Conviviality gains political urgency precisely where multicultural daily life is most constrained.

Evidence

That said, Kemoy’s description of detention as ‘purgatory’ reminds us that conviviality in detention should not be romanticised. Indeed, theorising detention in terms of conviviality might appear somewhat glib. When people are being indefinitely detained while the Home Office pursues their deportation, it can feel off-key to pontificate on convivial potentialities. However, if conviviality is a source of cosmopolitan hope, then its persistence in the context of detention and deportation matters. In the cages built to detain and deport ‘foreigners’, we are reminded, again, that difference is not always the site of danger and threat, but can be one of exchange, affinity and care. Indeed, the task of resistance and shared resilience in a detention centre is itself intrinsically dependent on acting and identifying across difference. It is in such institutions that prefigurative commonalities forged across disparate racial and ethnic backgrounds obtain an acute sociopolitical intensity and urgency – when contrasted with the habits of sharing space captured in the neighbourhood cafe, public street, playground or workplace canteen that is otherwise the mainstay of sociological research on multiculture and conviviality. — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 54

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the usual locus of multicultural conviviality research: everyday cafes get studied, but the ‘purgatory’ of state violence is where cross-difference solidarity becomes politically charged and prefigurative.
• XREF: Echoes the theme of my grafting/infrastructure essay: growth and connection arising in the most constrained, hostile soil rather than in well-tended public space. — connects to: Conviviality loses its political force when equated with everyday multiculture — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 22
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 54

Related

• Conviviality loses its political force when equated with everyday multiculture (similarity 0.83)
• The shared condition of deportability forges affinity across racial and national lines in detention. (similarity 0.79)
• Analyzing conviviality requires theorising racialized urban exclusion alongside national border control. (similarity 0.79)
• Coercive institutions like prisons and detention centres are overlooked micro-publics of conviviality. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Conviviality loses its political force when equated with everyday multiculture #contradicts (0.85) — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 22