the basis of a collection showing the history and gradual evolution of the ship from the earliest Nile boats of the Egyptians through classical times to the Middle Ages” (Lee 2009, 100). By filling his house with material objects he performs the role of “most rootless people who aspire to higher status, [by trying] to buy myself a past” (Lee 2009, 183) effectively demonstrating the paradox of the pursuit of fixedness or legitimate recognition through a system of exchange, within which identity becomes one of many expendable categories of spatiality. Yanko’s narrative is one of always appearing to offer up his identity as performance, mapping out his body to reflect the cartography that suits the socio-economic context of the moment. Lee (2009, 19) writes that after engaging in manual labour with a friend Yanko’s “habits and mannerisms were now so fully those of a Gypsy that I was no longer ever mistaken to be a Gazho [non-Gypsy]”. The power that emanates from such self-determination echoes, to some extent, the contortions of Diaspora on the normative plane. The novel does not, however, insist on a heroic narrative of self-discovery but instead explores the revelations of multiple journeys, evoking a cacophony of tongues making a variety of claims about anti-territorial authenticity. Yanko’s

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closest friend Kolia is described as a speaker of “the inflected dialect of the Easter European Gypsy clans” (Lee 2009, 3). Similarly, when Yanko encounters Kolia’s father, he observes that: [w]ith his Mexican poncho and exotic green felt hat he had the air of Pancho Villa or some other bandido and his fierce-looking moustache recalled days long past when Gypsy palikara carried weapons against the Turks in the Balkan wars of liberation (Lee 2009, 16).

This characterisation positions Kolia’s father as an embodiment of multiple migrations and spatialities, challenging the singular narrative of legitimacy derived through solid territoriality. He is more than a representation of practices of mimicry within a postcolonial state of hybridity, as he represents the rejection of spatio-corporeal order authorised by the designated limits of genealogical citizenship, limits exposed, or at the very least denigrated, through the Diasporic. This exposure is rendered explicit throughout the text by the way in which Lee (2009, 69) plays with discourses of legitimacy, exhibiting Kolia’s “primitive features” whilst suggesting that authenticity can simultaneously be performed. This subversion of the boundaries of paradoxically appears to account for fluidity whilst acknowledging resolute categories of identity: for example, Lee (2009, 121) writes that, “[a]s a European-born Gypsy, [Kolia] didn’t get along too well with the North American-born”. The text therefore engages with origins whilst accounting for the possibilities of disguise, thus introducing a form of resistance much more creative than mimicry. His lined and weather-beaten face told of his former life on the Hungarian plains. This was no modern North American Gypsy kingpin, but an old man who looked as if he remembered the plains and forests of Hungary, Carpathia, and Moldovia (Lee 2009, 38).

Thus, whilst this description seemingly establishes an originary link to another place embodied in the subject – “the plains and forests of Hungary” – these are no more than imprints on a shifting metamorphic corporeal plane. The performative way in which these stories of past origins are initially recounted and then almost immediately revealed as ambiguously performative – it only “looked as if he remembered” – establishes an ethical politics of alterity, whereby the subject can be cartographically located only through unsettlement. Yanko is informed that: [y]ou can be anything in Canada, even Black or Indian […] but they’ll never let you be Rom except on the road or in the slums with the rest of the Turks. If you want anything better for yourself, you’ll have to become incognito (Lee 2009, 69).

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This “incognito” ideal is confined to a cartographical imperative that attempts to define what is authentic only to confine it to the margins, offering transformation without the possibility of flight. When Yanko asserts that “Rom sim tai Rom merava – a Gypsy I am and a Gypsy I’ll die” (Lee 2009, 69), Lee’s play on the performative reveals that these deaths are in fact multiple and subversive, not only in their defiance of the ideal but also in the problematisation of the concept of an originary source. This subversive intent is apparent in the juxtaposition of concepts of metamorphosis and regeneration, in which people can become “Canadianized”. Each ruled his respective vitsa, or clan, in his own way and each clan had managed to survive and multiply in Canada. Demitro thought more like a European Gypsy and tried to make his people follow the older, more honest ways. Burtya, on the other hand, was Canadianized and ready to try any swindle or penny-ante racket if he thought he could get away with it by paying off somebody somewhere (Lee 2009, 89).

Lee explores the notion of “surviving and multiplying” through a disruptive strategy of playing with contamination and unsettlement as themes of ‘legitimate’ inhabitation. The way in which this text portrays the nomadic is crucial to rendering an aesthetic framework of “movements of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 191), in which movement must necessarily be interpreted outside the sedentary spatial order. This depicts movement outside migration, as an ontological condition that “neither begins nor ends” (Klein 2003, 193). Although Lee (2009, xiv) engages with the trope of the nomadic (for example, one of the tarot cards regularly inserted into the text features a symbol of this self-identifying motif, relating that “the face in the moon is Diana, goddess of nomads”) he strays far from casting Yanko as a perpetual outsider. Whilst Yanko and his companions engage in itinerant labour and move frequently within the country as self-designated outlaws, Lee’s self-portrait is not of an exile from a closed normative system; the way in which Yanko maps out his own corporeal cartography is an exposure of the unsettled spatiality of the lawscape. Defining Diaspora through the recognition of the anti-territorial is not to opine for transcendence, but rather a different form of occupation in which all spatiality is revealed as a mutually constitutive belonging. If a community had no rival entities, there would be no need for it to constitute itself. It would simply “be”. However, in this solitary existence, it would also be impossible for it to constitute itself for it would have no “outside” to mark its bounds (Pahuja 2011, 136).

In this way, Yanko celebrates a subversive form of nomadism in which a series of bodies establish themselves as they would wish to be, but only in accordance

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with laws of citizenship that outlaw these very bodies. Hence, the “community” of Diaspora in this instance is both boundless – “[t]he more I lived among these Kalderash Gypsies the more I became convinced that they had some kind of telepathy that enabled them to communicate with one another” (Lee 2009, 14– 15) – and evocatively destabilizing and exclusionary, in which Yanko considers that “[p]erhaps, after all, we Gypsies really were the bastard sons of Abraham and Hagar […] cursed to roam the world as pariahs with every man’s hand against us” (Lee 2009, 193). Rather than turning to materiality to account for this precarious juxtaposition of transience and fatal metamorphosis, or “the gradual Canadianization of my people” (Lee 2009, 93), it is worth considering Spinoza’s reflections on substance as a form of spatiality. Whilst a focus on the material can insist upon the grounded performative nature of subject-making within the normative conditions of legitimacy, a consideration of substance allows us to broaden our analysis to the Diasporic under law as a non-linear, borderless concept which is “nothing other than, or beyond, its modes” (Klein 2003, 193). Whilst Derrida’s critique of Spinozan ethics grapples with an alterity that is implicit in the construction of these ‘modes’ (Düttman 2011), it is important to reflect upon the ways in which Spinoza dismantles the notion of limitation whilst remaining vehemently opposed to totalities of any kind. Drawing on Spinoza, it is possible to read the encounters with objects in the text as a mapping out of cultural networks of hierarchy, in which substance is spatiality that devours and consumes. As Lee (2009, 119 – 120) writes: [t]hey were all too ready to give us their stinking Bibles, toothbrushes and their own brand of lobotomizing education, but they would never give us equality of culture. To this woman, I was nothing more than the native chieftain, Yanko Lee, King of the Romeo Gypsies. [sic]

The differentiation of cultural aesthetics here culminates in a hierarchical subversion of power, where “anarchy and unity are the same thing” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 175). Diaspora, if read spatially, has the capacity to incorporate a recognition of the substance which generates this particular lawscape, without reducing it to the level of a stratum or linear hierarchy. This is reflected at least partially in the text through the way in which Lee defines Romani as a form of “secret code” as part of a resistance to the violent renaming of the world through law, by identifying new forms of determination through alterity. Yanko is admitted into this network of transgressors only after he has been christened with a “Gypsy name” (Lee 2009, 16), where his becoming represents a reassertion of “what remains” (Deleuze & Guttari 1987, 179) rather than a transcendent metamorphosis. The idea of substance as “what remains” resonates with a Diasporic

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critique of the spatiality of the lawscape. The re-naming of identity reflects contortions that are made apparent from the very moment law manifests itself as sovereignty, “substantively understood as ‘juris-diction’, or the ability to speak the law” (Pahuja 2011, 135) [my emphasis]. In the text, the ability to “speak the law” is both a representation of self-possession and of the coding of alterity, with exchanges conducted between the central characters in untranslated dialect. These coded shapes are sacred, therefore, precisely because they are spectral: the absence of meaning (for both reader and audience within the scene) haunts the page thus marking its presence. This also generates a distance between the reader and narrator, inside and outside the text, where the reader who speaks no Romani is given no tools to decipher the code. Unsettlement is therefore self-determined beyond the status of outlaw or exile, in a recognition of Diaspora as a state in which “the organ is exactly what its elements make it according to their relation of movement or rest, and the way in which this relation combines with or splits off from that of neighbouring elements” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 282– 283). Although this represents an affirmative form of spatio-temporal self-determination, such unsettlement can seemingly invite discrimination, as Lee (2009, 104) identifies: [t]he Gypsy by his very existence is the negation of all the hypocritical values that society holds dear. He cannot be allowed to exist as he is; he has to be lobotomized like any other savage or nigger before he can enter the white man’s world.

This strategy of “lobotomization” bears connotations of Frantz Fanon’s (1963, 210) description of colonial rhetoric as a process whereby those being colonized are stripped of their former histories, spatialised as only and ever present subjects (yet forced, in Diaspora, to drag their genealogy along behind them). Coloniality is exposed as a potent system of spatio-temporal ordering through this act of severing subjects. Lee (2009, 106) provocatively interprets “what remains” differently, as constructs as part of a network of modes existing “beyond the law”. Yanko claims that, “[l]ike Kolia and Jilko, I was an outlaw, a person without roots or records” (Lee 2009, 78), situating himself as marginalised by misrecognition, defined by alterity beyond the reaches of a normative spatio-temporality yet in doing so, evoking the symbiotic relationship in which “sharing this common being-outside-the-law, beast, criminal and sovereign have a troubling resemblance” (Derrida 2009, 17). Hence, rather than emphasising a grid in which his marginality is emphasised, there is no distant space either to come or from which a corporeal body can be exorcised: “what remains” is unsettlement in the lawscape of the present. Lee’s (2009, 161) sense of unsettling the lawscape

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erupts through Yanko’s drive to “fight back, somehow, to form an army of all those who had wanted to be Canadians, to help build a great country, but had been shut out”. In this instance, resistance to the hegemonic lawscape is not a reflection of the absolute indivisibility of the law, but rather symbolises a continuous cycle of refraction in legal spaces. A Gypsy woman would break the law by telling somebody’s fortune, less often by taking a few bucks from his wallet, and the police would then arrest her for running a disorderly house. The judge would reprimand her for her life of sin while her husband paid the fine and pocketed his receipt. A few days later the same woman would be back again and the whole performance would be repeated (Lee 2009, 67).

Here, Lee exposes the illusion of juridical order predicated upon notions of containment as a vital part of a performance of authority. This revelation of ongoing unsettlement can be observed in the following scene at a bar, in which Yanko watches his Indigenous American girlfriend dancing a Gypsy dance whilst a raucous crowd applauds her display. “Christ,” I thought happily. “What savages we are.” I realized, suddenly, that we were outlaws not because we were not Canadians, but because we were. Here were people of all origins, almost all of them born in Canada, barring the odd immigrant like Jilko or Kolia, enjoying themselves in a frontier-style get-together within sight of the skyscrapers and the synthetic entertainment of commercialized culture (Lee 2009, 71).

The notion of the frontier is critical in this instance, not as the border between the legitimate and the dispossessed, but as the site of interaction between these bodies of different Diasporic affiliations, which activate severed “assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 184). It is, hence, this “Canadian melting pot” (Lee 2009, 113) which reflects the radical potential of Diaspora as spacing strategy to evoke the inherent unsettlement of the lawscape. Lee’s original novel was formerly published as Goddamn Gypsy in 1973, and its twenty-first-century republication displays the fluctuating legalities of the relationship between settler and nomad. Whilst in some respects, subsequent policies of multiculturalism can be seen to have benefited the Roma population in Canada, recent discrimination levelled against Roma refugees has challenged perceptions of tolerance and community coherence (Beaudoin, Danch and Rehaag 2015). Indeed, The Living Fire demonstrates the attempts by the dominant authorities to prohibit migration and emphasise assimilation prior to the Multiculturalism Policy of 1971 and the Multiculturalism Act of 1988. When Lee (2009, 142) writes that “there was talk in official circles of running [the Gypsies] out of town during the season in an effort to clean up the city”, there is an implicit emphasis on disease and contamination, in which the city is the space which must

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remain sacred. Here the spatial paradigm of the law – “[a]ll these permits and licenses and new bylaws” (Lee 2009, 94) – conditions the way the territory is imagined, as the “conserving violence of law” (Cornell 2003, 156) both authorises the spatial limit and attempts to draw space as that which is neutral. This guise of spatial neutrality contrasts with the reading of space through Spinoza as active and contingent, reflecting “a turning and rolling in, a joining and connecting […] folding in and folding out” (Klein 2003, 193 – 194). The framing of space in juridical terms obscures this unsettlement in favour of doctrines of possession and physical representations of spatial order. This is emphasised through Yanko’s reflections on the correlation between the post-industralised spaces of the city and the space of the nomadic: “‘[t]hat’s progress, Pavlos’, I told him. ‘The skyscrapers go up and the Gypsies go down’” (Lee 2009, 105). The narrative of “progress” as an effect of sedentary modernization reiterates the positioning of Diaspora as evidence of regression to pre-civilised space. Here, nomadism evokes a primitive state of nature, merely awaiting (but, crucially, always held in stasis before) the march toward modernity, where Yanko observes “the towering skyscrapers visible through the open window and tried to visualize the world of the future, perhaps a world without a place for us” (Lee 2009, 121). In this sense, containing and thereby rendering invisible the outlaw to preserve an ideal future is exposed as an essential part of law’s process of spacing. Lee’s emphasis on that which should have remained invisible as part of the teleology of the nation-state reveals the way in which law is being suspended, and, moreover, what it is that is being suspended here, if suspension is read as a spatial movement of looking towards that which might never come, playing with time through a form of temporal collapse. This is encountered in the text when a lot of the Roma are restricted to practicing the non-itinerant trade of fortune-telling, even though it is “technically illegal in Quebec province, but in the slim areas where the Gypsies usually live the police either ignored them completely or fined the women periodically for prostitution” (Lee 2009, 67). The effect of this coding is portrayed through the analogy of the fairground: the choice for those criminalised for fortune telling is exile or jail, confined to the urban limits in either case. Lee (2009, 67) writes that “Gypsies knew that this merry-go-round could go on forever”, a nod to the mythological connotations of the nomadic lifestyle as well as a mythologised space of commerce fetishized as a hyper-real non-place, in which the lawscape is being constantly negotiated to reveal its own utopian imaginaries and mediated cartographies. “I’ve opened the city again. We’re moving back in from Toronto.”

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By “opened”, he meant that he’d been down to City Hall and paid somebody off to get a certain number of permits issued to the various family groups under his influence. This would enable them to sell horoscopes and trinkets […] “I told ‘em to go slow,” he added, “no rough stuff, just honest fortune-telling and pickpocketing […] No use burning up the town for nothing. I’ve warned them. I opened the town again,” he concluded grimly, “and I’ll close if it anybody gets out of line” (Lee 2009, 88).

In this instance, the tribal leader demonstrates the way in which the ontology of dispossession can be routinely subverted through the revelation of spacing in the context of law. This subversion is repeatedly expressed through Yanko’s reflections on the nature of outlaws within the normative system – “Gypsies, beatniks, we’re all outcasts” (Lee 2009, 25) – as a powerful critique of the dominant sedentary order. Yanko’s resistance takes on a multiplicity of forms, including gestures towards violent rebellion: “Why don’t we take guns, bombs and fight for own fucking country. Long live Romanestan!” (Lee 2009, 160); the building of maritime objets-d’art in order to engage with the juxtaposition of motion without hope of departure; and an unconstrained mockery of the ambivalent mythologisation of nomadism in the non-Gypsy world, such as when a journalist is primarily concerned with asking questions about “the past, the horses, the tents, the wagons […] and all the other trappings of the pseudo-Gypsy culture she’d read about” (Lee 2009, 102). Dismantling the notion of legitimate settlement, then, as a rigidly binary, normatively coded spatial order, does not have to necessitate replacement with either a utopian alternative of unmediated movement, nor does it have to suggest only an emptiness is the possible consequence, but rather instead, these layered forms of resistance question what it means to be ‘settled’, and what form of legitimacy this presupposes. Indeed, Lee (2009, 51) explains the interaction of minority legal orders within the broader disciplinary culture. He describes various instances in which the “Kris Romani” [Roma court] are called to offer judgment “to discuss the problem of Kolia’s elopement and what legal steps to take [having] thrown himself on [its] mercy”. Yanko is also intrigued by the European Gypsies who are “campaigning internationally for representation in the United Nations, self-determination and international identity as a people in their own right” (Lee 2009, 114). He successfully applies for an “identity card from the World Romani community as the delegate general in Canada” cementing his Diasporic affiliation and proudly hanging “the blue and green flag of the Romani people on the wall” (Lee 2009, 117). This assertion of a trans-territorial identity relies on a dual movement of migration and enclosure: as it can only be recognisable as a sovereign claim when it “sets the origin and the ends of community, when a community gives itself formally in self-jurisdiction” (Douzinas 2007, 22). This sacrificial paradox creates a potential trap, in which the articulation of nomadism as a foundational capacity

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for self-jurisdiction instigates a demise, particularly as the law has always policed the boundaries of sovereignty as a principle determined by territoriality. Yanko’s girlfriend Marie tells him to effectively renounce his claims to self-jurisdiction, in fear that “[a]s soon as the Government gets after you, you’ll end up on reservations in shacks with a wooden shithouse outside” (Lee 2009, 99), devoured by a territorial contestation of sovereignty that, for Marie, is only ever capable of sedentarising. Indeed, for Lee (2009, 34) there is an ominous contrast reflected in the lives of Indigenous Americans. There was something genuinely sad about these city Indians. First, they had been pushed into reservations where there was nothing but cold, hunger and unemployment. Then they’d come hopefully to the white man’s cities, only to be driven into the slum ghettos. The Gypsies were different. If they’d ever had a land of their own it had been swiped so long ago that it had long ceased to have any valid meaning.

In this way, the spatio-temporality of disputed claims to sovereignty – to “a land of their own” – are constructed as issuing from a site of temporal collapse, as Marie asserts, “[w]e Indians don’t have any future” (Lee 2009, 47). Hence, the perpetual attempt to to adopt a “recoding” (Vismann 2005, 9) of space risks reifying a messianic form of pre-conditioned order, or to be required to simply accept that “[t]he law defines what is relevant […] there is no stopping the law” (Cornell 2003, 153). However, this denies the potential which recoding may have for simply acknowledging spacing as unsettlement, through a recognition that, after all, “sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 397). Thus, the condition of self-sustaining reiteration in which “[t]here is no outside point to which we can turn” (Cornell 2003, 165) cannot contend with the imperative of Diaspora’s capacity to reveal the contortions of the lawscape. Sovereign authority maintains a particular claim to “legitimate violence” (Caporaso 1996, 34), but only if mandated through a distinct form of spatial order. Lee (2009, 207– 209) writes of an escalation in violence at a crowded bar as an indication that “[a]ll the pent up hatreds of these oppressed minority groups and individuals were exploding right here” until“[b]odies covered the floor and the place was wrecked”. Within the text, there are neither denunciations of chaos nor laments to a lost homeland, but rather a celebration of metissage.²⁴

 Defined here after Edward Glissant (1981, 251) as the “poetics of relation”, a reflection of space as a “mixture of races and cultures that sweeps away notions of racial purity and singular origin” (Britton 1999, 16).

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The Gypsies stopped playing their traditional music and broke into a syncopated Gypsy adaptation of the Afro-American beat. This was Gypsy music too, but wild, aberrated and above-all, North American. It told of the big cities, the concrete jungles, the vice, corruption and garbage, of the endless moving in and out of ramshackle houses, the rats, the bedbugs and the cockroaches, the endless trips to the Salvation Army for junk furniture, of the magnificent feasts followed by the hunger and cold of the winter. It tore through the subconscious mind (Lee 2009, 217).

These “wild, aberrated” rhythms evoke a powerful topographical journey of survival, fighting against urban claustrophobia and a pervasive sense of temporality anachronistically rooted with the disruptive immigrant histories of the African and Gypsy Diasporas in North America. This represents a spatial pre-conditioning in which interrelationality within Diaspora space is a manifestation of connectivity, rather than union, assimilation or totality (Klein 2003, 213). The radical potential of recognising Diaspora as pulsing clauses of riotous waves of sound lies in a spacing which “tears through the subconscious” and insists on emergence and encounter in the interstices of an itinerant celebration of living in the frontier. The literary text is a productive space in which to recognise the unsettled chaos laid bare behind the fiction of spatial order, in the knowledge that with the death of absolute authority the framework of coherence, which holds the law together, is potentially rendered obsolete (Pahuja 2011, 113). Diaspora exposes this unsettlement, so that it can be said “[n]ow we are at home [though] home does not preexist” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 343). Hence, in reminding the law of the “myth of its originary foundation” (Cornell 2003, 158), we can hope to envision a radical new coding of unsettlement. Before me are two roads, which should I take? The Gypsy road or the non-Gypsy road? I took the non-Gypsy road but I didn’t go far I got into big trouble, big trouble (Lee 2009, 14).

