Legal identity is produced and revoked by global surveillance systems

Evidence

In deciding to flee rather than participate in a rushed, unaccountable judicial process that is already loaded against him, Raza embraces his provisionality and begins a process of “unbecoming” (308), ditching the documents that make him legal but traceable. He is forced into an awareness that all identities, approved and vilified, exist only by dint of global technologies of control: “One phone call … and he would enter data banks the world over as a suspected terrorist. His bank accounts frozen. His mother’s phone tapped. His emails and phone logs, his Internet traffic, his credit card receipts: no longer the markers of his daily life … but a different kind of evidence entirely” (307). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 434

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler) — Lauren also sheds documents and embraces provisional identity to evade a system that reads her as criminal; both protagonists unmake themselves before the state can fix their identities.
• DEFINE: ‘Unbecoming’ is a useful critical term for the deliberate rejection of readable, government-legible identity.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that all identities — approved and vilified — exist only by dint of global technologies of control is dense: it dissolves the line between inclusion and exclusion by locating the mechanism in surveillance itself, which both grants and withholds legibility. This is a paradigm-shifting point about the Age of Terror worth sitting with.