3 Diaspora Space 3.1 Property, possession, and proper use of space The topography of the lawscape incorporates spatio-temporal narratives of property law and hyper-present mechanisms of regulation, resulting in “a tapestry of concepts of possession, ownership and title” (Graham 2011, 203). This “tapestry” constructs a spatiality which either negates the validity of place as a distinct concept under the law, or exists purely at the level of representation, in which it matters only because of its capacity to be owned (Graham 2011, 44). The particularity of possession as a spatial modifier also obscures the way in which the lineage of purchase and commodity rely on the singular legitimacy of the owner and yet, paradoxically, property designates a relationality of absence and presence between multiple subjects. Indeed, it could be said that if, as the popular adage goes, “possession is nine tenths of the law [then] most of the other tenth is the construction of deviance as a moral marker” (Bancroft 2005, 82). Although this form of construction establishes spaces the law cannot reach – despite its colonial claim to title and emphasis on an all-encompassing territorial grid – a rejection of this paradigm interrogates the normative boundaries of legitimate space without having to conclude that there is indeed an ‘outside’ to law. Moreover, it also avoids the exploration of the complex materiality of the spatial order, whereby, for instance, “[b]oth modern and contemporary property theories abstract the physical and insist that property signifies something else and possibly nothing at all” (Graham 2011, 159). Nicole Graham’s work, therefore, aims to interrogate the dimensions of that which is rendered present through its absence, commodified within a matrix of value. The law is essentially dephysicalising, removing the material realities of place, and yet there is not a blank space mapped out through the relational activities of marketization lying beneath the law. The economic commodification of the space may thus exist largely in the abstract, but it still draws the boundaries and limits of a very recognizable space that, in the case of Diaspora, can be witnessed as the distinct edges of a transnational free market, in which property law values legality as a relationality above all others (Graham 2011, 177). For Graham, alienation begins at the point at which land is conceived of as property, extends through the cleaving of people from place through various processes of displacement, and ends with the segregation of planning which divides communities into units of self-contained individuals. Focusing on the concept of alienation introduces an unsettling of possession, exploiting the sense of abstract relationality in the context of Diaspora, reflecting Graham’s (2011, 24– 26) etymological journey into property, DOI 10.1515/9783110544251-004

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and evoking the “strange inversion of the people-place relationship that [property] originally described”. Graham examines the complex “relationship between property and identity” through the enclosure movement and the making of the modern Westphalian nation-state. Acknowledging this complexity presents a challenge to the orthodoxy of the role of legitimate ownership in opposition to the dispossessed, as it reveals the multiple spacing movements of relationality between people and place. In this way, it considers the function of alienation to narrativise property “in terms of relationships that were universal and dichotomous, rather than particular and pluralistic” (Graham 2011, 58). Abby Bardi (2008, 112, 118) highlights the way in which, as itinerant outsiders, the Romany in England historically became fictional tropes employed to legitimate the paradigm of possession. In her analysis of the characterization of Heathcliff’s “Gypsy” heritage in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Bardi argues that through “rejecting conventions of property and ownership in postfeudal society, Gypsies became a convenient receptacle for anxieties about other social mores”. However, the roots of this spatial order and state control are not absolute, for “(p]roperty ownership […] is infinitely malleable”. It is thus the juxtaposition of a doctrine that finds its paradoxical universality rendered visible and explicit in the construction of the concept of the home. Recent ECtHR jurisprudence has attempted to draw alternative lines of spatial order in order to fashion new spaces of proprierty that take account of relationality, through limiting the capacity of the state to “interfere” in certain spaces.¹ However, it appears from the juridical response to similar cases that the concept of “home” is only present through its negative articulation; in other words, only when it is threatened is the concept invoked, suggesting that at the heart of this discourse is unsettled absence. “You see”, property will say, “now I am not even my own idea. I’m just a bundle of other concepts, a mere chimera of an entity. I’m just a quivering, wavering, normative phantasm, without any home, without anything to call my own but an album full of fading and tattered images of vitality and consequence and meaning” (Penner 1997,1).

It is worth considering this “quivering, wavering, normative phantasm” in the context of Diaspora, in order to analyse its role in the construction of narratives

 See Lăcătuş and others v. Romania [2012] application no. 12694/04 at 82. Lăcătuş, the destruction of the claimants’ homes (in a violent riot) was held as a violation under Article 8 (the protection of private and family life). This followed the decision in Moldovan and others v. Romania [2005] 44 EHRR 16, in which the court found a violation of Article 8 after a similar incident in which the Roma settlement had been burnt down by locals (including local police officers).

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of the sedentary spatial order. To play on this idea of the concept of property as one that is effectively homeless in terms of its implications, is important for a reading of the Diasporic as a potential refutation of sedentary orders of imperium in which property “has lost its solid reassuring, conceptual distinctiveness” (Davies 2007, 19). The demand for rights to private spaces – such as the home – as part of broader doctrines permitting access to certain spaces reflects the way in which the “legal system both reflects and constitutes a special social order” (Bancroft 2001, 41). Reading the disciplinary process of “strategic enclosures – space that is specifically marked off from other spaces and closed in upon itself” (Dungey 2014, 18 – 19) through a Foucauldian gaze insists on a deconstruction of the sedentary spatial order by observing how “spaces are organized [through] the strategic partitioning of the enclosure”. For this reason, this section will consider the ideology of planning in respect of its assumptions of spatiality, and in particular, the rhetoric of enclosure in terms of access to space. In a study of the UK, according to an OSCE report, a high proportion of planning applications put forward by the Gypsy and Traveller minority are denied (OSCE 2000 quoted in Coster v. United Kingdom [2001] 33 EHRR 18 at 80). Whilst the previous Government claims that inclusion is the focus of their planning agenda, the emphasis on “a shared commitment to a common set of values” is to some extent undermined by the unsubstantiated reference to “the conflict and distress associated with unauthorised encampments, and the anti-social behaviour that sometimes accompanies such [unauthorised] sites” (ODPM Circular 01/2006: 4). Hence, despite the juridical emphasis on obligations to protect minority culture, access to space is restricted to a process of enclosure and containment, whereby the needs of the Gypsy and Traveller community are pitched against those of the settled community without recourse to the need of the former to establish homes, or their already existing ties to property. Whilst government initiatives claim “to promote more private gypsy and traveller site provision in appropriate locations through the planning system” (ODPM Circular 01/2006, 5) they neglect to define what these “appropriate” locations might be, and how a Diasporic articulation of spatiality might fit into these locations, if positioned within a narrative whereby “the law of spatial enclosure is still an operative principle” (Bancroft 2000, 44). One way of finding a new vocabulary in which to talk about possession in this context is by engaging with the ideology of planning, policing and control in relation to property and access to particular kinds of space in Diaspora, in addition to the juridical notion of proper use of space. The issue of proper use and its intrinsic authorisation of legitimate entitlement is completely obscured from what is constructed as a battle between the Roma Diaspora and the settled, where the emphasis is on “the responsibility of gypsies and travellers to respect the planning

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system” (ODPM Circular 01/2006: 6).² This demands further deconstruction of the juridical construction of private spaces, particularly as, whilst European law protects the right to a home, there is no clarification of the context of what that particular space should look like. In this context, the rhetoric of preserving proper use of space for the settled maintains a rigid cartography, where certain spaces must be “protected” (Coster [2001] at 123) in a way that narrativises Diasporic access to space as dysfunctional, or threatening. The cases that have come to the ECtHR emphasise a balancing exercise in which minority group rights evidently do not provide sufficient protection when weighed against the preservation of particular spaces engaging concepts of property possession and proper use.³ Often the space that is designated outside the boundaries of this preserved space takes on a peculiar identity as a liminal or non-place (one government circular, for example, noted that previous Green Belt land can only be assigned as a Gypsy and Traveller site, but not a formal residential lot (ODPM Circular 01/ 2006)). Similarly, these Other places must shrink to the point of invisibility: sites “should respect the scale of, and not dominate the nearest settled community [and] should also avoid placing an undue pressure on the local infrastructure” (ODPM Circular 01/2006: 13). Such wording constructs the sites as oppres-

 Such issues were examined in Lee v. United Kingdom [2001] 33 EHRR 29 at 17 nt 12, but only insubstantially, when the Court took note of the Planning Inspector’s direction that he was “not satisfied that the type of horticulture outlined demands living on the site”. However, although planning permission had been refused to the Romany site on grounds of damage to the environment, it had been granted to a vast industrial farm and large residential site for six hundred units. Hence, as Angus Bancroft (2000, 42) argues, the occupation of the land by Gypsies and Travellers is ruled problematic because “they fall between the two zoning principles […] the level of mental and spatial division between work and home that characterises settled society”. The argument over proper land use was also heard in Coster v. United Kingdom [2001] 33 EHRR 18 at 98, where the court submitted that “[t]he interest of gypsies in residing on their land was not seen as a useful or indispensable land-use feature and therefore automatically carried much less weight in the domestic balancing exercise”. It seems, therefore, that as long as these two functions – of residence and functional utility – are kept separate, the right to reside is preserved.  In Lee v. UK ([2001] at 80), the court found that “the decisions of the planning authorities refusing to allow the applicant to remain on his land in his caravans […] constituted an interference with his right to respect for his private life, family life and home” , and held that this interference was justified in accordance with the law. On the occasion where a violation was found (in Connors v. United Kingdom [2004] 40 EHRR 189) the Court held that this was due to inadequate procedural safeguards and disproportionate interference with the applicants’ rights under the Convention. However, this ruling appears to have been a response to improper judicial review and the particular circumstances of the eviction, rather than as a consequence of challenging the foundations of legitimate occupation.

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sive monoliths with the potential to infiltrate or threaten settled, protected spaces, as if they represent potentially contaminated, hostile and impossible externalities of perpetual non-compliance. Recent cases before the ECtHR have involved formerly nomadic families seeking to demonstrate that both in their evictions and the refusal of planning applications, their rights have been violated. In the UK, a recent High Court decision found the Communities Secretary guilty of discriminating unlawfully against planning applications from Gypsy and Traveller communities, in a breach of the Equality Act 2010.⁴ Most contain the same narrative, namely that the family in question “led a traditional travelling lifestyle until they suffered so much from being moved on with ever increasing frequency and harassment that they settled on the gypsy site run by the local authority” (Connors [2004] at 9).⁵ Many plaintiffs attempt to argue that the officious degree of enforcement within a restrictive and antagonistic planning framework represented a violation of the right to respect for home, family and private life contrary to Article 8 of the European Convention. Effectively, however, the court is groundless to do more than weigh public interests against the rights of the individuals, arguing in Chapman v. United Kingdom [2001] 33 EHRR 18 at 86 that where planning issues were concerned, domestic authorities “were in a better position to evaluate local needs and conditions than an international court”. This thus leaves the issue of the ideology at the crux of deterministic planning regimes and the complicit assumptions about rightful access to unsettled space frequently unexamined. Under the ambivalent terms of planning law, the authenticity of your right to reside as a nomadic gypsy is not determined through your ethnic heritage, “but in how you are living your life at the time of the planning application” (Tracada, Spencer and Neary 2014, 19).⁶ The use of the nomadic label thus becomes a form

 From July 2013 Communities Secretary Eric Pickles had been able to intervene in cases of planning involving green belt land, leading to a backlog of recovered appeal cases and delays of up to 30 months (Kochan 2015, 6). Despite the ruling – or noticeably, offering redemptive solutions – Planning Minister Brandon Lewis stated that the “judgment does not question [the] principle [that] both temporary and permanent traveller sites are inappropriate development in the green belt” (quoted in Kochan 2015, 7). However, although the recent ruling in Moore and Coates v. Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [2015] EWHC 44 held that the Secretary of State had engaged in a disproportionate and discriminatory means of dealing with Gypsy and Traveller planning applications, there was no attempt to fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of the planning objective and its claims to prohibit access to space.  See also Chapman [2001] and Coster [2001].  The ODPM Circular (2006, 6) defines the Gypsy and Traveller minority as “[p]ersons of nomadic habit of life whatever their race or origin, including such persons who on grounds only of

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of paradoxical stasis, emphasising movement whilst putting in place a disenfranchised separateness without value in relation to property law and the paradigm of possession. It offers entitlement to a specificity which is ultimately disenfranchising, establishing an ontological limbo in which the Roma Diaspora “are not allowed to take root and […] are instead forced to live upon the discards of non-nomadic citizens, often refused a stable and regular lifestyle; but at the same time […] hindered in their movement” (Orta 2010, 11). Alessandro Simoni (2011, 13 – 15) charts the development of a nomadic identity through an analysis of the continental legal environment, focusing in particular at historical attempts to control nomads in France through legislative measures directed implicitly at Roma. He writes that, “while the formal category (‘nomads’) used in legislation could be perceived as referring simply to an ‘itinerant lifestyle’, the travaux préparatoires and initial comments of scholars leave no doubt about which group was covered by the new control system and how this was unanimously perceived”. Whilst for Simoni reflections on ethnicity have been brought into the courtroom in order to displace the narrative of the nomadic outlaw, it can be argued that this narrative remains oppressively resistant. Nando Sigona (2005, 745, 752) has written extensively about the use of the nomadic label in a socio-legal context. As Sigona reports, the indiscriminate use of the label nomad in Italy to describe Roma and Sinti, “regardless of whether they are Italian citizens or foreigners, travellers or sedentary people, war refugees or economic migrants” has thus been employed to deny full access to citizenship. The Roma are separated and defined as a distinct legal identity with little status or entitlement, and as such permitted to survive on temporary visas, possibly for many years, “under the continuous threat of expulsion”.⁷ To emphasize the problematic assumptions implicit in the rhetoric of exclusion and the prohibition of access to particular kinds of space, it is useful to employ the interpretative framework of Diaspora space as “the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them’, their own or their family’s or dependants’ educational or health needs or old age have ceased to travel temporarily or permanently, but excluding members of an organised group of travelling show people or circus people travelling together as such”.  Sigona (2003, 70, 77) discusses the speed with which Kosovo Roma refugees were labelled ‘nomads’ “as soon as [they] approached the Italian coasts”, thus categorised as dispossessed and resulting in different treatment compared to others who were displaced. The perception of Roma as a group of itinerants was a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Sigona observes that restricted access to basic services and a lack of documentation meant that “the only possibility of survival […] was to become ‘nomads’”. There is similar evidence of Kosovo Roma living in illegal settlements elsewhere in Europe, where they are rarely registered and few mechanisms for assisting registration exist (UNHCR 2007).

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are contested” (Brah 1996, 209). In other words, it is a complication of the very idea of a legitimate, settled home and the rightful access to space through the paradigm of possession, recognizing that multiple articulations of power are operating in space. Reading Avtar Brah’s analysis “of location in its widest sense [as] not fixed but formed by the everyday politics of power” (James 2008, 8) constructs a critical framework in which to explore the interactions between law and the space rendered inaccessible to the Roma Diaspora, attending to “the role that location can have” (Temple 1999, 17) in a possessory paradigm. The notion of collision within relational space takes account of this Diasporic community as “archetypical bricoleurs who sort, discard and integrate elements from the surrounding systems within which they live” (Greenfields and Home 2007, 140). This forces us to unsettle doctrines of property, possession and proper use through an acknowledgement of the practices of spacing, deconstructing the normative framework that leaves this Diasporic minority “out of place” (Sökefeld 2006, 265). Using a variety of texts which depict “the intricate relationships between law, power and space” narrativises the unsettled spaces of settlement, and “legal codes of spatiality [which] have served to control and shape the lives of Gypsies and Travellers” (Greenfields and Home 2007, 136, 138). What makes a subject Diasporic, Brah (1996) suggests, can be observed in the layers of power relations at work in their contemporary spaces; complicating the notion of location suggests that it should be configured in a broader and simultaneously more nuanced sense than through the abstract label of ‘hostland’. In this way, Diaspora space challenges the classical paradigm of Diaspora, in which concepts of origin, point of departure and Return frame the genealogical limits of space. In contrast, Brah’s work turns our attention to the lived spaces of Diasporic communities as multi-layered, complex, dynamic and evolving. The way in which Diaspora space acts as a critique of settled society is particularly useful in explaining how “the nomadism of Gypsies and Travellers contests the norms of sedentary living” (James 2007, 368). Diaspora space implicates all subjects in the process of spacing at work in the sedentary order. Brah’s (1996, 196 – 197) work is about not only complicating discourses of migrancy, then, but also depictions of possession and the home, offering an attempt to analyze “discourses of fixed origins, while taking account of a homing desire”, evoking the Diasporic encounters implicitly and explicitly evoked at the site of the local (Mukta 1999,109). As such, Diaspora space problematizes the construction of ‘homeland’ and ‘hostland’ as resolute and self-contained categories (Safran 1991). In this way, it is the assumptions made about being ‘settled’ which come under scrutiny (Sökefeld 2006, 280). As Brah (1996, 181) writes:

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[d]iaspora space as a conceptual category is “inhabited” not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. In other words, the concept of Diaspora space (as opposed to that of Diaspora) includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of “staying put”.

This concept does not discount nomadic identity markers, but suggests it cannot be considered in isolation from narratives of settlement. Like Foucault, Brah (1996, 189) does not suggest power is a simple phenomenon which is always oppressive, and exerted from the top down in the paradigm of possession. Instead, she considers power as a dynamic and complex process, which can be resistant as well as possessive, and is enacted, embodied and encountered everywhere, where Diaspora can be understood as that which is “embedded within a multi-axial understanding of power; one that problematizes the notion of ‘minority/majority’”. Unsettlement in relation to property, possession and proper use of space therefore reflects a critique of the sedentary order and opens up “a new, emergent space of inquiry” in Diaspora discourse (Hall 2012, 29).

3.2 Autobiographical tales of uncanny space and unsettled encounters The autobiography A Gypsy Princess (2011) follows the life of Violet Cannon as she and her family move around various sites in Northern England. She writes of her attempts to map the city despite the restriction of access to space: “[t] he site in Bolton Woods was on top of a steel bank in a hilly part of Bradford […] we had stayed in many areas of the city including Low Moor, Tong Street, Canal Road and Bolton Road” (Cannon 2011, 32). Naming locations in which she has resided reflects a resistance against confinement through a self-determined assertion of positionality. Indeed, Cannon rides atop the city, surveying its streets in a way that potentially suggests an alternative topography of the lawscape is possible. The sense of resistance or differential tracing is evoked slightly differently in Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two by Maggie Smith-Bendell (2009, 9 – 10), who describes one particular encounter between her family and the authorities thus: “You can’t stop here,” said the policeman. “Put that fire out and get moving” […] “Let me tell you something, mister. This patch – your patch – will be here long after you’re dead and gone,” said me dad. [sic]

The recognition of temporal continuity in space acts as a form of resistance to the territorial claim of terra nullius, in which all space can be owned and mapped

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through imposition of the regulatory grid of the law. In the spatio-temporal narratives emphasized in these texts enclosure is therefore always incomplete, as access to space can never be effectively prohibited. As such, these texts play with doctrines of legislation in a way which expands the concept of cultural resistance demanded by the autobiographic genre (Benstock 1988).⁸ Considering autobiography as fiction enables us to make no distinction between biographical narrative and other literary constructions (Dow Adams 1994, 459), opening this spatial analysis up to multiple interpretations of the lawscape. The drawing of space in these texts also creates another form of spatiality in which elements of the real and the imagined play out as the narrator traverses the landscape of their memories. Smith-Bendell, for example, combines personal anecdotes about the shaping of her world in childhood with direct references to an active juridical context, such as the obligation to protect the right to private and family life and the limits of interference in the case of Buckley v. United Kingdom [1996] 23 EHRR 101. Smith-Bendell (2009, 244) becomes an active figure in the battle against the repressive planning regime, represented by various council officials and the local courts, and draws on the Buckley decision “over and over again as it would help me to help many others of my race”. She notes that the process of submitting a local planning application (and the subsequent appeal) was framed as a battle between legitimate local dwellers and itinerant Gypsy and Travellers, termed “The Land Grab” by the tabloid press in order to suggest the latter were poaching space, though in fact the issue contested was not one of ownership but of proper use. Since the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 had effectively criminalised nomadism and offered no alternative suggestions for accommodation: it had created, then, a designation of spaces which were effectively considered blank by virtue of their negation, supported by the rhetoric of improper use of land. Interrogating what is meant by proper use of land exposes any attempt to contain the Roma through rigidly limited sites and localities, by turning on its head “the vexed question [of] what material space they can occupy and what place they can have in the world” (Greenfields and Home 2007, 136). In A Field Full of Butterflies, Rosemary Penfold (2011, 137) recounts stories she heard whilst she and her family were residing on land purchased by her relative:

 Autobiography is often regarded as a strategy for giving voice to those who are often marginalized, whether through gender (Benstock 1988, 5 – 6); race, gender and ethnicity (Stover 2003, 6); sexuality – “the lesbian’s definition of herself is part of a larger movement by all oppressed people to define ourselves” (Segrest 1985, 102) – or other discriminated or historically silenced minorities.

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[t]hey had been pushed from pillar to post, never knowing what the next day would bring. Jobs on the land were few and work was hard to find after the war. When they found work it was very poorly paid, and sometimes all they got were a few vegetables […] They had travelled the country, hoping and praying that they would be able to find somewhere where they would be allowed to stay. Even when his wife was in labour, they were told to move on. It was only after the intervention of a local doctor that his wife was able to deliver her child in peace. The very next day, however, they were made to leave […] Granny assured them that they could stay for a week or two, but even she could not help any more than this. She had been told by the local council that only a limited number of families could live on the land. We would all be in trouble if we allowed them to stay too long. Granny had had several battles with the council already, and she was not prepared to have any more.

Although this is seemingly a narrative of being “moved on”, it also is one of marked territory, in which Penfold’s grandmother must battle to defend her own space. Despite the categorical imperative of legitimate possession, the text reflects the constant sense of antagonism in play, as although her Granny is the rightful owner of the land the council retains power over it through planning policy and legislation. There is an indication throughout of a very thickly defined boundary between us and them (although “they” are always collective and invisible), a sense of fighting against or perpetually being moved on by “them”. Notably, the helpful doctor is identified as “local”, which tethers him to a place, whilst at the same time the family are classified as nomadic by the authorities and remain perpetually outside the preservation of the local. Here economic structures are exposed as part of a broader narrative in which there a hierarchy of authority is framed within the rhetoric of rightful occupation. Limited spatiality itself is contingent with the idea of proper use here, as it is only sites that are considered to have fallen out of use for the settled community which are made made available for the Roma. As Cannon (2011, 32) describes it: “[t]o the side of us was a disused pub and on the other side a printing press works. The site was essentially a piece of waste ground that no one was using, so no one bothered us”. These are portrayed as unreal proximal spaces, not quite included in the cartography of the town (which explains why Gypsy and Traveller communities are never described as “local”). An extract from Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh (2010, 78) depicts the site of the encampment as something much more alien, unreal and ephemeral. They had somehow managed to bulldoze deep into the wood and make a huge open space. It was bigger than anything I had ever seen before. So huge I could not see how far back it went. It looked as if a giant meteor had fallen from the sky and crashed here, clearing the space. After the darkness of the forest, the light above the clearing shone through so brightly that our eyes had to adjust […] The clearing was like a huge swamp. Not a blade of grass,

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not a tree in sight, but endless mud and water and several towering pillars, with iron steps at the side and thick electric cables balancing from the top […] On [the wall] hung a huge white sign with big red letters stuck onto it with melted rubber: Welcome Travellers to Warren Woods Caravan Park.

The excessive materiality of this description is particularly intriguing: the visceral articulation of violence as they “bulldozed deep into the woods” alongside a simile of a crashing meteor and phallic blinding pillars creates an unsettling sensory juxtaposition with the wide expanse of a “huge open space” set far back in the woods, as if the violent act of tearing open this space has created a blank otherworldly space within the lawscape. Saskia Sassen (2011) claims that the act of “disassembling [the nation-state] produces structural holes, or blank spaces” in the fabric of territorial topography. However, the spaces excavated in the text do not demonstrate the end of law but rather merely explore ruptures in the lawscape, as evidence of a local space that is simultaneously an uncanny space. The notion of an uncanny space derives from Freud’s “map of the urban unheimlich” (Cohen 2003, 326), and emphasises the relationality of disruptive “encounters” of both familiarity and repulsion in the metropolitan space (Freud 1919 [2003]). It is the deviant quality of these encounters in “which an unfamiliar setting evokes the absence/presence of significant others” (Cohen 2003, 326) and can be considered, therefore, as another means of making the lawscape visible. In Freudian terms, the striated order of the urban can be contrasted with an unconscious cartography, transforming the “familiar” into the unknown, and finding points of intersection in uninhabitable spaces. If these spaces of the encounter are theorised through the uncanny, they reveal a subversion of the notion of absence/presence (Hook 2005, 697), which challenges the very legitimacy of the sedentary spatial order. For Derrida (1994b, 10) the uncanny is reimagined as “hauntology”, reflecting a temporal rupture which acknowledges incommensurable remnants of past in the present and present an opportunity to take account of spatiality’s “active […] engagement with the unexpected” (Gunder 2008, 199). Michael Gunder (2008, 189) suggests that planning is the most explicit means of legitimising the narrative of spatial order and that consequently, planning with risk and uncertainty is key to exposing the instability that is inherently part of space. Within the context of this book, it reveals how the space could be unsettled by acknowledging the instability in literary refractions of lawscape and the process of spacing as “the index of an irreducible exterior, and at the same time of a movement, a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity” (Derrida 1981, 81). Taking into account Derrida’s perspective on spacing as a process of “designating nothing” but unsettlement, is not designed to validate a presumption of terra nullius, but

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rather, to gain access to uncanny space through the rupture of Diaspora. In other words, this analysis recognizes that “[i]t is the very gesture of exclusion that produces space in the first space” (Wigley 1993, 69). This “gesture of exclusion” is rendered explicit through Walsh’s text, where the visceral materiality of the carved out space of the site in the woods manages to be both empty and full, a “clear space” that is also “like a huge swamp”. Here, materiality is negated in favour of the abject subjectification that occurs when the site is named and allotted specifically for them, but is done so within a segmented topography of restricted space; as Smith-Bendell (2009, 250 – 251) writes, “[i]t was soul destroying to see that land was good for one race but not another”. These autobiographies engage with the issue of proper use by subverting the nomadic discourse of migration, mapping out the way in which the narrator exploits their surroundings. In Gypsy Princess, Cannon (2011, 32) describes the following scene of exploration. Around the edge sat Giant Yorkshire boulders that we soon learnt to climb over. Later on as kids we’d hold little shows on there using it as a stage. Underfoot was grass everywhere, all around the camp.

Reading space as a performative and productive site challenges the juridico-political concept of proper use, and leads us to consider the “gesture of exclusion” (Wigley 1993, 69) that produces space in the first place” . Drawing on Derrida’s notion of spacing draws out the role of absence in categorizing spatiality, reframing the designation of appropriate “land-use factors” (Circular 1/94 1994) as an attempt to obscure uncanny space. This particular “gesture of exclusion” is exposed in Judge Pettiti’s dissenting opinion in Buckley ([1996] at 30) when he argues that the Government’s use of the narrative of preservation to justify an interference in the rights of Gypsy families “amounts to a disproportionate interference”, indicating that “the survival of families must come before bucolic or aesthetic concerns”. From the edges marked by boulders to the phallic pillars pointing down towards an empty tarmacked black river in Walsh’s Gypsy Boy, the notion of proper land use is based on the idea of a shaped topography of space that cannot (yet must be) neutral and which cannot (yet must be) malleable. This paradox is realised in the study of post-nomadic architecture by Anne Hoare (2013, 1– 2). Hoare defines the transition from a traditional nomadic life as “post-nomadic” without necessarily assuming that this transition leads to sedentarisation. The space generated in this state represents “the material centre of unresolved questions about the role of law and the state in dwelling, property and familism”. This is a distinctly uncanny recognition of spatiality, where dwelling is identified as a temporal interruption written through absence:

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the site’s architectural intentionality or status as a gypsy site is signified by the absence of something, moreover, an absence that cannot be observed. The closer the inspectors get to the material site, the more the numinous substance of gypsy dwelling recedes from view (Hoare 2013, 9).

Hence, the malleable shaping of the site depends upon it being rendered invisible, situated “between excess and absence of something that would make it what it must not be” (Hoare 2013, 10, 13). To accommodate risk within post-nomadic planning acknowledges the ways in which “post-nomadic architecture’s public-private subjectivity is made visible”, subverting this sense of legitimate spaces through making explicit “the point at which conflict and accommodation meet and separate, still unresolved”, reflecting a process of spacing without end. The designation of space within the lawscape appears to descend through a significant hierarchy of authority that constantly and unremittingly seeks to apply invisibility to each site. Smith-Bendell (2009, 203) relates that, for example, although “the police could no longer shift us from the land we owned, we hadn’t reckoned with the council”; the unsettled edifice on which the sedentary order is built, is constantly exposed in their interactions with the authorities. Smith-Bendell (2009, 206 – 207) recalls a time her father was told that he would have to take down their hut, as only moveable buildings could be present on the land they owned due to its special status as a temporary site. His mocking, yet ultimately successful, response was to build inoperable wheels out of chicken wire. This resistance to authority – or effectively who gets to shape the space – is thus present in any reading of Gypsy and Traveller legality in Diaspora space, with the perception of nomads as perpetually “evading hegemonic control” (Okely 2014, 66). This sense of “evasion” as resistance, however, conforms to a singular reading of space which does not take account of the uncanny. In A Field Full of Butterflies by Rosemary Penfold (2011, 209) the narrator describes her experience of living temporarily on a site and feeling a different kind of emptiness: We were usually good when we played in the field, but looking back I realise we had no sense of the land not belonging to all and sundry. The fields round about us were our playground.

This subverts the idea of who gets to shape the space into one of what the space consists of if it cannot be preserved. In this way, Diaspora subverts the myth of possession; space is a “playground” enacted through spacing rather than segmentation resting on the authenticity of a particular claim. Such a subversion engages with the idea of taking space with you, subverting the notion of a rigid dichotomy in which the law is irrevocably set against the Roma. Hence, although

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Smith-Bendell (2009, 20 – 21) catalogues the history of legislation restricting movement, passed by successive regimes – “[w]e always knew that laws counted against us, that we were always in the wrong” – an emphasis on restriction and containment gives the lawscape more power than it is due, and in turn negates the fragmentation and emancipatory potential of unsettlement. The contradictory interplay between domestic juridical discourse and the jurisprudence of the ECtHR displays the paradox of stasis at its most potent. In R. (Smith) v. Barking and Dagenham London Borough [2002] EWHC 2400, the High court held that there must be a distinct difference between the way site provision is granted to those who are nomadic and those who are not, stating that “there is no good clogging up all the caravan sites with those who do not move” (cited in Connors [2004] at 51). The ECtHR acknowledges that as the practice of nomadism had effectively disappeared,⁹ it should not be used to classify this particular minority group and signal a special status – a status “which is the raison d’être of that special treatment” (Connors [2004] at 93). It is an endlessly circular definition, clearly demonstrated when the denial of planning permission forced a family into itinerant practices from which they were then prohibited (Chapman [2001] at 15), whilst in Lee ([2001] at 75), the court found that the occupation of a caravan counted as “integral part of [gypsy] identity”, though nomadism was no longer permitted. This reflects a paradoxical bind within planning legislation, where it is demonstrable that if nomadic status is deemed no longer suitable then that presents a significant obstacle to a planning application (Tracada et al 2014, 55). Hence, in juridical terms, stopping is both no longer possible and is, at the same time, an invitation of condemnation, whilst nomadism is forbidden and yet remains the basis of ethnic identification, so that the only route left open is embedded in a state of spatio-temporal stasis. Smith-Bendell (2009, 251– 252) highlights the absurdity of this position when she writes that: [t]o be a Gypsy, in planning terms, we have to be nomadic and earn a part of our living in a nomadic way. As most field work is performed with machines nowadays, we began relying on the horse fairs for our cultural and legal nomadism.

Implications of “cultural and legal nomadism” in relation to Roma are historically observable across European legal culture, in which the spatio-temporal stasis identified here replicates the nothingness inherent in Derrida’s notion of spacing (Derrida and Malabou 2004, 6, 12, 20). In Rabbit Stew, Smith-Bendell (2009, 222) explores the complex ways in which the topos of nomadism is negotiated.  The ECtHR ruling found that “it no longer appears to be the case that local authority gypsy sites cater for a transient population” (Connors [2004] at 84).

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The need to travel never really left us, no matter how long we stayed […] Sometimes we would stand out on the road, longing to pack up and travel again. One day, as I was heading to the village shop, a couple of old wagons went through the village. How I longed to run behind them, to sit round a wood fire and smell the smoke. As soon as the pea- and hop-picking seasons came around, our jobs were thrown up and we were off, not returning to Peasedown for weeks or months. Going away was the highlight of each year, but life out on the road was getting more and more difficult as the police stepped up their harassment. Other Travellers told us awful tales about being moved on, hopping from common to common to get a little peace. The police were beginning to move wagons off the grass verges and lanes that we had stopped on for hundreds of years, places we had thought were safe and sacred. “You don’t know how lucky you are, owning your own bit of ground,” people told me dad. He heard the same thing again and again. “You can come and go whenever you like.” [sic]

The movement described here introduces a sense of openness in which it is possible to cross the boundaries of the established settlement just as the narrator transverses the village, a connection to the narrative of nomadism as the exploration of “a jagged landscape, full of ‘effects’ and ‘collapsing’” (Derrida and Malabou 2004, 10). In addition, the reference to networks of employment and the insecurity of short-term seasonal contracts as economic determinants of migration play a role in shaping the space. Police interference resonates within the passage, with the sense of being “moved on” a common theme in these texts juxtaposed harshly with the sibilance of places that were “safe and sacred”, introducing a sense of preservation outside hegemonic doctrines of possession. Both these “sacred spaces” and the routes mandated through patterns of labour add to the production of complex connectivities and interstices of spatiality. There are also many anonymous “[o]ther Travellers” implicated in the shaping of space, and the wish to “get a little peace” through a form of discordant root-making which also encompasses the desire to “get away”. If this contradiction is employed to deconstruct the binary division between the sedentary and the nomadic, Diaspora can be regarded as an alternative topography of uncanny space. This demonstrates that the assumed value-free neutrality of space is merely a fiction of non-belonging, a recognition that “[s]pace cannot simply be subordinated inasmuch as it harbors the possibility of that which attempts to subordinate it” (Wigley 1993, 71). This sense of mutually authorised production where the Diasporic are not marginal but intrinsic to the nomos presents these interpretations of literary resistance as implicated in the spacing of the uncanny. As Rosemary Penfold (2011, 140) writes: [w]e know with hindsight that things are still the same. Yes, you can buy your own land, but you cannot live on it as you like. “Move on, move on!” You may well say, “We’re Romanies,

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it’s our God-given right to travel if we wish, or stop if we wish.” But no, they say, “You’re Tinkers, move on.”

Here, once again, is the subversion of spacing as a critique of terra nullius, in which temporality negates the territorial claim as space submits to a shifting of origin and a denial of originary possession (Derrida and Malabou 2004, 12). There is a distinct emphasis on the aesthetic effect of the sites within the juridical narrative of the Romany site, denounced as postulant contaminating sores producing “a very harmful effect [on] an attractive valley” (Lee [2001] at 110): The site is in a corner of an open field on the southern hillside of the Stour Valley and surrounded by agricultural land. In this position it is highly visible at various points […] However neither screening nor painting the caravans, as offered, is likely to make the development less obtrusive in such an isolated and open situation, and there is no doubt in my mind that it seriously conflicts with the policies designed to conserve and enhance the countryside.

The familiar narrative of preservation against “significant intrusion” (Coster [2001] at 18) represents the site as an encroachment on rural space, dismissing its right to occupy space as a particular zone of contamination whilst simultaneously ordaining it with the power to be both intrusive and willfully destructive. Another accusation often hurled at us is that our trailers are eyesores stuck on the sides of roads and fields. Actually in most cases we park out of sight from the roads, behind a hill, or in woodland or high bushes. What you can’t see you don’t know about and that’s the way we preferred it (Cannon 2011, 70).

It is important to consider the issue of agency here, and in particular, how it is articulated within a discourse of invisibility. Cannon suggests remaining hidden is a choice, which is unsettling in its correlation to the juridical authorization to locate sites in marginal places, replicating the assertion that the Gypsy and Travellers have a long history of presence and yet are rendered absent from the paradigm of possession and the doctrine of proper use (Greenfields and Home 2010, 4). This sense of invisibility is echoed in Gypsy Boy, where Walsh (2010, 157) notes that: Gypsy encampments are everywhere. Most are secluded, hidden away down inconspicuous back roads. A few are slap bang in the middle of a community, but most of these don’t last long, because they attract a lot of public complaints.

If we consider that “[s]pace is inscription rather than its site” (Wigley 1993, 69) then the spaces of the uncanny are both everywhere and nowhere at once. This is

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the most explicit evocation of the unsettling tendencies of the contemporary enclosure movement and its “legislative assault on nomadism” (Greenfields and Smith 2010, 3). Reading the act of spacing as a recognition of unsettlement, one can contest the assumption of order it rests upon; if “space is mastered by being kept outside” (Wigley 1993, 69) the paradox is indeed that “[t]he exterior is always, and only, space”. Thus, the attempt to nullify the nomadic is seen as an act of spacing caught in the act of negating space, evoking the resident implications of the lawscape as both particular and universal; as both absent and present, malleable and fixed. Whilst Smith-Bendell (2009, 253) discloses that “the common land has been fenced off or blocked [and is] impossible to access”, that which is blocked off does not, on the contrary, lose its spatiality by virtue of being enclosed, but rather reveals that access to space is a dented paradox of the uncanny. This is evident in Judge Pettiti’s dissenting opinion in Buckley [1996], which held that “the obstacles placed in the way of Gypsies go beyond the general law. Forcing them to live in a designated area is equivalent to placing them or assigning them to a territory”. Here, then, he sets out two impossible blank spaces: a law of specificity which retreats beyond its own remit and a territory “assigned” at the limit point of the law, into which “Gypsies” are passively “placed”. In this next extract from Walsh’s (2010, 113) autobiography the expansion of this metaphor of the blank space is portrayed in a way which first establishes its performative aspects and then eviscerates them with a violent and condemning concretization of a physical aesthetic. Coming back to the camp from anywhere else was like entering into another world: a fullscale exotic trailer-filled town, created and built by Gypsies for Gypsies. Fresh concrete had been poured on top of the mud that had once been everywhere, and a smart road of jetblack tarmac flowed right through it. At the main entrance the walls curved and spiralled ingeniously like frozen waves. At the very tip of each solid wave stood the life-sized stone head of a wild horse, peering like a milky-eyed guardian at the people passing below.

The shapes Walsh describes here are both fluid and linear, both as natural and of the earth as they are built and manufactured, subverting the narrative of containment implicated in the designation of space. Walsh evokes the contradiction between the presence of materiality, and the invisible lines of division between the inside and outside operating in a single space. The theatricality or performativity of this uncanny space in which movement of beasts and sea has been “frozen” and turned to “stone” reflects the hegemonic process of taining and containing each corporeal, sensorial or material impulse. Watched over by a “milky-eyed guardian”, this “other world” illustrates the way in which the desire to render these sites invisible is in fact an indication of the desire for an audience

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in which “[t]he exclusion and subordination of space produces an orderly facade, or, rather, the facade of order, to mask an internal disorder” (Wigley 1993, 71). The use of shapes can be read as the display of a complicit and subversive form of disorder always implicated in the production of the space. In Gypsy Princess, Violet Cannon (2011, 70) writes: [i]n the 1980s, Travellers were all lumped together with ravers by the Tory government, who seemed hellbent on making our way of life illegal. They brought in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which was originally designed to prevent people from turning up at gatherings and raves in public spaces […] But in effect this law made our lifestyle illegal too. Suddenly we were told that new regulations meant we couldn’t graze any animals, have a fire or bring in scrap metal to sites we’d used for generations. The rules purposefully seemed designed to target every aspect of the way we lived. From a very young age I feared the police. We all did as kids. Just one glimpse of their fluorescent striped cars sent kids running to the trailers. My sister used to hide underneath ours. And there were so many reasons for this reaction. They only ever turned up to tell our parents off, or to tell us to move on. They caused ripples of panic and distress whenever we saw them approaching.

The spatio-temporal metaphor of “ripples of panic” used here to describe the effect of the police descending on the camp places an emphasis on space as that which spreads outwards, reflecting the way in which it “is not a static receptacle of inscriptions but an effect of ongoing inscription” (Wigley 1993, 69). Here, inscription is not an effect of space but rather a relational process of production that plays with juridico-political discourse naming Diaspora space as both contagious and criminal.¹⁰ As Mark Wrigley (1993, 72) writes, “[t]his insensibility to spacing is itself an institutional effect produced to mark the threat posed by spacing to the system it at once organizes and disorganizes”. Hence, there can effectively be no enclosure within the process of spacing (Derrida 1981, 94), and, specifically in the case of the legal construction of Gypsy and Traveller sites, spacing must obscure the sense of its own production whilst bearing traits of a receptacle at the end of the sedentary order. Such a reading provides a way

 As the ERRC (2000) have reported, restrictive legislation and prohibitory planning policy “have increasingly forced Gypsies to choose between assimilation and criminalization”. The ERRC’s brief for Chapman [2001] submitted to the ECtHR, details the way in which the claimant had been evicted from an unofficial site in the depths of winter, and forced to stop on a grass verge, a place from which they were then moved on “to a location that was ankle-deep in mud”, from where they were also asked to move. The council informed them they had no vacancies on any official sites. As a result, the claimant purchased her own site and the family moved onto the land, but was denied planning permission and was subsequently served enforcement notices, until, finally, to avoid further court action, they resumed their nomadic life, being “constantly moved from place to place”.

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to turn from the more totalizing biopolitical topographies of Foucault (Collier 2009, 84), in particular the negation of the blank space through a deconstruction of spacing as that which reveals something altogether different, and altogether more unsettling, about space itself. This is not, then, about specific sites having “immunity from general laws” (Coster [2001] at 110) as uncanny spaces in Diaspora, but rather presenting a challenge to the type of spatialisation implied through planning law, questioning the spatio-temporality of prohibition and the doctrines of legitimate occupation in the context of the enclosure movement which blights the Roma Diaspora. The acknowledgement of spacing deconstructs the narrative of nomadic threat that pervades jurisprudence. The experiences highlighted in Cannon’s (2011, 312) autobiography highlight the critical need to read these spaces differently: [t]he worst Gypsy sites are always found on local authority land. We heard of some terrible conditions that Travellers were living in, sometimes right under huge pylons or next to toxic land. We heard of one case when a group moved on to a site that had just been declared unfit for horses to live on.

Similarly, Walsh (2010, 186) describes another “unfit” location to which they were assigned, “through a dirty little road and up behind a dirty old petrol station, where we were surrounded by several overgrown fields filled with rubbish”. The United Nations Rapporteur on adequate Housing observed “the shortage of sufficient, adequate and safe sites for Gypsy and Traveller communities across the United Kingdom, many of whom feel this is part of the stigma and discrimination they regularly face from Governments and society as a whole” (UNHCHR 2013). In Lee ([2001] at 21), the court noted that the reason the applicant had refused to move to so-called “alternative” sites was because “the sites in question were in a very poor state [one] next to a rubbish tip and the other […] built on an old sewage bed”. Such descriptions of toxic uninhabitable wastelands designated as sites for the Gypsy and Traveller community is repeated across Europe, despite measures put in place in an attempt to counteract this discriminatory housing strategy. This analysis represents a demand for a radical way of re-thinking spatiality in order to expose the unsettled paradox at the heart of this juridical discourse. Hence, a new way of thinking which accommodates Diaspora through a spatiality would necessarily involve taking account of those who “haunt” the space in order to acknowledge “absolute responsibility for the other” (Gunder and Hillier 2009, 178, 73 – 74). It is suggested that whilst this is not a very radical subversion, as “risks haunt spatial planning policy narratives” regardless, it means in practice that paradigms of planning law must “seek to accommodate uncertainty”.

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The voices that “haunt” these acts of spacing (Derrida 2000, 152) reveal the way in which planning law works by perpetually “papering over the fear of risk” (Gunder and Hillier 2009, 19). Despite attempts to hide these contaminating sites from view, or situate these spaces as proximal and illicit zones beyond the law, preserve the flawed juridical narrative of spatial neutrality. This analysis therefore seeks to return a sense of unsettlement to a critique of the sedentary order, whilst simultaneously recognizing spacing as an articulation of the uncanny.

3.3 Alina Serban speaking (of) and spacing “home” Exploring the relationship between property law, ownership and territoriality problematizes hegemonic contemporary interpretations of Diaspora. This chapter will focus on a particular aspect of Diaspora space, by exploring the juridical articulation of the concept of home through a theoretical analysis of the effective potential of Article 8 (the right to private and family life) in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), as an example of a particular juridical narrative of private space in Diaspora. Reading this narrative through I, the Undersigned, Alina Serban, Declare (2011) explores the possibilities of interpreting the doctrine of possession (and in so doing, the concept of home) through its material conditions in the context of the normative. Constructing a literary jurisprudence of Alina Serban’s dramatic monologue alongside recent case law, this chapter will attempt to consider the legal codes spatialising the Roma settlement. Reading the spatiality of the home differently thus has implications for the ways in which legal protections explicitly evoking a sense of spatiality can be interpreted as positive obligations, and asking if they contain the capacity to interrogate narratives of exclusion which adversely affect the lives of the Roma Diaspora. I, the Undersigned Alina Serban, Declare is a dramatic monologue written and performed by the Romanian Romani playwright and poet Alina Serban. Adapted into an autobiographical monologue using excerpts from Serban’s teenage diary, this text offers a rich and productive site in which to examine the construction of home. This text will be read through the rhetoric of spatiality in the ECtHR’s jurisprudence on the Diasporic spatiality of home, as a means of unsettling the dominant topography of dispossession and displacement. Whilst the Convention enforces a positive obligation in order to protect “private and family life, his home and his correspondence”, it ambiguously provides no further detail about the limits or content of the space it is attempting to preserve, which is particularly problematic in the context of Diaspora (particularly as derogation is

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possible in the event of a perceived threat to “public safety” or “for the prevention of disorder”, both of which conditions can be engaged in reaction to the Roma Diaspora).¹¹ The definition of home represents a distinct fiction of a particular kind of preservation in the sedentary spatial order, but only for those granted access to the obligations of protection in the context of this “autonomous concept, which does not depend for classification under domestic law” (Kenna, 2008, 200). Taking account of the locational materiality of physical space, it is possible, then, to turn towards the narrative of home as an autonomous signifier, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the “material world that is drenched with the signifiers of sovereignty and property” (Delaney 2004, 849). The latter is particularly important in terms of the reinterpretation of human rights in relation to Diaspora, where in most domestic cases “critical issues relating to the home fall to be determined through the property paradigm of rights and priorities” (Nield and Hopkins 2013, 431), as defined through the juridical framework of the nation-state. The problem with the spatial protections of Article 8 – in common with other rights regimes – is not only that obligations often stop at the border, but also that it is rarely broadened to incorporate the material spatialities of property within which, as Sarah Nield and Nicholas Hopkins (2013, 431) argue, “occupiers without such rights are frequently invisible”. They suggest that it is possible to incorporate protection for those excluded from the narrative of possession, and yet even linking rights to the preservation of space within a broader rhetoric of protection fails to both take account of Diaspora and attend to the unsettled nature of space itself. There is evidently a critical need to attend to the protection of the home space in the particular case of the Roma Diaspora, as research has demonstrated that large numbers of Romani families live in inadequate conditions in segregated, substandard settlements with the continuous threat of eviction (FRA, 2009; ERRC, 2010).¹² Although, as

 Article 8 of the Convention states that “[e]veryone has the right to respect for his private and family life, [and] his home” and that any interference with this right can only be justified by a concern for “public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”  Although Article 8 guarantees respect for the home, “this does not amount to a right to housing” (Guet 2011, 3). The Revised European Social Charter (1996), addresses the right to housing in Articles 16 and 31, in addition to the Recommendation Rec(2005)4 of the Committee of Ministers to Member States on improving the housing conditions of Roma and Travellers in Europe. This is not the argument I am addressing, because I would suggest that the provision of adequate housing is not intrinsically connected to the meaning of home as it is conceived of in Article 8. In effect, the home is not necessarily mutually constitutive with the narrow concept of housing provision. Indeed, although positive obligations have arisen in regard to the negative

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has been outlined in this book, strategies promoting inclusion and emphasizing member state obligations of minority protection have been prominent in recent socio-political discourse, there has been little change to this reality for many communities across the Roma Diaspora (Kuhelj 2014: 66). Although the issue of housing discrimination has been addressed at numerous forums of domestic and transnational engagement with policy, the spaces made available to Roma families remain notably inadequate and instable. Roma housing is considerably less secure, less habitable and more overcrowded, compared to non-Roma housing […] Roma own their dwellings to a lesser extent than non-Roma, and consequently are tenants to a larger extent than non-Roma. This means the fear of losing their housing, due to eviction, is higher among Roma households (Perić 2012, 9).

Helen O’Nions (2007, 80) argues that Article 8 is key to addressing the exclusion and discrimination which characterizes the living conditions for many Diasporic Roma. O’Nions suggests that as a specific indicator of cultural preservation, the obligation to protect private and family life may indeed offer a rare opportunity for broader protection. Article 8 is often engaged when it comes to cases of exclusion or dispossession, particularly where these violations disproportionately affect minors (Aleca and Duminică 2012, 108). However, the ECtHR has often relied on ambiguity rather than the materiality of what constitutes the concept of home in decisions involving violations under Article 8, particularly in the context of a disadvantaged minority.¹³ The limits of cultural protection offered to the home space when weighed against the fungible interests of the state was evident, for example, in Buckley [1996] where, whilst the Court recognised a violation of Article 8 rights had occurred, it accorded greater weight to the “planning concerns and local needs” guaranteed by the “wide margin of appreciation” afforded to the state (O’Nions 2007, 81). Helen O’Nions (2007, 83) confirms the precedence of possessory interests and state-bound configurations of spatial order which are authorized under the guise of protection. As such, although Nield and Hopkins contend that a greater correlation between property law and human rights may go some way towards unlocking the potential of Article 8 as a form of spatial recognition, it is evident that jurisprudence still privileges the narrative of a particular kind of preservation - albeit ambiguously defined-

effect inadequate housing may then have on an individual’s private life (Marzari v. Italy [2000] 30 EHRR CD218), housing is regarded as a (neutral) physical obligation which can be discounted due to pragmatic considerations.  In Moreno Gomez v. Spain [2004] application no. 4142/02 at 53 the Court defined the “home” as “the place, the physically defined area, where private and family life develops”.

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of space. The value of the concept of home is thus negated when “the applicant’s right to a home and family life could be outweighed by the state’s interest in applying and maintaining planning rules” (O’Nions 2014, 157), as in this sense the home becomes no more than a smaller symbolization of the roadside campsite, either hidden from view or perpetually resisting eviction. Turning towards a recognition of the spacing of the home which incorporates the process of eviction, then, does not seek to emphasise the metaphysical experience of private space as an alternative to a mythologisation of the Diasporic journey, but rather grounds the narrative of what counts as home within a discursive analysis of space. Such a space can be approached through the recognition of alternative ontological readings of spatialities that challenge the hierarchical structuring of locations as neutral or abstract (Woodward et al 2012, 204– 205). Taking account of these “spatialities stripped of transcendence” provides a means of engaging with the experience of Diaspora without neglecting the materialities of Serban’s living experience: the evictions she is subject to, substandard living accommodations, and her ongoing relationship to the space. Serban’s (2011) script describes her home as marginalised and excluded, yet at the same time surrounded and enclosed: “some fancy villas were built around the yard, and the owners of the villas fined her community, through the police, because of all the mess”. In this way, her own space is mediated through a discourse of control in which the “owners of the villas” are privileged rights-holders capable of exerting punitive measures of control on her community, whilst she remains subject to a disciplinary system of surveillance. Whilst this may at first appear to reflect a Foucauldian (1977) reading of the space, in this instance the spatial hierarchy of observation reflects a singular narrative about which spaces require protection and which need to be purified or absolved from contamination. Within this topographical lawscape there is “no transcendental organizing principle” (Woodward et al., 2010, 273) as the presence of the law saturates the space as a field of visible segmentation, with no guidelines as to what is necessarily omitted from doctrines of rightful occupation and legitimate spatial entitlement. Serban’s resistance, however, comes in the form of unsettling the passivity of being the subject under surveillance, trapped beneath the punitive gaze of the surrounding space. In a letter to the authorities she reads as part of her monologue, she informs them that, “I’m making this appeal in hope of support […] I need a decent place to live and study”. This petition effectively spatialises the audience in the position of voyeurs looking onto her personal space, rendering them complicit in the authoritative act of witnessing her demands. Her letter also, however, raises a critical challenge often omitted from human rights discourse on the right to home: evoking complex questions regarding the capaci-

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ty of the law to accommodate hostile spaces whilst retaining the definition of the home as a space in need of preservation. Sarah Nield (2013, 149) observes that ECtHR jurisprudence is developing a definition of the home beyond the scope of property law that incorporates the connections – or “sufficient and continuing links” – an individual has with a particular space. Distinguishing the home from the doctrine of possession in this way offers the possibility of articulating spatialities without engaging the limited concept of rightful occupation, in the form of a recognition of human rights outside property law (Nield 2013, 147; Gray and Gray, 2009, para 1.6.1 and 1.6.3).¹⁴ However, whilst Article 8, for example, does depend upon an acknowledgement of diverse spatialities incorporating multiple forms of occupation (Fox 2007; Kenna 2008), this gets no closer to an understanding of what the space of the home – including its legal structure and the threshold where the law cannot cross – actually consists of, as Padriac Kenna (2008, 200) observes: while the authenticity of home as a social, psychological, cultural and emotional phenomenon has been recognised in other disciplines, it has not penetrated the legal domain, where the proposition that home can encapsulate meanings beyond the physical structure of the house, or the capital value it represents, continues to present conceptual difficulties.

Although some legal scholars have attempted to grapple with this by engaging with the construction of a domestic space “beyond proprietary interests” (Nield and Hopkins 2013, 435), the ECtHR has demonstrated its inability to acknowledge the complex and ambivalent production of space. Although the home is recognized as a distinct space, Article 8 jurisprudence is slow to make room for multiple claims and connections beyond a singular reading of possession. The significance for this in the context of taking space with you in Diaspora can be inferred in relation to what cannot be protected when the limits of what constitutes a home space are juridically ambiguous, or when possessory interests are considered incomplete under the law. Thus, the paradigm of possession continues to negate Diasporic access to space, revealing an insistence on incompleteness that inevitably proves fatal to its territorial claim. In this context, whilst it is important to continue to advocate for a broader recognition of the home as a “distinct” space (Nield 2013, 149), it must be acknowledged that it is not going to be possible to fundamentally challenge the narrative of a sedentary spatial order predicated on possessory interests whilst juridical discourse  In 1991, the CESCR, in its sixth session, adopted a detailed General Comment on article 11(1) of the Covenant dealing with the right to adequate housing.

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stubbornly refuses to engage with the material conditions of space, in which the experience of the home is relational rather than simply (passive) inhabitation on a neutral zone of jurisdiction. Consequently, scrutiny of socio-legal discourse must demonstrate a means of accounting for the “complex scattering of vague, localized articulations” (Woodward et al. 2012, 216) operating within a site. Within the text, Serban’s home does not, therefore, stop at the borders of the Roma settlement, but also incorporates her encounters with her mother as she visits her in prison. Whilst the spaces she evokes are rigidly segregated, a sense of spatio-temporal turbulence pervades her articulations of familial spatiality, whereby her home moves with her, emphasized in the short, clauses she utters upon entering the prison and the curt, formal declaration of identity: “Name: Alina Serban. Age: 14. Visiting: mother. ‘Friday is the cleaning day in prison, tight schedule. You’ve got one hour’”. The applicability of Article 8 for recent cases involving the Roma has been regarded as an indication that, due to “their turbulent history and constant uprooting the Roma have become a specific type of disadvantaged and vulnerable minority [who] therefore require special protection” (DH and others v Czech Republic [2007] 47 EHRR 3at 182). This is particularly evident when one considers the prevalence of eviction and dispossession in many Roma communities. However, rather than approaching this issue from the context of exclusion, it is more productive to use the concept of “abandonment” as it pertains to the concept of the protection or preservation of certain kinds of spaces. As Geraldine Pratt (2005, 1054) explains: [a]bandonment is not equivalent to exclusion. It has a more complex topological relation of being neither inside nor outside the juridical order. The difference between exclusion and abandonment turns on the fact that abandonment is an active, relational process.

Thus, this concept presents a more resistant sense of connection that reflects the interpretation of home as a series of “links” to and within a normative space. Such relationality is fundamental to an unsettling of space, enabling interpretation of the home beyond the limited definitions of property law and the doctrine of possession. Within this interpretation, then, proximity is not obscured in the redemptive articulation of home, as the rich villas surrounding Serban’s home are all implicated in the spaces of the Roma site they peer down upon. The proximity of “intimate spatial terms” theorized through abandonment (Pratt 2005, 1055) can be read as a productive narrative of the home in Diaspora. This approach can then take into account spaces of juridically defined dispossession without reducing this status to one of non-belonging in which the subject is no longer considered to be at home. Indeed, where evictions are concerned

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the ECtHR has identified that the loss of one’s home is the most extreme form of interference with the Article 8 rights (see McCann v United Kingdom [2008] 47 EHRR 40). Consequently, evictions are frequently found to constitute violations of Article 8 and the right to respect for an individual’s home providing considerable scope for protection regardless of the level of ownership.¹⁵ This now requires further development in order to deconstruct the persistent juridical neutrality of space, particularly as the privileging of planning considerations demonstrates that in effect, this protection is severely limited in the case of eviction if the process of eviction is considered proportionate in accordance with the law (Guet, 2011, 6). This establishes the apparent dichotomy between ambiguous representations of home and the idea of property (Saporita 2003, 272), through the way in which they can so easily be cleaved apart once eviction is justified under the wide margin of appreciation afforded to member states. Hence, the discourse of property highlights a narrow reading of the material at the expense of the ontological, and the rhetoric of human rights persistently continues to emphasise the symbolism of home as a textual effect of property.¹⁶ In this regard, any attempt to articulate the complex spatialities of the home as a productive space needs to insist on the unsettlement evident in Diaspora space as a site of emergence and encounter. Taking account of these encounters subverts the spatiotemporality of rightful occupation as the only valid and contingent shaping of the home, emphasizing the materiality and relational aspects implicit to a recognition of “sufficient and continuing links” and the counter-normative definition of home. A significant issue with using human rights frameworks to unsettle legal spatiality lies in its relentless focus on the individual. It is arguably for this reason that human rights have been unable to advocate for greater protection of minority rights (O’Nions 2007), but also accounts for the problem with acknowledging the ontology of material inhabitation in Diaspora without desubjectifying the

 This right “encompasses, among other things, the right of access, the right of occupation and the right not to be expelled or evicted without provision of relevant safeguards, and is thus intimately bound with the principle of legal security of tenure” (OSCE/ODIHR 2014, 14). In addition, the right not to be forcefully evicted is complemented by the protection against “arbitrary or unlawful interference” with one’s home guaranteed under article 17(1) of the ICCPR (para. 9).  The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), which interprets the ICESCR, has emphasised: “[T]he right to housing should not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example, the shelter provided by merely having a roof over one’s head […] Rather it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity”.

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concept of home. One way of encountering this problem might be by drawing on the notion of the “suspended subject” (Woodward et al 2012, 206) as a means of looking beyond the individual-centered doctrine of human rights, whilst maintaining a focus on how the individual subject operates within and through a site. As Woodward et al (2012, 206) suggest: [t]aking account of the suspended subject, both critically and methodologically, does not negate the work of individuals or their subjectivies; rather, in acknowledging them, this account looks beyond in order to ask what else is happening in a site.

Considering suspension without absence or transcendence in space is useful as a recognition of what Diaspora could be if delivered from the mythology of departure and the myth of Return (Cohen 2007). Thus, just as the concept of “abandonment” can be a useful way to re-frame the dichotomy of owner in opposition to the dispossessed, the concept of the “suspended subject” can provide a means of engaging with the space of the home without privileging a singular narrative of possession which does not account for what happens when you take space with you. This layering of spatio-temporalities in turn interrogates the hierarchy of ownership, that which continuously despatialises the concept of home in the context of the juridical; eviction can therefore be theorised as both evidence of fungibility and settlement. In Serban’s text, she relates her frequent experiences of potential eviction and undermines the positionality of a minor outside the owner-occupier framework: “I am ten years old and I know what a mortgage is. I know what losing one’s house means”. In this instance, recognizing the “suspended subject” is not designed to articulate a loss or absence but rather the multiple operations of power operating within the site at the point at which the potential for eviction is engaged. Attending to the consideration of home in spatial rather than personal terms, raises some interesting questions about the familial, highlighted in Serban’s narrative, written in the perspective of a minor without property rights. Her connection to the space of the home is, therefore, initially determined only by her material relationality to the site (rather than economically or through an active choice) as a particular space of recognition.¹⁷ If a child’s spatiality is defined through a contingent relation to a broader familial spatiality then the

 The CESR General Comment on Article 11(1) para 6 stated that “the concept of ‘family’ must be understood in a wide sense. Further, individuals, as well as families, are entitled to adequate housing regardless of age, economic status, group or other affiliation or status and other such factors. In particular, enjoyment of this right must […] not be subject to any form of discrimination”.

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recognition of home within a Diasporic community may also begin to acknowledge a specific shaping of space through the resonant materiality of the communal. In this sense, if “[e]very centimeter of the material world means” (Delaney 2004, 849), negating the conditions of spatial relationality risks: blurring recognition and authorship by overlooking the forces of unfolding matter and taking their strange articulations as merely the result of the hard work of human hands and dead materiality (Woodward et al 2012: 214).

The interrogation of such complex composition should be fundamental to a spatial unsettling of the home and the interstices of connectivity operating at all times between a subject and the space (Nield 2013, 149 – 150). Acknowledging that rights “hover ambiguously between the personal and the real” (Gray and Gray 2009, para 1.6.7) necessitates an awareness of the juridical as a way of accessing Diaspora as the exposure of the unsettlement of space, in which a scattering of spatio-temporalities is omniscient. However, rather replicating the state-bound portrayal of people in Diaspora as symbols of genealogical tendrils, here the right to a home can be regarded as an incomplete opportunity to articulate the way in which spatiality “connect[s] our embodied lives to specific fragments of the world” (Delaney 2004, 851). Hence, for Serban, the “adobe shanty” in which she lives can be read as operative within ruptured movements of material proximity as part of a relational matrix (Woodward et al., 2012, 210). Rather than offering up a system of normative privileging, then, it can be argued that the space Serban constructs is one of a localized unsettlement, interrogating the conditions of the space through which the ontology of Diaspora is encountered. This is perhaps a glimpse into what law could be: articulating a conditionality of suspension as a way of recognising that the space of the home is unsettled regardless of obligations to protect. In this reading, although home is recognised as an autonomous material construct, it is implicated as a productive space existing within a network of power relations as (in part), “the emergent product of its own immanent self-organization” (Woodward et al. 2012, 214), whilst remaining reliant on the negotiations of the “suspended subject” within a juridical topography of enclosure. Serban’s narrative is viscerally material when she describes the space she inhabits. The house in is made of adobe, with really thin walls which the rats pierce and easily get in. The roof is really crooked, with so many holes it often rains inside. On the ground there isn’t even a normal floor, but some cartons covering the cold dirt beneath.

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The disordered shapes and pervasive sense of porosity in the text reflects the bleeding of the material into the spatial and the inseparability of their authorization of the limits of the space. The relationship Serban has with the space is consistently ambivalent, as it is depicted as both hostile and welcoming. This unsettled reading thus complicates Margaret Radin’s argument “that the amount of protection afforded property [depends] on the extent to which we constitute ourselves as persons through our possession and/or interaction with an object” (Saporita 2003, 272). For Radin, home is intrinsically subjectified through interaction – “the more closely an object is connected with personhood, the stronger the entitlement” (Saporita 2003, 272– 273) – and yet Serban’s articulation of the space as a site of hostility and welcoming is jarring, as though it is “crooked” its disordered materiality does not make it any less of a home. This exposes the problem with theorisations of property that do not take account of the complex articulations of spatio-temporality that juxtapose, for example, a narrative of eviction with an emphasis on belonging to a space. Serban’s letter to request assistance begins: “I hereby declare the following: The state of things at home” [sic], insisting on a clearly defined space which she actively continues to shape. Using the literary device of incorporating testimony which looks beyond the site results in a sense of unsettled proximity to the unseen observer: this relationality is the means through which the conditions of her home are judged, through “the aggregating components of the site [which] engender an immanent politics of multiple orientations” (Woodward et al. 2012, 216). In this way, Serban constantly revisits the politics of location as she refers to her situatedness within the site: “I don’t look out the window, ‘cause I’ll see my yard and it seems even more horrible”. However, this disassociation is juxtaposed with the repetition of “I” which indicates this is, defiantly, her space; although the audience become voyeurs of a characteristically private space, we are all invited to transgress these boundaries. This unsettling disassociation in conjunction with an almost claustrophobic familiarity is the paradox that must not be – yet so often is – left out of juridical notions of the home. In other words, it is possible to have an ontology of abandonment and exclusion without falling into the singular privileging of “subject-thinking” (Woodward et al. 2012, 210) that discards the Diasporic. This “subject-thinking” of human rights discourse merely reflects “lingering Cartesian extensive spaces that grid materiality or reflect Kantian spatial structures arranged by the control centre of transcendental thought” (Woodward et al. 2012, 210). To look beyond this subject-centered ontology of home in Diaspora allows us to look beyond the limits imposed by the temporal prerogative of human rights law that has proved so inadequate in the protection of space for the Roma Diaspora (O’Nions 2007, 25). In this instance, new meaning is given to the absence of spaces of dispossession from juridical discourse. Attending

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to the concept of suspension as “the production of a ‘conditional withholding’” (Woodward et al. 2012, 213) in unsettled space turns the focus of attention to the production of the home as space you take with you, without relying on a vocabulary of possession, allowing for the development of a richer analysis of the emerging spatialities operating within a space. As Woodward et al (2012, 214) write, “[o]vercoding the site is thus a peculiar capacity by which subjectivity reflects the world back upon itself”, destabilising property law as an articulation of the space of the home in Diaspora as “not just a place where one lives but also the place where one feels one belongs” (Busye 2006, 296). Any theoretical critique of the concept of home clearly must have considerable weight to contend with the particular situation of the isolated and segregated spaces of housing for the Roma. Serban’s text is a reflection of the situation in her native state of Romania, where “as a result of economic coercion and the Communist industrial drives, the overwhelming majority of the Roma now live on the fringes of the cities and towns” (O’Nions 2007, 7),¹⁸ a form of “ghettoization” identifiable across Europe (European Parliament 2005). Serban’s narrative rebels against this oppressive regime of ghettoization: her visceral writing displays a sense of fluid porous boundaries, whereby “squalor, muck and garbage” spreads across and disrupts the lines of the site. The chromatic distortion at play here resists the sense that the only available options for the Diasporic claim to space are either “assimilation […] exclusion or containment” (O’Nions 2007, 40) which would justify David Delaney’s (2004, 858) claim, “[t]here is no outside” to the law. Sarah Keenan (2015, 36) takes issue with Delaney’s concept of spatiality, in that it constructs a world in which “law is inescapable [as] it literally leaves no space out of the reach of law”. This overcoding thus over-simplifies the relationship between the subject of human rights discourse and the spaces they do (and can) inhabit. For a subject is not always either home or not home. Home, like any place, is not just a discrete physical location that a subject is either inside or outside; it is loaded with complex social and emotional meaning that seeps out beyond that subject’s residential front door (Keenan 2015, 36).

This “seeping” performs a similar function to the notion of the suspended subject in Diaspora, for it takes account of spatio-temporal emergence beyond the limited binary of possession or property in which one can only ever be “inside

 In Moldovan and others v. Romania [2005] 44 EHRR 16 at 110, the state of the applicants’ living conditions was described as a “severely overcrowded and unsanitary environment [having a] detrimental effect on the applicants’ health and well-being”.

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or outside”. Serban’s narrative similarly rejects the idea one can be contained by law or that law can be everywhere, for the final part of her monologue describes her journey from the settlement, where she writes: “[i]t took me 9 years and 500 kilometres to leave Bucharest and forget”. This spatio-temporal distance does not negate the idea of home but merely demands its reframing as a fluid and relational critique of the limit, contrasting with the mythology of Return in Diaspora discourse – where instead of repetitions of circularity she has carved out a space “to forget” – as an alternative way to space the self. Serban thus fashions her own home in her encounter with a space in which she can tell her own story, a claustrophobic space where she mimics the performative narrative she is retelling: I look on the right side of the stage, there’s a big tent that says: “Speak out your opinion! Roma tent!” I don’t know why, but, before even realising it I’m running toward the tent.

It is worth considering what an alternative topography might look like when home is reframed as both the locus of encounter, yet beyond the subject – curiously material, yet more than simply the physical. The adaptation of this concept in juridical terms is entirely possible, given that in recent cases the Court has suggested that the positive obligations under Article 8 necessitate a duty of consideration to the particular needs of a minority group in finding suitable accommodation (see Winterstein and others v. France [2013] ECtHR no 27013/07). Whilst this is a long way from the assertion of unsettled spatiality which looks beyond the rhetoric of protection, for some this represents a shift in the right direction.¹⁹ On the other hand, I would argue that this retraces the dangerous minority/majority nexus which is problematic in Diaspora, as well as doing very little to counteract the narrative of space as neutral or the underdeveloped material spatiality of the composition of the home in juridical discourse. To guard against this minority/majority nexus – understood here as a reiteration of the sedentary v. nomadic dichotomy – it is crucial to look for instances of encounter and emergence in local spaces (Pratt 2005, 1055). Examining the articulations of spatiality highlighted in Serban’s text rids the space of the home from the incomplete

 Sarah Nield and Nicholas Hopkins (2013, 454) have also identified a significant development in the conceptualisation of human rights protection for the home through the “[r]ecognition of […] the child’s right to respect for their home” as an independent right, revoking “their invisibility in property law”. For Hopkins and Nield this places a greater emphasis on positive implications of protection, which could also have an impact on other vulnerable occupiers, as “it is because of this vulnerability that a state’s positive duty to prevent unjustified interferences with the home is particularly potent”.

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quasi-colonial appropriation of protection and preservation. The obstacles in the way of achieving such a jurisprudential debate are manifold, namely that the ECtHR’s reluctance to determine upon general conditions of rights – from free movement to private life – has resulted in the proliferation of case-specific decisions which fail to accumulate a significant weight (Harris et al. 1995, 353). However, perhaps such a fluid and dynamic process of interpretation has the possibility of realising the potential of a discursive home in Diaspora space, enabling us to “deploy more sensitive radar in order to detect subtle relational connections between individual locales that may be far distant” (McNeill 2010, 400). This has wider implications for the wrenching of obligations to protect from the rhetoric of preservation, in which the spaces that are preserved are only those defined as legitimate within the sedentary spatial order. The potential of reading the spatiality of such a broad concept as home differently demonstrates the ways in which “[s]pace is law’s mirror on which the irresolvable paradox between its universality and particularity is thrown into relief” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2010b, 195). The aim here is thus, to emphasise the spaces of unsettlement through “an alternative jurisprudential narrative” (Ward 2009, 20) which has aimed to expose the encounters and relational interstices of emergence revealed in the spacing of the home.

3.4 Alienation and enclosure in Louise Doughty’s Stone Cradle The chapter will continue to explore home and place within the lawscape through a critical reading of Louise Doughty’s novel Stone Cradle (2006). For Nicole Graham (2011, 4– 7), the anthropocentric focus of property law and the insistence on a “dichotomous model of the world that separates people from everything else” is evidence of an unsettled “paradigm of placelessness”. Graham urges a focus on “the particularities of land, of place” in order to acknowledge the materiality of those networks of connectivity identified in the previous chapter as critical to the composition of the home space in Diaspora as that which exists beyond mythology. Graham (2011, 5 – 6) writes that the current paradigm of property law ensures that “place, in itself, is meaningless”; the emphasis on dephysicalising property down to a purely transactional status, then, avoids having to deal with the materiality of a particular location, justifying a pervasive system of exclusion and eviction. Whilst place may be omitted from the framework of property law, its implication as a productive site in the movement of spacing movement is not. Such a paradox highlights the discordance at the crux of the sedentary order: the historical shift from property as a field of rela-

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tionality, designating a relationship between the individual, place and identity, to a limited recognition of proprierty over a thing or domain: according to the original sense of “property” the thing possesses me, I belong to it and am identified by it. But according to the modern sense of “property”, I possess that thing, it belongs to me (Graham 2011, 27).

Hence, the concept of “belonging” can be reinterpreted through the spatio-legal as a modern emphasis on an anthropocentric hierarchy of spatial ordering, which discredits alternative accounts of the relationship in which “the thing possesses me, I belong to it”. Such a statement radically reframes the imposition of cartographical sovereignty, repositioning concepts of enclosure, quarantine and containment as material particularities that are embedded in a distinctive and paradoxical recognition of place. This represents a recognition that land and place extend beyond the commodifiable, evoking a distinctive relationship between people and property. Thinking like a lawyer requires a suspension of belief in physical reality, a denial of experience. The law facilitates a culture of property articulated in terms of symbol, certificates of title, conflicting interests rather than places, homes and belongings. Living in a world of modern property relations involves an acceptance that the real is unreal, that places are spaces and that networks of complex relationships are commodifiable environmental products. To deny this sensibility […] is radical (Graham 2011, 11).

Such relationality recalls Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ (2012, 4) depiction of the lawscape and its emphasis on the real and lived conditions of the material; both interpretations attend to the distinctive placing of law through a materialist analysis in order to “replace the absence of place with its centrality to law” (Graham 2011, 16). This chapter will present a critique of this absence through a reading of property and place in the context of Diaspora and the unsettled spaces of the lawscape. The novel Stone Cradle explores the lives of one family over almost a century. The text is divided into two first-person narratives, that of Clementina, a Romany gypsy who is brought up in a vardo travelling across the Cambridgeshire fens, and Rose, her “gorgia” [non-gyspy] daughter-in-law, a farmer’s stepdaughter who marries Clementina’s son Elijah. The novel therefore spans disparate and overlapping temporal frames, exploring the experience of the family as they move through different spaces: from the wide rural fens to a graveyard cottage; to a terraced house; amidst the commons; through stables, yards and roadside camps to the graveyards of their final rest, mapping out the topography of lives that move back from the wide open countryside to the cramped conditions

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of poor urban housing (and back again), against a backdrop of displacement, discrimination, and evictions. The porousness of settings in the novel troubles the insistence on the mutually constitutive relationship between law and the construction of a sedentary spatial order, where containment is privileged. This exposes how law and Diasporic spatiality are always in opposition, particularly in the regulatory environment, due to the uncontainable material features of this particular recognition of spacing (Pruitt 2014, 190). This tension is in fact part of law’s failed attempt to obscure materiality through the colonization of space, made manifest in the context of the particular and performative physical character of the rural, with its own unique spatial characteristics (Pruitt 2014, 207). The way in which the narratives are framed by the funerals of Clementina (in 1949) and Elijah (in 1960) establishes a sense of claustrophobically finite spaces. The prologue maps out the visceral shades of the delineated contours of the scene, from “[t]he iron walkway” to the glowing “corroded cylinder” of the gas tower rising above them (Doughty 2006, 1). Mortality is a persistent undertone running beneath the narrative, expressed through the theme of origin and used to create a framing device for the text, as Doughty (2006, 11) writes that Elijah was “born in the graveyard of the church at Werrington, a village in the Soke of Peterbrough”. The birth of Elijah is located with cartographical accuracy, so that despite the signification of movement and migration as an ontological trope in the text, Doughty is insisting on a strong sense of place. Doughty’s novel interprets this sense of place in the context of the prohibitions constructing the lawscape (Bancroft 2005, 16). The family are apprehended by the “gavvers” [police] because Clementina’s father had not replaced his Hawking License, and as a result of a system of regulatory control designed to maintain sedentary order through the punishment of vagrancy are carted to gaol, along with other ‘disorderly and disruptive’ individuals – “loose women and tramps from round about” (Doughty 2006, 37– 39). They are “kept all-together in a lock-up, a filthy, low place” before they are taken before a judge. The hearing takes place “in the local pub one morning” for lack of a proper courthouse, where the defendants are accused of hawking by various locals giving testimony against them. The judge agrees not to punish Clementina (as she is a young mother nursing an infant) but in order to compensate for this leniency hands out a harsher sentence to Clementina’s mother (Dei), as he hoped “to make an example of all miscreants and because of that Dei would get four weeks’ hard labour, not two” in the “House of Correction”. When the family return to visit Dei they are led through a Kafkaesque series of spaces and narrow corridors guarded by silent wardens into “a room with a faraway ceiling, where the windows were so high up too you couldn’t see out of them even if you stood on a

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table and jumped” (Doughty 2006, 44), in which prisoners are therefore closed off, observed but unable to look out themselves as subjectified bodies before the law. When Dei becomes sick following an accident and is housed in a stinking, infested ward Doughty (2006, 49) writes that, “[t]he room was another highceilinged one but the windows were smaller and didn’t admit much in the way of light”. The construction of spaces in this disciplinary site are claustrophobic, closing in on the reader in a doubling motion of figurative and physical enclosure, when all are quarantined and the distinction between spaces becomes uncomfortably blurred. When Clementina is offered shelter in the graveyard cottage she compares the fear she recognises others may have of sleeping near the dead but argues, “[l]et the gorjers [non-Romany] have their […] holes in the ground full of ghosts, good and bad. Is that any worse than to be a soul a-wandering around all the time?” (Doughty 2006, 76). Here the nomadic is characterised not as an antithesis to the sedentary paradigm, but rather compared to the final resting place of the established order as a more marked, yet no less unsettled place. When Clementina moves to Paradise Street to share a terraced house with her son and his family, she acknowledges the claustrophobic malevolence of containment: I asked around a good deal before it was pointed out to me: a long, narrow street, full of houses all packed together […] Boxes, those houses were, squat little things all tight against each other with no air in between. Just looking down that street made me come over all poorly (Doughty 2006, 184).

The power of property as the manifestation of desire in the sedentary order is diminished here in the description of houses as “squat little things” crowding in on the space. In contrast, Elijah was keen to escape the openness of “fields and mud” (Doughty 2006, 122). In this way, the tempo-spatiality of the external, rural space does not oppose the boxed-in cramped urban terraces, but is acknowledged as an alternative form of subversive counter-mapping, as Doughty (2006, 207) constructs a sense of external space that is similarly oppressive and restrictive. Above us, the sky was gathered tight and grey, the clouds all packed in. The rain pelted and the branches of the trees bent and shook above us. The brown mud gave way beneath my feet with each step I took. It was as if time had slowed right down, as if we had been making our way down this wretched, sodden lane for all eternity.

For Doughty, spatiality is represented as something that can be “packed in” or “gathered”, its malleability reflected in the way the ground “gave way beneath my feet”. Temporality is distorted in this form of spacing – time “slowed right

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down” – and the journey continues on as if forever in an “eternity” of “finally following the thread of a strange and perilous adventure that consists in arriving without deriving” (Derrida and Malabou 2004, 10).²⁰ Doughty’s subversion of the mythology of the Diasporic journey articulates the spacing which produces both endlessness and nothingness in the dichotomy between open countryside with the enclosure of the urban, in which both can signify both a threat and a moment of emergence. In the novel, Doughty emphasises the contortions implicit in the doctrine of possession. When Rose encounters the Gypsy camp after their eviction from the terraced house, she has to come to terms with Elijah’s decision to move not near but “on” the commons, sourly noting that “ahead of us, were the dark shapes of tents and wagons just visible in the breaking dawn” (Doughty 2006, 172). The family is thus marking their mark on the land whilst simultaneously bearing witness to a map that highlights the lines and contours of those inhabiting the commons, as a formerly shared space. This brief glimpse at collective space is juxtaposed with the mechanisms of regulation deployed by the state to negotiate and maintain the borders between the Travellers and the settled community. For the former, there is no question of representation or slippage through this tenuous boundary, as eviction and removal are always an imminent threat. Doughty (2006, 13) writes of how the police announce one day, for example, that “there’d been a vote or something at the Council and we had to go”. They are thus trapped in the labyrinthine contortions of the punitive sedentary spatial order, where they must stop to engage in labour practices and obey the vagrancy doctrines whilst at the same time recognizing that the act of stopping is a punishable offence. The family hence acknowledges that they would “have to pull the vardo onto a verge, which is the thing most likely to get you in trouble with the gavvers” (Doughty 2006, 33, 38), splitting up the camps of Travelling communities in order to satiate the spatial requirements of the “local” population: the gavvers were going around picking up Travelling people all abouts. They said how they had been part of a big camp, and their horses were all tethered in the next field and a whole gang of local men had come and untied the horses and flapped umbrellas at them to frighten them away.

 Here, “deriving” can be interpreted as both “a continuous and ordered trajectory from an origin to an end” and, simultaneously, a representation of “loss of control, [of] deviation”, whilst the double meaning of “arriving” denotes both approach and emergence (Derrida and Malabou 2004, 1, 10).

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This revelation of the violence inherent in an act of spacing contradicts the apparent emphasis of laws ostensibly designed to maintain a specific sedentary order through punitive restrictions on vagrancy, or in the prohibition of access to space. As Nicole Graham (2011, 83) notes, to this end, “[d]isplacement [rather than sedentarisation] was the objective and effect of enclosure”. Reading legislation that criminalizes vagrancy calls into question the construction of lawscapes that seek to differentiate the urban and the rural in terms of their access to space. This process of regulation and punishment betrays the double signification at the heart of property law, made manifest in the state’s relationship to the Diasporic Roma. In this instance, the spacing demarcated through the framework of enclosure is imbued with a very particular set of metaphysical approximations, which can only be acknowledged through a form of enforcement that gestures towards the “end of the possibility of deriving” (Derrida and Malabou 2004, 12). Boundaries and limits are revealed in the text as simultaneously segregating and continuous, reflecting the construct of ownership as that resting on a complex narrative of identity, which distorts a singular reading of property. Clementina questions the value of nomadic camp life whilst living in the terraced house in Paradise Street, thinking that although people are confined in this particular space – “they have a wall and some air and then another wall between them” – there “might be times when it was nice to have walls to shut out other people” (Doughty 2006, 73). This subversion of the nostalgic narrative of nomadism as a mythological construct of the endless journey plays into the unsettling of the borders of property, as Margaret Davies (2007, 13) relates: property and propierty enters further into the construction of social identity than simply being about what we own: regardless of whether we are owners, the notion of property, with its boundaries and exclusion zones, helps to define “me” and “you” within the liberal cultural context. It therefore defines symbolic and cultural capital, placing people within notional – but socially significant – hierarchies.

Thus, Clementina’s walls symbolize more than simply the boundaries between individuals, just as the idea of property as a “bundle of rights” between persons is more complex than simply a legal effect, as both represent an effect of encounter and emergence in the process of spacing. It is for this reason that, as Margaret Davies (2007, 24, 110) argues, it is important to think of property through the metaphor of the “proper”. For Davies, this concept “brings together a matrix of values, such as purity, self-identity, and exclusivity” and thus troubles the narrative construction of the legitimate possessor and the borders that divide their accumulative territories. In other words, the proper must refer outside itself to find itself. Hence, any critical approach which seeks to destabilize this paradox

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through the recognition that property is more than a complex relational effect of exchange must engage with the idea that property law, if read differently, already provides the multiplicities of interstitial belonging to multiple locations necessary for Diaspora to be an effective analytical category. The complex formulation of space as simultaneously a site of emergence and encounter signifying a particular absence – in recognition of the fact that “[t] ravel takes the origin away with it” (Derrida and Malabou 2004, 12) – is observable in the thoughts of Clementina, who remakes enclosure as a substantive spatialising of internal withdrawal. If there is one thing I have always been afraid of, it is being shut in. I am so afraid of it that thinking of it makes me go almost mad. And then I fall to reasoning how that’s what madness is. It is like you’re shutting yourself up, inside yourself, and the more frightened you get the madder you get and the madder you get the more afeared you are. And there is something going round and round about this that makes me want to put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes – to shut myself away from the thought of being shut away (Doughty 2006, 22).

This corporeal quarantine is a prominent feature of Diasporic Roma literature, but is also so much more than simply a reaction to the anti-nomadic bias of modern law and the configurations of social order. It is instead a recognition of Diaspora space rendered visible through its capacity for unsettlement, as a construction that must both necessitate the deliverance of a terra nullius upon which law can imprint its own process of mapping genealogy, and yet simultaneously a designation of absence in which you take space with you. Hence, although the spacing movement implicated in this process can be felt as a form of “being shut in”, the resulting effect is that of an endless topos of circularity in which “there is something going round and round about this”. Doughty (2006, 205) draws this out in a way which does not play into the pervasive binary of nomad v. settler, by offering us an alternative spatio-temporal narrative which situates Clementina as both alienated and simultaneously comforted by containment. I didn’t know whether or not we was going to carry on living on the road – we were at that time, that was it. But I know that it was hard and that after a while I was not altogether happy about it. At first, it had been good to be back were we belonged. But after a while, I found myself thinking sometimes that a solid ceiling above you is quite pleasant when the rain is that sharp rain like pointy needles. In truth, it was just like always. I wasn’t at all sure where I belonged. [sic]

This perspective of such alienation as a multifaceted structure is articulated by Graham (2011, 45) as she suggests that it “denotes neither agency nor passivity; rather it describes a relationship […] to describe the state of estrangement or the

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act of estranging” (Graham 2011: 45). The Roma community is characterised by the local settled population as a “lawless clan”, and by the state as “miscreants” in need of containment and correction (Doughty 2006, 26, 39). Clementina overhears the local vicar fashioning an epic biblical saga in which his parishioners must “never forget that in our own lands we too have a heathen tribe among us” describing them as “road-side Arabs” (Doughty 2006, 19). Alienability is therefore implicit to the maintenance of the sedentary order, but must be obscured in order to retain the fallacy of spatial chaos contained only through legitimate structures of rightful ownership and just possession. It is for this reason that the doctrine of “exclusive possession” (Graham 2011, 91) maintains the disguise of spatial neutrality, constructing a lawscape in which Clementina does not “belong”. However, Doughty’s (2006, 57) exposure of unsettlement is far more complex in its implicit resistance to the dominant narrative of the sedentary order. Clementina describes one state of resistance as a subversion of the segregated enclosure of the Gypsy communities, where some groups would portion off their own bit of land for labour, mimicking the conditions of valid legitimacy by “making their own little kingdom”. Her resistance is not simply an assertion of agency as a member of a demonized minority, nor is it mimicry of the construction of home in a segregated zone. In contrast, Clementina practices her subversion by acknowledging the processes of settled society that must remain hidden for the doctrine of possession and its hierarchical mechanisms to retain their desired effect. That whole time I was carrying Lijah and we were living in the cottage in the graveyard, we would see them, the secret burials. They always happened at night. We would hear the creak of the cemetery gate, the turning of the handcart wheels on the gravel path. We would go to the door to watch. Past our cottage they would come […] They were the worst off of the parish, folk who could afford a plot or gravestone of their own. They must have begged the vicar to put their little one in Holy Ground and he had found a way to do it. Him and his sexton together, they opened up a grave, in the dark, and put the little child on top and closed it up again. They opened up the graves in no particular order, as far as I could see, who ever they belonged to. They just worked their way along the rows (Doughty 2006, 77).

In this extract, those in the parish who cannot afford to buy land for burial cannot be excluded (as they are not vagrants) therefore are ostensibly part of the sedentary order – as their exclusion would threaten the binding of legitimacy to possession. Doughty’s description of the mechanical way in which the vicar and his sexton “worked their way along the rows” is a symbolic evocation of the act of concealment fundamental to the spatial ordering of modern law.

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The sense of containment in this instance flows not from the protection of space from excluded subjects of Diaspora but from internalized strategies of unsettlement. This is implicitly evoked when Clementina’s father, known as Dadus, reflects on the final act of departure for the settled community: “didn’t they realise that if they kept opening up the ground then the mullas, the ghosts, would be getting up and walking abroad?” (Doughty 2006, 77). The Roma, in contrast, burn the body and all its material effects upon death – as Clementina and her father do with Dei. This counter-archival temporality gives history (in an oral tradition) an alternative non-linear spatiality in the Roma Diaspora, which is not accounted for in contemporary Western epistemology. The perception of mortality theorized in the text reflects Agamben’s notion of “violence [as] the device that binds life to law” (Swiffen 2010, 167). When Clementina moves in with her son, the urban terraced house becomes a metaphor for the coffin. That house, that house. It was like the graves in the cemetery at Werrington. It was like we was dead people all packed up into little boxes. Night after night I would startle awake and lie in the dark thinking maybe I was dead and crammed into a box all on my own and I was going to lie there, underground, for all eternity (Doughty 2006,194).

For Clementina, however, this particular sense of enclosure is not fatal: there is some resistance in the form of escape to the sanctuary of external space, as she recalls, “the only thing that would calm me would be to go down to the garden” (Doughty 2006, 194). This is not the dissection of blank space segregated into the distinctive boundary lines of property and possession, but rather a reflection of the unsettled mechanisms fashioning the relationship between place and the subject. There was a little square window with no shutter, so I went and looked out of it. It looked out over the back – their tiny garden with a small shed for the doing of private things and, beyond, a narrow dirt alleyway. It was all so small out there it was like the houses that backed onto theirs were pushing in and I thought I shall never be able to breathe with others living so close. How do they stand it? (Doughty 2006,186).

The anthropomorphism of the houses depicted in the text can be read as a subtle unweaving of the anthropocentric web facilitated through the law’s manifestation of ownership as the only ‘just’ form of inhabitation. Here the houses “push in” to the space, but despite the cramped conditions it is apparent that Clementina can look beyond the limits of the urban to the rural landscape stretching out beyond, though she continues to effect the spatiality of the scene she is witnessing by narrating the space from a site of incomplete locality rather than omniscient perspective. The space she is “looking out over” is hers,

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just as she is shaped by it in turn. Although Clementina has the agency with which to observe the topography of her surroundings, the particularities of place are never missing from her engagement with the space in which she is the tenant, the incumbent inhabitant. This subverts the narrative of “dephysicalisation” prominent in spatio-legal discourse on property, reinserting spatiality to reveal the latter as “both ideologically and physically unsustainable” (Graham 2011, 148), yet paradoxically immersed in the process of disavowing the concept of a material place implicated in the emergence of the spatial boundary. Whilst Graham (2011, 45) writes, then, that “alienation renders the modern paradigm of property, placeless”, it can be argued that Doughty’s text demonstrates how alienability makes claims on the space of enunciation as a concrete and recognizable singularity designating exclusive possession, and simultaneously an ephemeral and otherwise-than remedy for blank territory to be conceived of as title. This claim is revealed when being attentive to spacing as a process that both obscures and legitimates the authority of possession. Reading Doughty’s (2006, 56) text from the perspective in which property is theorized through – rather than in spite – of alienability provides space for an interpretation of the narrative as part of a wider critical interrogation of topographical legitimation. We went fruit picking every summer when Elijah was a boy. The travelling was all a-slowing down by then, for they had made a new law, the gorjers, that said we should not camp on the commons no more and this made it very hard as we were not allowed to stop on roadsides or farmers’ lands neither. The only way we could stop anywhere when we needed to was by breaking the law – and as we were breaking the law we only did it for a short bit before moving on to break the law somewhere else. So their new law meant we had to break the law a lot more often than what we had before. [sic]

The hostility and provocation they received from the “gorgers” who prevented them from accessing their traditional stopping sites without “breaking the law” represents the double bind of spatial encounter in which the law is both more and less than a rendering of order and the carving up of legitimate space. Spacing as a cadastral grid draws boundary lines whilst performing the limits of place; this crucial juxtaposition of the function of power and the subversive potential of spacing refutes the way in which the spatial order is maintained according to a particular paradigm of possession. Responding to Graham’s (2011, 38) call to critique the “modern legal right that guarantees property (and sovereignty) identifies possession as the primary basis of ownership” seeks to not only render explicit the act of spacing as a process of unsettlement, but also unburdens the concept of property of its contemporary denial of spatio-temporal relationality. Disrupting Diaspora through the propiertal gaze,

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therefore, provides a critique of how law might engage with the daunting task of locating possession in a site without origin, in which it is no longer possible to “approach these central concepts [of possession, ownership and title] believing they come from nowhere” (Graham 2011, 203).

3.5 Romani poetry and the arrivant The final chapter in this section aims to unsettle the key concepts of moving and arriving embedded within Diaspora discourse, disrupting the mythology of origins. Following on from the previous section’s engagement with property law, this critical analysis will enquire about the condition of Diaspora spatiality in terms of its material dimensions, particularly as it relates to the legitimacy of Diaspora space, using Jacques Derrida’s (1993) figure of the “arrivant” as a way of unsettling spatio-temporality even further. Evoking this concept provides a way to read Diaspora by attending to the force of transgression and dislocation that Derrida identifies as a particular dimension of experience, not the embodiment of difference but a “wholly, nonoppositional other” (Abeysekara 2008, 25). What we call the arrivant […] is whatever, whoever does not cross a threshold separating two identifiable places, the proper and the foreign, the proper of the one and the proper of the other, as one would say that the citizen of a given identifiable country crosses the border of another country as a traveller, an émigré or a political exile, a refugee or someone who has been deported, an immigrant worker, a student or a researcher, a diplomat or a tourist. Those are all, of course, arrivants, but in a country that is already defined and in which the inhabitants know or think they are at home (Derrida 1993, 34).

For Derrida, then, the arrivant is unquestionably immersed in the fatal act of waiting, not in the context of a displacement but rather in an impositional and transgressive position of accusation, caught in the act of announcing the event in the Diasporic, forever not-crossing, and potentially impossible for the law to embrace. Such a response therefore disrupts the reading of borders, or “thresholds”, as either liminal or definitive; indeed, it can be said that they now “have to be measured for their presence, or absence, and the role they play in constructing social relations” (Ben Amara 2011). The monstrosity of the arrivant is not acquired through the act of a hurried disassembling of the border, but rather is evoked through what it suggests about the impossible structure of the nation-state and the multiple “thresholds” of Diaspora; as Derrida (1995, 387) writes, “‘to welcome the monstrous arrivant […] is to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange”. In the context of this particular framework, it is worth debating whether there is indeed such a thing as an aesthetic

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of the “threshold” within Diaspora space, and that whether it could be considered a unique ontological condition. This aesthetic is seemingly presented as an endless quest for some form of grounding: or, as it were, the slippage or transition from arrival to claim. However, to read exile through the concept of the arrivant is to work towards troubling this linear manifestation of the guise of transcendence, by considering what might happen when “the quest for stability proves impossible – if the wound does not heal and keeps producing psychological damage?” (Schlesinger 2004, 44). This spatio-temporal reading seeks to shift the focus from the subject and on to the spatio-temporality of the scene of waiting in Diaspora, in order to consider the material dimensions of the absolute alterity of the absence/presence evoked through the figure of the arrivant. The issue of how this may be broached, to consider, in other words, that potentially “[n]ot only does the subject have to wait out the passage of time but there may also be a movement through space” (Schlesinger 2004, 44), evokes the emptiness of exile and exposes its fallacy as a “threshold” positionality. This figure does not simply enter onto the scene of waiting, but rather “transforms the site or space into which it enters” (Richter 2002, 62). Such an act of destabilization or unsettlement is in fact, then, a dialogic revelation of absence, distinctly manifested in the sense of arrivant as “someone or something before or in excess of stable identity”. In this context, arrival cannot be separated from the act of waiting; there is neither afterwards here, nor is the space suddenly full once the arrivant appears – yet paradoxically, it must be recognised that “[s]omething happens during its scene of arrival to the site in which this arriving occurs”. Edward Said (1984, 49) describes the exiled body as a symbolic representation of the “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home”. The impossible rupture evoked in Diaspora reflects a common conception of exile, and yet an arrivant is of course not an exile. Whilst the dominant discourse on the aesthetic of Diaspora is mythologised through an exilic spatiality, the act of spacing implicated in the production of all scenes of waiting negates this particular claim. The claim to shape space conceived through Diaspora – configured along lines of identification premised on the illusion of movement – must always be written in the register of what emerges at the scene of arrival. Hence, Diaspora cannot be spatialised through exile but must instead be recognised as the effective unsettling of the scene of waiting, for those waiting without knowing what it is they are waiting for (Derrida 1993, 33). Employing a Derridean framework is an effective way in which to articulate the ontology of a stateless Diaspora through an approach that challenges classical paradigms of dispersal. Pheng Cheah (1999, 226) argues that the arrivant is a

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reflection of the ways in which Derrida is “dismissive of the spectrality of the nation-state form” as that which “can promise nothing and has no future to-come”. It is for this reason that the arrivant traumatises the myth of Return that is so central to Diaspora politics, a myth that binds Diaspora irrevocably to the nation-state. In this way, Diaspora discourse, often positioned as the archetypal antithesis of the rooted notion of citizenship linked to territorial belonging, is demonstrated to be similarly precarious in its turning towards an originary source, just as it can be said that the mythology of genealogy is designed to bind one to a particular location (Rushdie 1983, 90). Thus, Diaspora discourse is predicated on conditions of exile resting on a flawed reading of absence. It is the way in which the law mitigates the scene of arrival which negates this dichotomy, as it is absence rather than presence which is central to this particular doctrine of arrival, as a manifestation of the “mutual haunting between the nation and the state” (Cheah 1999, 239). The hegemonic articulation of Diaspora theorises hybridity through a post-national or postcolonial critique, rather than focusing on the spatio-temporal ethics operating in “the place of arrival” (Schlesinger 2004, 46). The arrivant is not a feature of migrancy nor a symbol of the migrant at all, any more than the Diasporic can be said to be, but rather identifies “the possibility of the subject to imagine itself and objects as claiming to exist in different places” (Ben Amara 2011). Diaspora Studies deflects this claim of self-authorisation rather detrimentally by framing itself through a limited spatiality in which you only ever ‘come to be’, so that “Diasporans enact their felt autonomy while laying claims to ‘ownership’ of the places and nations in which they settle” (Werbner and Fumanti 2013, 149). Through a critical deconstruction of Diaspora space, this concept of “settling” is revealed as an aporia, because it simply cannot be negated by the possibility of an arrival that will never come. Derrida will figure the subject’s aporetic experience of its own finitude and futurity – an experience of the impossible – in terms of absolute hospitality and an opening up to the arrivant. In Specters of Marx, Derrida will denounce the nation-form as ontopologocentric because it fails to practice this absolute hospitality that keeps alive the promise of the messianic without messianism (Cheah 1999, 239).

Consequently, any lawscape must thereby take account of dissent towards the idea of the bounded nation and instead encounter those turning to look as implicated in the process of spacing, and a reflection on how space is shaped within, by and through this process. One of the reasons that the de facto stateless Roma present such a challenge to classical paradigms of Diaspora is that, as “a stateless ethnic group, [they] are not the majority in any nation and have no country to call their own” (Bennett 2011, 223). The arrivant does not even cross an identifiable threshold, challenging

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whatever may be waiting for it (unknowingly) just as it is othered to the point of being unidentifiable. This is why the Diasporic colludes with such a concept, particularly in the case of the Roma, which Khachig Tölölyan (2012, 9) describes as “d]iaspora as stark dispersion, with no gaze turned towards a homeland, no memory of it, no aspiration to return”. Even to speak of them in this singular way is potentially problematic, as the Roma exist as “dispersed and oppressed fragments” rather than as a conglomerate unified group lining the edge of a single border. If the scene of arrival is not merely a gesticulation but a gesture at an impossible absence – as “the point of contact is itself a frontier” (Ben Amara 2011) – perhaps, then, this disjunctive arrivant always manifests through hostility to the logos. For the Roma Diaspora, in particular, the idea of Diaspora space as a scene of waiting and as a scene of arriving challenges the narrative of a wandering, “mystified population” (Hancock 1998, 10) paradoxically determined through anachronism and exclusion. Rather than approaching the Roma Diaspora through the paradigm of migrancy as movement – the focus is now on how a “space comes into being” as soon as a border is established (Ben Amara 2011). Valdemar Kalinin’s (2005, 277) poem “You Lack Fields” can be interpreted as the manifestation of the scene(s) of waiting. Kalinin’s poetry is particularly visceral, and appears to situate the speaker in the position of observer, watching horders of strangers coming upon the scene, which is resonant of Derrida’s arrivant as symbolic “figure or trope for the series of displacements that its movement both triggers and describes” (Richter 2002, 61). Kalinin (2005, 177) writes: Lit by chandeliers etched with geese, Showy clothes and extravagant words, All faces are turned in expectation, Toward those arriving at the parapet.

This first stanza is ambiguous in spatio-temporal terms, as we are seeing people “there” as well as those “coming”. Kalinin draws out the shapes of anticipation, designing the space in the colours of a theatrical scene, sketching its contours as the audience awaits the oncoming act. There is nowhere to hide from this particular gaze, as “[a]ll faces are turned in expectation”. Reading the concept of the arrivant subverts the notion of Diasporic emergence as a homogenous event or the universal descending on the singular for the purposes of convergence, reminiscent of Homi Bhabha’s (1994, 139) description of the hybrid postcolonial space as:

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gatherings of exiles, émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of foreign culture; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the halflife, half-light of foreign languages, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language.

In order to consider the effect of the arrivant on the event, it is necessary to acknowledge that the arrivant “affects the very experience of the threshold” (Derrida 1993, 33). This is not purely an act of subversion, however, as “thresholds, like horizons, are forever in translation always receding from our efforts to transgress them” (Ben Amara 2011). In this sense, then, Diaspora cannot exist outside its spatial teleology, where the very concept of the “threshold” represents a scene rather than a definitive border. In the third stanza, Kalinin introduces a cacophony of sound through a sense of polyvocality, to suggest that here there are many others operating upon the scene. The free form of non-metrical, non-rhythmic lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech enhance this sense of polyvocality. This reflects the processes of Othering complicit in the Diasporic experience in which one must learn “how to live with, inside and through another language” (Schlesinger 2004, 46). The “threshold” as scene is thus ultimately porous, and demonstrates the dialogic nature of the border as an incomplete boundary line (Ben Amara 2011). When Kalinin (2007, 177) writes that, “[t]hey interrupt each other/ And use people up”, the portrayal of an elusive yet conceptually distinct “they” (as distinct from “us”) “using people up” evokes a sense of latent violence, reflecting that which cannot be forgotten, namely the trauma of unsettlement both producing and produced by Diaspora (Schlesinger 2004, 46). This “compulsion to depart” is implicitly part of the scene of arrival, in the form of an eschatological turn which in this instance is enhanced by broken syntax, as Kalinin’s use of short sentences interrupts the flowing enjambment of the rest of the poem evoking a devouring, captivating intention. The scene of arrival is often mistakenly thought of as a site of thresholds awaiting the presence of the stranger – in other words, it is the absence of the stranger that is thought to define the scene, whilst instead it is the absolute Othering of the stranger at the point of arrival which constructs the space: “[t]he stranger is the stranger precisely because (they) are not recognised as from within the socially constructed space that is ‘home’” (Ben Amara 2011). This is apparent in “You Lack Fields” when the final stanza alters the register by turning the focus onto the others: “You Romale […] How you miss your fields, sunlight, / the breath of wind.” (2005, 177). Here the speaker is directly addressing a distinctive group of people, the “Romale”, reminding them they are always strangers, always located in the sensory environment of an external space. Ending the poem on this note of nostalgia juxtaposes the scene of waiting with a haunting

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connotation of an elsewhere, which is ephemeral in its pastoral materiality and yet is also undoubtedly an emergent presence drawn out through the direct reference to “You, Romale”, which could be both those in a perpetual state of arrival and simultaneously the readers doubly implicated in the process of arrival. The theatrical conceit of identifying the readers through a doubleness retains the emphasis fully on the scene of waiting, so that, in this way, a recognition of the arrivant involves a process of “annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity” (Derrida 1993, 34). The nostalgia within this poem is indeed evocative of a particular kind of traumatic rupture with past genealogy: not as mythological originary departure but rendered as trace or remnant of the event to come, whereby “[e]ven to revisit old haunts might be too much to bear” (Schlesinger 2004, 46). Derrida’s (1993, 34) arrivant – based on the annihilation of such genealogical certainty, comes to: call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations, families and genealogies. The absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity.

This “indeterminacy” is important to emphasize, as it is an indication that the absolute other may be “turned towards in expectation” (Kalinin 2005, 177) but is never expected within Derrida’s formulation, so that a pervasive sense of unsettlement is always explicit in the scene of arrival. This does not, therefore, symbolise a constant temporal plane, just as it is not emptiness awaiting a subject who will fill the space, highlighting a feeling of “strangeness” identified in Ilija Jovanović’s (2010, 81) short poem “Integration”: You continuously kneaded, improved and strangled the feeling of strangeness with your hands, and finally you spat at it and trampled it under your feet.

This stanza invites reflection of the materiality of “strangeness”, as the narrator – once again, directly addressing the subject at the outset – evokes this Diasporic tendency as a something which can be grappled with, “trampled” on, objectified. In his collection of poems, Jovanović pursues this sense of materiality grounding the subject into a temporally slippery state of travelling without transcendence: “You are yourself nothing other, / than your tied bundle” (2010, 69). This resonates with the spatiality implied by the expectation of absence at the scene of waiting and affirmed by the dual meaning of “host”. In Derrida’s work on hospitality, he draws on the slippage of meaning whereby “the French

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‘hôte’ is both used to denote host and guest” (Ben Amara 2011). In this way, the one who is coming (heralding the end of the future to come) is effectively “the foreigner […] who shakes the rein of dogmatism about being and not-being” (Ben Amara 2011), without constricting their movement towards the scene of waiting as one of a journey in which they are welcomed. The violence in the poem viscerally transgresses the concept of belonging as a motion of welcoming, as here the quality of strangeness is physically assaulted, “strangled”, “spat at” and “trampled” upon. Such aggression brings to the fore the process of Othering as it is spatialised through hostility, where the arrival can never indeed come, and that this becoming is revealed as always something other than being or “nothing other, / than your tied bundle”. [T]he absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, state, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming (Derrida 1994b, 65).

Perhaps the subject the speaker is addressing in “Integration” is therefore turned away, neither complicit nor compliant, as an alternative transgression of the issue of legitimacy in a space in which there can be nothing but awaiting presence. In other words, “strangeness” reveals itself as malleable enough to be held, because there is everywhere nothing but “strangeness”, and indeed “strangeness” travels with the origin. It is through such an analysis is that we can determine the positioning of the arrivant in relation to the condition of the Diasporic, whereby “strangeness” shapes the spaces of unsettlement. The arrivant is not an acknowledgement of the unsettled site of exile as a markedly delineated space from which there may be cartographical resolution; indeed, it is much more disruptive than this, as “the arrivant does not allow the identification – as a stable subject or identity – of either the arrivant or the site of arrival” (Richter 2002, 62). This analysis aims, then, to consider the drawing of Diaspora space in the shadow of the arrivant. In order to focus on this particular scene of waiting in further detail, we must return to the themes of “inclusion and exclusion”, which are not in fact static but rather, reflects a “mediating exchange between the two” (Ben Amara 2011). In the poem “We did not break our century-old drums”, Ali Krasnići (1998, 141) reflects on this dynamic dialogism of the threshold as a site of eschatology, where “wounded nightbirds” both mask and signal “hidden secrets”:

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those who transformed our voices and songs into the ominous sound of wounded nightbirds, our secrets are hidden

This returns us to the concept of polyvocality, only on this occasion it marks the frailty of what is omitted from the call to strangeness uttered in foreign tongues. Krasnići evokes the relationship between multiple ontological claims, which are transformed by “modes of organization, which are in turn the results or consequence of its ability to be affected by other bodies” (Grosz 1994, 12). The threading of this oxymoronically silenced cacophony demonstrates the process of spacing as Othering which is at play in this instance, where Diaspora is constructed as a waiting for redemption that will never arrive. Here, there is no post-metamorphic transformation, as once the “voices and songs” are heard as those of “wounded nightbirds”, spatialised as ruptures vocalized through absolute alterity gesturing towards an ending vocalized through “ominous sound” and absent voices. It is not a question of absorbing or adapting the scene of arrival to accommodate “new, multiply hyphenated identities” (Katrak 2006, 246), nor of acknowledging that those to come will always be absent in their nostalgic turning towards originary sources, but rather that Diaspora space is always a space of waiting, a space onto which other spaces can be brought, and a space of absence/presence. Consequently, when Krasnići writes that “our old people dreamed / of pristine white sails / afloat on the Pengebe river” (1998, 141), nostalgia acts once again as a trace of a future that can never come, because it both was and is here. This is the true revelation of the eschatological scene of arrival, which Derrida describes, in which there can only be waiting: but it must be noted that this is not only a temporal dedication, but also a spatial narrative by virtue of its flawed and impossible anticipation. The fourth stanza of Krasnići’s (1998, 141) free form verse is particularly suggestive here, following two shorter stanzas setting out nostalgic visions found in dreams experienced at the scene of waiting: Then as the dust rose from our unshod feet, there appeared in the mind a people, hungry and homeless, old, weary travellers: they who have buried their innermost hopes.

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The subjects evoked here appear definitely subjectified – “a people” – yet it can be argued that the journey is in fact not a journey at all, but a fatal form of unsettling in which they “have buried their hopes”. This suggests that they are both those waiting at the scene of the arrival, emphasized by the transition from “travellers” to “they/their”, and the symbolic articulation of “our” alterity in which this space is being summoned into being. Thus, these “old, weary travellers” are perpetually in temporal stasis though always moving, raising “dust […] from our unshod feet”, but they are only ever gesturing towards Diaspora, a space that is simultaneously the threshold and the scene of arrival. Hence, what manifests itself as memory in the reproduction of distinct figures from a dispossessed history can instead be read as the impossible anticipation of what is to come, of the arrival that is already being spatialised through unsettlement. This acknowledgement of spacing is often negated in favour of a focus on displacement in the Diasporic narrative. However, if displacement can be reinterpreted as unsettlement spacing the scene of arrival, there is no transformation from homelessness to travelling away from homelessness or being at home, just as no transcendence can be sought from resorting to nostalgic imaginings or hungry anticipation of a future distant from any constraining threshold. Derrida’s framework impels us to explore the dialogic paradoxical inclusion/ exclusion implicated at the scene of arrival with a focus on all the processes of legitimacy which spatialises the monstrous arrivant, as Richter (2002, 63) relates: Derrida’s arrivant hopes to help us name what propels us to be open to the other, to invite it, to be hospitable to it, while respecting its potential withdrawal from meaning, that is, its irreducible otherness.

Hence, the potential for recognising absence contains an ethical aim to attend to the spaces of withdrawal, as Krasnići’s (1993, 141) poem bears witness to, in a poignant final stanza: In here lies the place where reality meets with a new beginning, down a dirt road towards a horizon that ever recedes.

Here, Krasnići introduces an anonymous, unidentifiable subject as the locus of this scene as distinguishable from that which is coming, a disruption of order that is always outside of oneself. This is not a metaphysics of absence, then, but a reflection on the aporetic trope of the border as a manifestation of unset-

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tlement at the scene of waiting in Diaspora space. Such a disruption is configured differently in Dezider Banga’s “Minarets of grass” (1998, 71). If Diasporics are always constructed as transgressive trespassers, it is necessary to consider what such an analysis suggests about the notion of rightful access to space, and how this can be interpreted through a spacing that subverts displacement as a condition of perpetual arrival. Such a reflection is irrevocably transgression, in its subversion of the tendency to spatialise homecoming as the only legitimate scene of arrival. Banga’s poem refutes this claim in his implicitly violent portrayal of “the poet’s path” as a journey: I walked through the meadow through the ink-black night where the stars scorch: that way led the poet’s path. […] Where he sings of burning grief of burdens carried by rocks: that way led the poet’s path. Where the minarets of grass pray in tongues of the gadjé that way led the poet’s path.

The violence in this poem is depicted in the “scorching” of the sky, where grief is not internalised but “burning” and the path is interrupted by curt consonants – “ink-black night” and “minarets” which pierce the scene as they line the edges of his route. His grief is present but also absent, lost in a song of the past unknown to the readers of the poem. The speaker gives no sense of who is waiting for the poet, and yet his path is clearly determined; we are not witness to his art but we are led to anticipate his coming. Although interrupted by the abrupt obstacle of “rocks” and the sibilance of “stars scorch”, the use of enjambment and alliteration in the repetition of “poet’s path” gives no sense of an ending to this journey, as if he is “that way led” in perpetuity. Banga does not offer the reader a sense of space as pre-ordained, but rather that its linear temporality is both a form of spacing and the inhabitation of space. Indeed, we do not even know he is following this particular path, only that the route itself is active here: “leading” the path he walks upon. It can be argued, then, that the subject of this poem is no more than an irreducible symbol of the spacing of unsettlement who is, like the arrivant, “indeterminable, does not cross a threshold separating two identifiable places, and is therefore not to be reduced to a traveller, an émigré, or a political exile, refugee, or immigrant” (Cheah 1999, 247). The poem leaves the reader with a sense of anticipation for that which is marked by the incomplete presence of unsettlement, evoking the process of spacing revealed in the

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context of Diaspora. This particular scene of arrival, then, is extra-diegetic: it exists, then, in the space between the page and the reader, and it is in this way that the contract of legitimacy is at its most potent. Thus, we are rendered complicit as articulations of space at the scene of waiting, turning towards Diaspora whilst the threshold responds to the poet’s journey “through the meadow […] where the stars scorch” (1998, 71).

Conclusion “O lav tut šaj anel pro lačho drom.” [Words can carry you to a good road]¹

Exploring a corpus of understudied texts from across a heterogeneous minority group generates new literary spaces in which to theorise spatiality in law and Diaspora, focusing on the concept of unsettlement in which to challenge the mythology of Diaspora as an originary teleology. This book has considered the limits of Diaspora through the paradigm of spatial order, with the aim of exposing the process of spacing and its implications for the construction of the lawscape. I have argued that a radical interdisciplinary jurisprudence has the capacity to accommodate alternative constructions of what it means to inhabit space and challenge further the underdeveloped juridical discourse of property law, possession and proper use. Exposing law’s spatiality in effect subverts the dephysicalising of the material, and attempts to render explicit the way in which law’s framing of space as neutral relies on incomplete interpretations of the relationship between people and territory. This literary jurisprudence has four broad aims: firstly, it aims to pave the way for further studies of literary works in which to re-frame the way we think about Diaspora Studies, acknowledging the mythologisation of Diaspora as displacement in order to enhance the analytical productivity of the term. In revealing the contradictions of the possessive impulse, literary refractions of Diaspora explore whether there is potential to escape from the “myth of origin” (Cornell 2003, 161). Secondly, it has intended to shift the narrative of the Roma from the limiting framework of nomadic dispossession by focusing on how these spaces of disenfranchisement are actively constructed, exploring how one might ‘bring space with you’ in order to overcome the narrow discourse of Diaspora and disrupt the sedentary spatial order. This book has therefore aimed to both spatialise Diaspora and to read it as a spatial condition: not as a category of mobility, but as a reflection on the process of spacing and spaces of unsettlement under the law. Finally, this work has attempted to demonstrate potential avenues of future interdisciplinary research in the study of Diaspora space. There is much more to be done in terms of exploring the connections between Diaspora, law and literature in this context, building on scholarship which considers both the commensurability and incommensurability of these domains and how Dia From the Romani, meaning “words can carry you to a good road” (Lacková 1999, 205), translated by Milena Hübschmannová. DOI 10.1515/9783110544251-005

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spora may be negotiated through a critical interdisciplinary approach (Shackleton 2008; Carpi and Stierstorfer 2016; Patchett and Keenan 2017). The book has focused on the way in which the construction of externalized spaces serves the sedentarising aims of the lawscape. Within the lawscape, law takes different forms, eroding, receding and disappearing at some doors whilst remaining intrinsically foundational to others; hence, the lawscape is simultaneously more and less than the local, the national and the Diasporic. Whilst it is better to think in terms of being “out of reach of law” (Keenan 2015, 36) rather than beyond the law, this reading of Diaspora deconstructs spatiality so that it is repositioned in a way which engages directly with the mechanisms of spacing implicated in the juridical. This literary jurisprudence acknowledges the commodified matrix of value which draws spatial limits and ensures that space is made recognizable through the processes and strategies of spacing. Acknowledging that Diaspora, like the chora, is a relational matrix without form, a virtual category limited by the nature of power (Juss 2006, 47), permits the re-imagining of Diaspora as that which speaks from a space of unsettlement whilst constantly producing its own limits, a paradox of presence and absence; like space, it “unfolds” (Adler-Nissen and Pram Gad 2013, 1). Employing Morley’s (2007, 24) poetic emphasis on “living in edges”, Diaspora space is interpreted as chasm but not as emptiness, and as that which is always already occupied (Derrida and Eisenman 1997, 23). If law implies that sovereignty came before it and will remain after it has gone in the anarchic future, then Diaspora space can draw on this spatiotemporal dimension as a radical exhibition of unsettlement. This is not to suggest that Diaspora can be read as a preordained (prelapsarian) gesture towards space, but that the recognition of this unsettlement suggests it is possible to move beyond dichotomies of settler against nomad and hostland/homeland in a critique of the lawscape. This book asks what it means, then, to in/habit a space when normatively constructed as an outlaw within a “paradigm of placelessness” (Graham 2011, 5). If the concept of the outlaw is theorised as a spatial critique rather than an isolating subject formation, it can potentially provide a useful framework from which to consider Diaspora as that which recognizes space as dialogically produced, subverting the notion of being beyond the law by taking account of “shades [that] shift around me” (Morley 2013b, 67). If there is no beyond for those deemed outlaws, the subject must speak from a position of absent presence that does not reify the idea of the territorial nation-state as the only legitimate source of authority. On the contrary; space is interpreted here as both a threshold and a site of emergence “at the end of the world” (Mehr 1998, 63), best glimpsed through textual refractions of lawscapes which challenge the notion of space as a static receptacle. Diaspora, in this reading, does not exist to resolve spatiality but to recognize the “unravelling” of

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unsettled space (Blomley 2003b: 32), exposing the fiction of terra nullius as the unshakeable foundation of sedentary order. Although research on law’s role in the construction of the sedentary spatial order is plentiful, reading this relationship through the literary text unveils a new way of interpreting encounters with urban space, allowing us to “open the city again” (Lee 2009, 88) by revealing the metropolitan to be both limiting and threatening, as uncertain and incomplete as the “campi nomadi” in Italy. Deconstructing the lawscape of the city enables us to make the connection between law and space “hyper-present” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012, 21), by examining the normative boundaries that are typically rendered invisible. This reveals the process of spacing that produces and is produced by a plethora of spaces: from urban imaginaries to the supposed non-places of the camps zones; to halting sites, camps and settlements. These sites are situated in a convergence of spatialities, whereby stories of being “moved on” are also stories of marked and localized territories, and the juridico-political manifestation of home. In such a reading all normative and counter-normative spaces are read as representations of “a full-scale exotic trailer-filled town” (Walsh 2010, 113). One such localized space, the concept of the home, suffers from negative articulation in the context of the Roma Diaspora, as it is only evoked following a threat of dispossession, reflecting an incompleteness in the juridical discourse of protection. The ambiguous classification of the home in ECtHR jurisprudence reflects an eruption of unsettlement and one of the central problems of human rights discourse, as the privileging of the subject reads spatiality in limited (rather than relational) terms, and leaves the space itself intact. These texts bring to attention that which is both present and absent in a particular space, where the condition of containment is the self-producing limit point, “a place that held me / hard between its borders” (Woloch 2002, 73). A positivist narrative deters analysis of the border as that which draws the limits of the space, aiming to deflect focus on to the idea of the subject in a state of self-imposed purgatory. Spatialising the issue of Diaspora beyond the border thus reframes the concept of Diaspora from a mythological origin fetishization into a focus on how a subject might “take space with them” (Keenan 2015, 153). This is a subversion of the colonial narrative of blank territory and sovereign title, attending to the idea of alternative links between people and place, in which, in fact “the thing possesses me” (Graham 2011, 27). The limit point evoked in this alternative reading of possession represents “an opening in the very idea of space” (Wigley 1993, 185), problematizing the idea of an originary source and the emphasis on confining Otherness to the margins. A Diaspora discourse which does not take account of this spatial articulation thus risks reaffirming a system of colonization rather than taking account of how unsettling

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space in fact responds to the border through the infinite limit point, reflecting that the law can be both “infinite rooms of despair” and, simultaneously, “nomansland” (Mehr 1990, 35, 21). The doubling of space as both nothingness and an unsettled threshold manifests itself through the impossibility of flight in Diaspora and a form of temporal stasis that reflects the ambivalence of representation before the law: “what can a way out be, when there is no outside, no elsewhere?” (Malabou 2012, 10). However, unsettling the space is not about looking for a “way out” at all, for the limit or border can be considered as the site of interaction rather than a gesture towards closure. Conceiving of the limit as a productive space of colliding legal assemblages suggests that Diaspora space could be read as a more radical counter-discourse, a “frontier-style get-together” (Lee 2009, 71). Further research is need to expose the act of spacing and its implications for normative collision, particularly through the articulation of minority legal cultures, in particular how “space is mastered by being kept outside” (Wigley 1998, 69), where the exterior is also space, and absence revealed as is thus a “haunting” (Cheah 1999, 239). Although the phenomenon of de facto statelessness is presented as a space of limbo – “fear / between title and / text – an empty trench” (Mehr 1998, 61) – this analysis argues that it is in fact a reflection of the threshold as an active, contingent process of spacing. The threshold must therefore be read as a scene of waiting rather than as a border, suggesting that it is not about an emptiness or blank space awaiting a subject to fill it but, as Krasnići (1998, 141) elegantly writes, “the place / where reality meets / with a new beginning / down a drift road / towards a horizon / that ever recedes”. Statelessness is refracted in this analysis as an act of waiting in which all are implicated.² Reading this stateless Diaspora through the spatialised scene of waiting interrupts the fallacy of settlement by observing how the Derridean arrivant “transforms the site” (Richter 2002, 62). The arrivant enters on a revelation of absence/presence, so much so that the moment of arrival cannot be separated from the act of waiting: there is no afterwards, and the space is not suddenly full. Hence, the “vanishing point / black space / devouring me” (Mehr 1998, 61) reflects that which is always present yet ever receding, reflecting a different reading of the wall or boundary and complicating the idea of the frontier by acknowledging those who bring space with them, and those turning to look at who may yet arrive.  This reading of Diaspora can be best applied to concepts such as statelessness, acknowledging that despite its persistence as a pervasive phenomenon, it is often left out of interdisciplinary (law and literature) critique. More should be done to explore this issue, particularly in the light of the campaign recently launched by the UNHCR to eradicate statelessness within ten years, which features a call to hear “unheard voices” (Nash 2014).

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In this context, there is still much work to be done on exploring what a literary jurisprudence could do as a means of unsettling territorial legitimacy through the concept of Diaspora. If the positivist order of the law is recognised as a sedentary imperative, then Diaspora represents the unsettling of space, a withdrawal from an abyss that is not the end of the world. Diaspora performs a critique of the idea of suspension of the law in illegitimate spaces, reading suspension, as an absence that forms part of the unsettling of the sedentary order. Recognising spacing – rather than space – interprets the paradigm of containment through a material dialectic, employing an ontological reading of form (through, for example, the destructive plasticity of Malabou) to explore what it means to be in a space without neglecting its materiality. There is a cacophony of spatial contradictions in each text: from solid structures to fluid substances; dreams and crude elements of mud, blood and bodily fluids; to the finite edges of the campsite, static caravans and infinite shadows. The spaces fictionalized here are not enclosed and separate sites but a reflection of porous boundaries, where “squalor, muck and garbage” (Serban 2011) spread beyond the lines of settlement. This highlights the shaping of space cannot come from above, as the enunciation of a collective, invisible power, as it is a reflection of inscription rather than source. The bodies framed within these texts – from Mehr’s dissected protagonist to the rootless and traumatized figures in Doughty and Kalinin – are frequently portrayed as those situated at this limit: categorized as the sick, the criminal, the degenerative, and the nomadic. In Fires in the Dark (2004, 108), Emil’s mother is acutely aware of their proximity to the brink: “[h]ow close we are, she thought, how nearly we walk to the edge of that precipice”. Yet, if the limit is theorized through the interstices of unsettled space then there is no exilic afterwards, we are all simply “scattered randomly across a landscape” (Wicke 1991, 462). The notion that it is possible for any subject to be beyond the reach of law may be a mere reiteration of the dominant paradigm of dispossession; if it is acknowledged that the body is in fact “everywhere and nowhere” (MacNeil 1998, 37) in human rights discourse as a form of deterritorialized identity, this literary jurisprudence has countered that it is not in fact degradation or even chaos but rather the disinvestment of legal representation in spatial terms which disenfranchises the Diasporic subject. Mehr (1990, 13) articulates this powerfully when she writes, “i push something black, bloody out of myself, it is my own coffin”. Although in “enacting law, we enact space” (Blomley 2003b, 31) these texts evoke the sense that the act of spacing under the law gestures towards a doctrine of enclosure in which all space is marked by death: where the “iron walkway” and “corroded cylinders” and “gas towers” (Doughty 2006, 1), are depicted as part of a process of being devoured (Mehr 1990, 93). Abandonment as theorized through the act of spacing reveals that Diaspora spa-

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tiality is thus “neither inside nor outside [the] juridical order” (Pratt 2005, 1054) but instead evokes a condition of proximity, – as in Alina Serban’ (2011) monologue for example, where the wealthy surrounding villas are implicated in the squalid space of the Romani settlement. Hence, a deconstruction of Diaspora space reveals the problematic nature of assumptions made about minority access to space. The shaky edifice of this spatial order is revealed through the exposure of the construction of the propertied subject (Davies 2007, 90), as a focus on subjects rendered otherwise invisible suggests a rupturing of the sedentary order is possible. If propriety depends upon the fixed relationship between the part and the whole without being implicated in a matrix of relationality, a spatial critique must deconstruct what is obscured through the doctrine of possession. These authors consider the nature of that which comes to be possessed, in space that is always relational and responsive. Diaspora is revealed as that which always includes a turning to wait, symbolised through the myth of Return with “no gaze turned towards a homeland” (Tölöyan 2012, 9), reflecting instead a permanent scene of waiting. Awaiting presence through the concept of strangeness accommodates the potential of the arrivant for disruption: bearing, in other words, indeterminable witness to emergence in unsettled space. Those who stand before the law in Diaspora highlight the fact that law is never really suspended, but reveal rather that engagement with absence is the very condition of the juridical order. Possessory interest is thus exclusively linked to the fiction of absence and the sedentary narrative of keeping out those who do not belong. Hence, the concept of possession is subverted through the use of Diaspora space as a theorisation of unsettled society involving all subjects, and all space. This is a field of recognition that is always mapped out in limited terms by ECHR jurisprudence. This book does not reify the passivity of these outlaws as supplicants to a higher order; space is defiantly marked as their own, and goes with them when they move. Outlaws must then unsettle the spatial order but also speak from that encounter with unsettlement. Within these close readings the Roma are not positioned against the law, but as active agents exposing the myth of possession as a juridical cartography enacted through spacing. Hence, the treatment of the Roma in the context of housing provision cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the European project, for example and the broader boundaries of external spatiality imagined through the law. Whilst the right to home does not guarantee a right to housing,³ the radical notion that what you have is determined through where

 This research has noted that whilst the right to housing is effectively guaranteed under Inter-

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you are in relation to your family, community and the textuality of the site enables us to move beyond subject-thinking as its only criteria. Juridical focus frequently rests solely on the ‘subjects who move’ rather than attempting to define what a space of possession (or a possessed space) could be. Whilst the ECtHR have held that the idea of nomadism remains an intrinsic part of identity, it is argued here this represents a paradoxical bind in which genealogies of past practice enforce spatial prohibitions in the present. Within this corpus, few of the protagonists (or indeed, authors) retain their nomadic lifestyle. However, each text can be read as the re-theorization of nomadism as a critical analysis of unsettled space, where the sedentary order (rather than the practice of migration) is subject to interrogation.⁴ The diverse representations of spatiality encountered here shift from a claustrophobic depiction of location—“a Traveller can’t hold himself together in a small confined space” (McDonald 2000, 158) – and the mortal terminality of property – “[i]f there’s one thing I have always been afraid of, it is being shut in” – as well as a sense of being hemmed by the rural landscape, with “clouds all packed in [and trees which] shook above us” (Doughty 2006, 22, 207). Alina Serban’s (2011) relationship with the space she calls home verges from ambivalent to hostile – “[o]n the ground there isn’t even a normal floor, but some cartons covering the cold dirt beneath” – and yet although her space is “crooked”, it is still a representation of home space that extends beyond the commodifiable. By restoring textual materiality to the sensory articulations of localized spaces beyond the doctrine of possession these authors demonstrate, therefore, that sites do not lose spatiality either following eviction or by virtue of being portrayed as enclosed and claustrophobic spaces. This analysis has suggested that the exclusionary narrative of the Roma incorrectly emphasizes the legitimacy of occupation and the scared space of home; the possessory impulse of property law reifies the positivist regime of ownership as proximal exclusion, which does not even require us to set foot in a particular space. In a sense, then, property is always enacted through expulsion (Blomley 2003, 130). The hegemonic narrative of the Roma Diaspora therefore falsely emphasizes illegitimate occupation, rather than the spatialities implied or denied by the juridical definition of the home. Although rights regimes guarantee the right to reside in space, the deconstruction of what constitutes the space of national and European human rights law, its efficacy is severely limited in practice and provision.  In this context it is useful to draw inspiration from the way in which Ya’akov Havakuk (1986) has considered the rigidly controlled normative zone of the tent in nomadic Bedouin culture, for example.

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the home has, therefore, not yet punctured the doctrine of propierty and the sedentary spatial order. These literary texts suggests that rather than read through the discourse of mobility, Diaspora should be regarded as a complication of the ambivalence of home and the constructive of planning regimes which seek to delineate what counts as inside and outside. Quasi-judicial planning regimes enact a grid of belonging that seemingly exorcises the Roma, constructing this minority group as those who cannot fit predefined, neutral space. This corpus considers the concept of “proper use” of land within a sedentary order and the sense of inaccessible spatiality in Diaspora. The disused ‘uninhabitable’ wastelands allotted to the Roma Diaspora are never regarded as local, but are identifiable instead as uncanny spaces of “endless mud and water and […] towering pillars” (Walsh 2010, 78). The performance of space encountered within these texts subverts the very notion of proper use: this doctrine is revealed as a paradox of exclusion, based on a discourse of shared space that must be neutral and malleable, yet cannot be either.⁵ The model of illegitimacy which narrativises the Gypsy and Traveller community is shown to be fallacious, obscuring the way in which authorization must be sought for that which is already – and legitimately – owned. This exposes the paradigm of possession framed through use, rather than valid purchase. In other words, it is not a question of your right to be there (a right which is already affected by the erasure of halting sites and encroaching privatisation), but of your right to inhabit a particular space. The texts therefore demonstrate that the manifestation of ownership as a singular reading of possession demonstrates the problem with highlighting only “what material space [Gypsies and Travellers] can occupy and what place they have in the world” (Greenfields and Home 2007, 136), as this leaves the unsettled spaces of the majority absent from the discussion. The cluster of values that collapse on the notion of just possession are present in every spatial categorization of belonging. Much more could be done to read the rhetoric of planning through its refractions in the literary text, in order to theorize its role in shaping space further, particularly in terms of advocating modes of risky planning to accommodate spatial uncertainty. The spatial uncertainty mapped out in the lawscape as it is encountered in these texts reimagines the notion of being “lost and directionless” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012, 12) – the favoured rhetoric of the anti-nomadic – and instead reveals the spatial regulation of the law in quarantined spaces. Movement is interpreted beyond the nomadic narrative as a form of trespass exposing end-

 Indeed, the zoning of increasingly privatized public spaces reveals that they are soon to be “pixellated into billions of stock-marketable units of sequestered air” (Martin 2015).

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less spatio-temporal articulations of the normative. Thus, it can be argued that just as it is “false to define the nomad by movement”, the premise that the nomad has no afterward (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 420 – 421) can be taken to refer not to a desubjectifying resolution but to the way in which the nomad shapes space, and takes space with them (Keenan 2015, 8). In Fires in the Dark (Doughty 2004, 341), Emil is thus the conductor of his past Diasporic routes as he moves: he “walked until the forest ended [with] no thought to the direction of his walking”. A literary jurisprudence must incorporate this displacement without negating the space that is brought, the space that is entered into, and what this type of ‘world making’ does to the nomos. This book suggests that reading spatiality as a recoding of Diaspora does not reject Diaspora as a meaningful categorization, but rather explores all that produces, refracts and emanates from unsettled spatiality in the context of Diaspora. If Diaspora is extracted from the mythological strait jacket of departure and the myth of Return and revealed to be not about movement at all, the artifice of authentic representation, gesturing towards exclusion, is dismantled (; the aspirational body before the law comes without organs, and without origin). Although the enclosure movement is still operative (Bancroft 2000, 44), literary refractions of Diaspora resist the dichotomy of nomad (as disorder) in opposition to the sedentary (as order) in order to articulate an alternative relationship between subjects and space. Hence, the authors subvert expectations by playing with the construction of Roma as other worldly exiles, employing the rhetoric of “the bastard sons of Abraham and Hagar […] cursed to roam the world as pariahs” (Lee 2009, 193) to explore the juridical discourse of exclusion and segregating impact of a Diasporic group identity. In recognition of the the way in which stateless Roma are fictionalized as the archetypal figures of exclusion, “mythical nomadic Gypsy groups who left India and wandered west” (Lee 2008, 2), the trope of the wandering stranger is revealed here as that which is based upon a rhetoric of spatiality forced to hide its relational tendencies, where “the room and world are in a spin/one around the other – a gyroscope buzzing inside a gyroscope” (Morley 2013, 67). Perpetual motion is characterised in “The Pen” (Morley 2013, 67) and The Living Fire (Lee 2009) as a way of negotiating unsettled space, bearing witness to the spatiality of the law like the unfolding cartography of an unsettled city. However, rather than an “unfolding of difference” (May 2003, 147) this can be considered as an exposure of law’s claim to itself (Pahuja 2011, 259). Asking “why not some other world? Why this particular one?” (McDonald 2000, 96) forces a rethinking of how legal space is effectively framed, and deconstructs its neutrality as a fiction of non-belonging.

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The authors contest the narrative of exclusion in complex ways, mapping out the spatial dynamics of power, and challenging the restrictive juridical bind of a nomadic classification. The texts in this corpus explore the flawed dichotomy of inside/outside by highlighting the way in which multiple inhabitants operate in and through space. This analysis suggests more studies are needed which acknowledge the literary works of the Roma Diaspora as a rich corpus with which to expose the spacing implicated in the normative. This project was limited to English language texts alone, but there is a plethora of work in multiple languages (including Romani) which can and should be read, in addition to tales from the oral tradition that are yet to be researched in this way. Critical readings of this minority corpus are key in order to contend with excessive contemporary discrimination (Candau 2015; see also Thornton 2015). Mapping the movements of the protagonists in these texts enable us to embrace spatial uncertainty in the lawscape, by tracing “procedural labyrinths” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012: 21) through infiltration rather than exile (Santos 2002, 437), a form of resistance attributed to the fact that “all my life I had to sneak through my landscape” (Mehr 1990, 34). Revealing this “legal assemblage” (Valverde 2009, 153) not only questions how legitimacy is authorized through a spatial paradigm, but also provides a productive means of considering how these authors make ‘use’ of these spaces through a subversion of the narrative of inside/outside. Location must therefore be read not merely as a site of trespass but of interaction, both conditioned by and provoking the lawscape, acknowledging that “[t]his patch – your patch – will be here long after you’re dead and gone” (Smith-Bendell 2009, 10). Textual movements of deterritorialization within this corpus of literature reveal the radical potential of Diaspora as a potentially resistant measure against the juridical fiction of preserving order by protecting space (Fitzpatrick 2001, 97). Hence, space is revealed as both spacing and containment obscured in the colonising ideology of modern law. In acknowledging that this colonizing sedentary spatiality “is not natural” (Upstone 2009, 6) my analysis has developed the anticolonial disruption of the distinction between “sovereignty (order) and territory (land)” (Boano and Martén 2013,10) in the context of Diaspora. Each text within the corpus explores how space is, then, “mastered” (Wigley 1993, 71) through competing narratives of legitimacy. As territorial sovereignty has not loosened its grip despite the impact of globalization, this book has argued for the productive capacity of spatio-legal interpretation in order to unsettle the link between people and territory (without, therefore, having to contend with the impossible exercise of exorcising state borders). Within this deterritorialization, the protagonist reveals their Othered nomadic identity to be a spatialised locality positioned within an unsettled lawscape. Continuous narrative refractions of enclosure reveals what is unsettling about the sedentary order, as a system of

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quarantine within a broader movement towards preservation. In this sense, Diaspora becomes more than a manifestation of a transnational and rootless externality, acting as an analytical mechanism through which to theorise the ultimate failure of law’s attempts at closure. If disciplinary processes are born out of the failure to enclose, then these texts emphasise the way in which the rhetoric of exclusion is a condition of the spatial, whereby law needs the threat of disorder to survive (Sarat and Kearns 1992, 1). Perhaps, then, the ultimate critique of the sedentary spatial order and a key analytical tendency of Diaspora space is “the refusal to draw any lines at all” (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004, 13). If space is regarded not as static and neutral but as always mobile and incomplete, then negotiating Diaspora can be said to attend to the relation between space and law as a mutual infiltration of all identities. Literature allows us to appreciate the chaotic fiction of the sedentary order, therefore, and unsettle the narrative of stability. The linguistic slippage of terms used to establish the rhetoric of confinement demonstrates the narrative qualities of exclusionary spaces, subject to a hermeneutically disproportionate ius scriptum. Gaps on the page, unpunctuated streams of consciousness, and untethered dialect, reflect an interruptive unsettling of conventional narrative space, indicating an elsewhere that is also a definite here. The writers reflect the hierarchy of possession as an encounter with living spaces, as the narrators actively collide, converge and contract to shape their spaces of inhabitation. The juxtaposition of linear excess and the fluid contours of specific sites reveal how the nuances of spatiality refract notions of spatial order. Vibrant spatio-temporal metaphors deconstruct the site as a scene of waiting, where the authors can be seen mapping out Diaspora space by portraying the encounters within which all are implicated. The titles of the works selected display an engagement with the material dynamics of being grounded – Stone Cradle, Stoneage – or the fluid interpretation of source elements – Fires in the Dark, The Living Fire – refracting an empirical refraction of the chaos of the uprooted, set against the disorder implied by the water imagery frequently evoked in dominant discourses of migrant and nomadic Roma (Clark and Campbell 2000; Cobeanu 2013; Avara and Mascitelli 2014, 136). Attending to spacing (in) Diaspora does not aim to resolve the question of limits but rather to emphasise Diaspora as a point of collision, in which “blind spots make a view of more impossible” (Mehr 1990, 88). Diaspora is depicted in these texts as a way to inhabit unsettlement by taking space with you, rather than looking for a way back. This is a jurisprudence of “living in edges” (Morley 2007, 24): not through a denial of boundaries in favour of a utopian claim to a spatiality beyond the lawscape, but by embracing spacing (in) Diaspora as the critical revelation of law’s hidden spatial narratives.

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Cases cited Amuur v. France [1996] (Application no. 19776/92) BSkyB and others v Chelmsford Crown Court and Essex Police [2012] EWHC 1295 Buckley v. United Kingdom [1996] 23 EHRR 101 Chapman v. United Kingdom [2001] 33 EHRR 18 Connors v. United Kingdom [2004] 40 EHRR 189 Coster v. United Kingdom [2001] 33 EHRR 18 D.H. and others v. Czech Republic [2007] 47 EHRR 3 Government of Communauté française and Gouvernement Wallon v. Gouvernement Flamand [2008] ECJ C-212/06 Lăcătuş and others v. Romania [2012] application no. 12694/04 Lee v. United Kingdom [2001] 33 EHRR 29 Lekpo-Bozua v. London Borough of Hackney & Ors [2010] EWCA Civ 909 Maria Martinez Sala v. Freistaat Bayern [1998] ECR I-2691 Marzari v. Italy [2000] 30 EHRR CD218 McCann v. United Kingdom [2008] 47 EHRR 40 C-202/13 McCarthy and Others v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2014] ECLI:EU: C:2014:2450 Mills v. Cooper [1967] 2 All ER 100 Mogoş v. Romania [2005] application no. 20420/02 Moldovan and others v. Romania [2005] 44 EHRR 16 Moore & Coates v. Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [2015] EWHC 44 Moreno Gomez v. Spain [2004] application no. 4142/02 R. (Baker & Others) v. Secretary of State and London Borough of Bromley [2008] EWCA Civ 141 R. (on the application of McCarthy) v. Basildon [2008] EWHC 987 Reinhard Gebhard v. Consiglio dell’Ordine degli Avvocati e Procuratori di Milano [1995] ECR I‐ 4165 R. (Smith) v. Barking and Dagenham London Borough [2002] EWHC 2400 R. v. Lincolnshire County Council ex parte Atkinson (1995) 8 Admin LR 529 South Bucks DC v. Porter [2004] A.C. 558 Western Sahara [1975] Advisory Opinion, ICJ GL No 61, ICJ Rep 12 Winterstein and others v. France [2013] ECtHR no 27013/07

DOI 10.1515/9783110544251-007

Legislation cited Egypcians Act 1530 (UK) Vagrancy Act 1824 (UK) Highway Act 1835 (UK) Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (INTL) European Convention on Human Rights 1950 (INTL) International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 1951 (INTL) Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960 (UK) International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 1965 (INTL) International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR] 1966 (INTL) Caravan Sites Act 1968 (UK) International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid 1974 (INTL) Helsinki Final Act 1975 (INTL) Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women 1979 (INTL) Multiculturalism Act 1988 (Canada) Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 (INTL) Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (UK) Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (UK) Human Rights Act 1998 (UK) Race Relations Act 2000 [1976] (UK) Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 (UK) Housing Act 2004 (UK)

DOI 10.1515/9783110544251-008

Index abandonment 152, 154 abyssal thinking 60 f., 63 f. African Diaspora 127 Agamben, Giorgio 89, 91, 94 agency 143 alienability 166, 168 alienation 42, 128 f., 165 Amnesty International 91 Amuur v. France (1996) 93 Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003) Arendt, Hannah 73, 91, 94 f. autobiography 136

79

Bancroft, Angus 12, 81, 131 Banga, Dezider 177 f. Bardi, Abby 129 bare life 87, 94 Basildon District Council 82 becoming 51, 70 belonging 98, 102, 160 Benhabib, Seyla 3 Benjamin, Walter 49 Bhabha, Homi 56, 172 Blomley, Nicholas 22, 79, 83, 106 Boaventura de Sousa Santos 60 border, the 89, 173, 182 border control 95 borders 87 f., 163, 169 Brah, Avtar 3, 8, 83, 134 f. BSkyB and others v Chelmsford Crown Court and Essex Police (2012) 83 Buckley v. United Kingdom (1996) 136 camp, the 92 camp site 20, 80 campi nomadi 90, 92 f. Canada 10, 99, 118 f., 123, 125 Cannon, Violet 135, 137, 139, 143, 145 f. Caravan Sites Act (1960) 77 Caravan Sites Act (1968) 77 f. Certeau, Michel de 21 Chapman v United Kingdom (2001) 132, 141, 145 Cheah, Pheng 170

Cho, Lily 63 citizenship 120 Clare, John 18, 21, 23 Cohen, Robin 4 colonialism 12, 21, 45, 56, 60, 122, 182 colonisation 54, 61 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 153 commons, the 77 Connors v. United Kingdom (2004) 78, 131 f., 141 Cooper, Davina 6 corporeality 27, 41, 43, 45 – 47, 49 – 52, 54, 61, 110 Coster v United Kingdom (2001) 130 f., 143 counter-archives 167 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) 78 f., 81, 83, 136, 145 Critical Legal Studies 21 Curtis, Carl 42 customary law 76 Czechoslovakia 65 Dale Farm 19 f., 81 f., 97, 101 Darian-Smith, Eve 46 Dauvergne, Catherine 58 f. Davies, Margaret 164 Delaney, David 21, 157 Deleuze, Gilles – monism 57 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix 122 – and power 121 – assemblages 123 – body without organs 43 f., 49 – 52, 54 – connectivity 25 – corporeality 61 – desire 43 – deterritorialization 43, 71, 120 – nomadology 66 f. – rhizome 67 – space 42 f. Derrida, Jacques 172 – arrivant 169 – 171, 173 f., 177, 183 – becoming 51

Index

– before the law 24, 55 – chora 29 – 31, 33 – 35, 37, 39 – hauntology 138 – hospitality 174 – nomos 6 – on Spinoza 121 – rupture 25 – scene of arrival 55 – sovereignty 30, 122 – space 16, 111 – spacing 38, 138 f., 141 detention 84, 87 f. deterritorialization 7, 43, 51, 57, 61, 65, 67 f., 71, 189 DH and others v Czech Republic (2007) 152 Diaspora – and displacement 177 – and space 117 – and the border 182 – and the claim to space 157 – and the home 154 – as a scene of waiting 170, 172, 176, 185 – community 120 – discourse on 169, 171, 182 – displacement 180 – genealogy 155 – identity 188 – journey 150, 163 – minority group 158 – myth of return 154 – origins 180 – politics 171 – spacing 178, 190 – spatial ontology 173 – spatiality 170, 188 Diaspora space 83, 101, 127, 133, 145, 165, 172, 176, 181 Diaspora Studies 4, 17, 62, 171, 180 Diasporic spatiality 83, 93 Doughty, Louise 10 f., 65 – 71, 159, 161 – 168, 184, 186, 188 Dregni, Micheal 104, 108 – 113, 116 Eastern Europe 86 Edkins, Jenny and Pin-Fat, Véronique Egypcians Act (1530) 76 Eisenman, Peter 30, 39

81

219

Eleftheriadis, Pavlos 38 enclosure 20, 47, 50, 52, 54, 57, 76 f., 103, 105, 108, 130, 136, 146, 162, 165, 167, 184, 189 England 76, 80, 129, 135 Equality Act (2010) 132 European Convention on Human Rights 185 – Article 3 88 – Article 5 93 – Article 8 129, 132, 147 – 149, 151 – 153, 158 European Court of Human Rights, the 88, 93, 129, 132, 141, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 158 f., 182, 186 European Roma Rights Centre 84, 87 f., 91, 145 European Social Charter , Revised (1996) 148 eviction 79, 82, 84, 91 f., 101, 116, 132, 148, 150, 153 f. exile 170 f. Fanon, Frantz 122 Fitzgerald, Sharron 4 Fitzpatrick, Peter 33, 35, 46 f., 56 Foucault, Michel 6 – biopolitics 146 – biopower 50 – disciplinarity 105, 130, 150 – governmentality 98, 108 – plague city 92, 93, 106 f., 113, 115 f. – power 135 – space 6 – spatiality 95 – subject 48 France 1, 10, 93, 104, 108 f., 116, 133, 158 – Paris 115 f. free market 128 Free Movement Directive (2004) 86 Freud, Sigmund 138 Garrett, Bradley 115 genealogy 27, 34, 86, 88, 118, 171 Germany 10, 86 – 89, 95 ghettoization 13, 74, 91, 157 Gilbert, Jérémie 75 f. Gilroy, Paul 7

220

Index

Glissant, Edward 126 globalistion 38 Goodrich, Peter 51 governmentality 100, 107 Graham, Nicole 20 f., 128 f., 159 f., 164 – 166, 168 f., 181 f. green belt 83 Grosz, Elizabeth 51 group identity 113 Gunder, Michael 138 Haldar, Piyel 52 Hammerberg, Thomas 80 Hancock, Ian 12 Harvey, David 6 Highway Act (1835) 77 Hilla, John 29 Hoare, Anne 139 Holocaust 13, 41, 70 home, the 129 f., 147 f., 151 f., 154, 156 f., 159, 182, 185 – protection of 157 – right to respect 153 homeland 1, 5, 8, 48, 62 f., 74, 126, 134, 172, 181, 185 homelessness 63 Hopkins, Nicholas 148 f., 158 hostland 134 housing 82, 148 f., 162, 185 Housing Act (2004) 19, 79 human rights 3, 46, 58, 75, 82, 85, 93, 148 – 151, 153, 156 – 158, 182, 184 f. Human Rights Act (1998) 78 Human Rights Watch 95 hybridity 15, 20, 56, 118, 171 identity 118 immigration 87 immigration control 87 incommensurability 15, 46, 51, 63 Indigenous peoples 15, 75 f., 99, 125 Inter-American Court of Human Rights 76 interlegality 107 f. Italy 90, 133

Jovanović, Ilija 174 juridical order 85 juridical space 95 Kafka, Franz 41 f., 53, 89, 99 Kalinin, Valdemar 172 f., 184 Keenan, Sarah 3, 16, 19, 157 Kenna, Padriac 151 Kosovo 133 Krasnići, Ali 175 – 177, 183 land 81, 83 – Green Belt 131 – proper use of 83, 136, 139, 143 law – and citizenship 95 – and colonisation 189 – and corporeality 184 – and Diaspora 161 – and identity 133 – and migration 141 – and mortality 110 – and ownership 187 – and possession 168 – and proper use of space 130 – and property 139 – and rightful occupation 150 – and sedentary order 184 – and sovereignty 125 – and space 100, 106 f., 113 f., 123, 136, 166, 188, 190 – and spacing 124, 181, 184 – and spatial order 127, 130 – and spatial regulation 187 – and the city 104, 106, 108, 111, 115, 123 – and unsettlement 180 – and violence 84, 121 – beyond the 157 – breaking the 168 – corporeality 161 – normativity 182 – origin of the 127 – outside the 85 – sedentarisation 103 – spatio-temporality 116 – suspension of the 85, 91, 124, 155, 185 Law and Literature 8, 29

Index

lawscape 4, 9, 11, 40, 96, 107 – 109, 117, 120 – 124, 126, 128, 135 f., 138, 140 f., 144, 150, 159 – 161, 166, 171, 180 – 182, 187, 189 f. Lee, Ronald 117, 119 – 123, 125 – 127 Lee v United Kingdom (2001) 131, 141, 143, 146 Lefebvre, Henri 5 Legal Geography 7, 10, 17, 104 Leitch, Vincent 38 Levinas, Emmanuel 49, 64 liminal space 97 literary jurisprudence 8, 180, 184, 190 logos 94, 172 Loughlin, Martin 31 Luhmann, Niklas 107 Lyotard, Jean-François 41 Malabou, Catherine 24, 27 f., 65 – 67, 69 – 71, 184 Manouche 104 Marzari v. Italy (2000) 149 Massey, Doreen 5, 17, 22, 101 materiality 139, 155 McCann v United Kingdom (2008) 153 McDonald, John F. 96 – 100, 103 Mehr, Mariella 40, 42 – 49, 51, 53 – 61, 63, 85 – 87, 93, 184, 189 f. metamorphosis 44, 51, 68, 71, 119 – 121 metissage 126 migration 142, 176 Mills v Cooper (1967) 77 Minkkinen, Panu 49 minority group 99 minority protection 149 minority rights 75, 77, 78, 130 Mishra, Sudesh 83 Mogoş v. Romania (2005) 84, 87 – 89, 95 Moldovan and others v. Romania (2005) 129, 157 Moore and Coates v. Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (2015) 132 Moreno Gomez v Spain (2004) 149 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 14 Morley, David 10, 16 – 21, 23, 28 f., 32, 34, 36, 40, 181, 190

221

mortality 167 Multiculturalism Act (1988) 123 Multiculturalism Policy (1971) 123 nation-state 13, 20, 27, 49 f., 52, 58 f., 62, 74, 94, 129, 169 f., 181 Nield, Sarah 148 f., 151, 158 Nomad Plan 91 nomadic lex specialis 76 nomadism 10 – 17, 19 f., 23, 40 f., 46, 49, 59, 66, 68 f., 71, 74 f., 77, 84, 96 f., 103, 120, 124 f., 132, 134, 136, 141 f., 144, 162, 164, 186 – 188 nomos 6, 8, 25, 73, 85, 142, 188 normative boundaries 115 normativity 114 O’Nions, Helen 8, 74, 78, 96, 149 origins 31 f., 55, 59, 119, 143, 169 OSCE 130 Otopeni airport 84 ouroboros 47 outlaw 51, 53, 58, 181, 185 ownership 164 Penfold, Rosemary 136, 140, 142 Perrin, Colin 23 personhood 26 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas 4, 96, 106 f., 109 f., 115, 160 place 128, 159 f., 167 planning 138 – applications 83, 130, 132, 141 – framework 79, 132, 153, 187 – ideology 130, 136 – law 132, 141, 146 f. – permission 79, 81 f., 141 – policy 81, 137 – system 130 plasticity 10, 24, 65 – 71, 184 possession 17, 19, 36, 111, 128, 130, 140, 148, 151, 185 post-nomadic planning 140 post-nomadism 139 Postcolonial Legal Theory 46 postcolonialism 6, 15, 46, 62 – and space 172

222

Index

postmodernism 48 Postnational Literary Theory 62 power 111, 113, 134, 135 Pratt, Geraldine 152 property 129, 130, 153, 156, 164, 186 property law 128, 149, 151, 157, 159, 164, 186 Pusca, Anca 13 Quarmby, Katherine

19 f., 83

R. (Smith) v. Barking and Dagenham London Borough (2002) 141 R. v Lincolnshire County Council ex parte Atkinson (1995) 81 Race Relations Act (1976) 78 Radin, Margaret 156 Render, Meredith 26 resistance 86, 96, 102, 112, 114, 124, 166 Return, myth of 28, 188 rhizomes 67 Rickert, Thomas 30 Roberts, Simon 114 Romani 98, 121 Romania 87 f., 157 rupture 27, 66 Said, Edward 170 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 107 – contact zones 111 – legal scales 113 Sassen, Saskia 138 Schmitt, Carl 90 sedentary spatial order 11 f., 37, 45, 60, 65, 80 f., 83, 90, 97, 100 f., 105, 117, 120, 125, 130, 138, 140, 148, 151, 159, 161, 163, 182, 190 self-determination 125 Serban, Alina 9, 11, 147, 150, 152, 154 – 158, 184 – 186 Shamir, Ronen 14 f. Shildrick, Margrit 27 Sigona, Nando 133 Silverstein, Ben 14 Simmons, William 39 Simoni, Alessandro 133 site provision 79

Smith, Charlie 20 Smith-Bendell, Maggie 135 f., 139 – 141, 144, 189 sovereignty 3, 27 – 39, 52, 59, 76, 126 space – access to 102, 106, 177 – and identity 158 – and the city 112 – and the uncanny 135, 138 – 140, 142 – 144, 146 f., 172, 187 – materiality 155 – metissage 111 – rural 162 spaces of exception 85 spacing 59, 84, 118, 124, 134, 138, 144 f., 147, 161, 168, 170, 176 f., 180, 183 spatio-legal reading 84 spatio-temporality 26, 66, 86, 102, 170 Spencer, Siobhan 99 Spinoza, Baruch 117, 120 f., 123 Spivak, Gayatri 40 state of exception 89 f. statelessness 4 f., 62, 84 f., 91, 94 f., 105, 171, 183 Stone, Matthew 64 subaltern 12 subjectivity 48, 50, 52, 55, 58, 63, 121 suspended subject 154, 157 Switzerland 40 temporality 15, 126, 162 terra nullius 21 f., 37, 75, 135, 139, 143, 165, 182 territoriality 6, 16, 26, 46, 75, 118, 189 third space 56 threshold 89, 94 f., 169, 173 Tölölyan, Khachig 171 Town and Country Planning Act (2005) 82 trans-territoriality 125 transit centre 88 transit zone 84, 87, 89 f., 93 f. transnationalism 189 Treaty of Westphalia 74 trespassing 79, 82, 115 Tsekos, Mary Ellen 8 United Nations

125

Index

vagrancy 77, 163 Vagrancy Act (1824) 77 Valverde, Mariana 105 violence 87 f., 94, 126, 138

withdrawal 49, 74, 94, 96, 99, 165, 177, 184 Woloch, Cecilia 23, 25 – 28 World Romani community 125 Yenish

Walsh, Mikey 137, 139, 143 f. Western Sahara (1975) 76 Winterstein and others v France (2013)

223

zero 158

40, 44 f., 50, 53, 56, 85 55, 57, 59, 86, 93