Mckeown Chapter 1 Summary

McKeown’s book significantly traces the enforcement of the bio-power on the national border control system against the background of the expansion of capitalist global order, and thus further debunks that the seemingly neutral face of modern international migration is a discursive and institutional mask for coloniality. His arguments keep reminding me of previous insights on our modern world by thinkers like Foucault, Walter Mignolo, and Lisa Lowe, who all stay vigilant to the progressive and emancipatory vision from the enlightenment, or, the western modernity, by revealing its dialectic relevance to its opposite, the suppression and alienation of humanity from disciplinary regimentation of social life to colonial bloodshed and enslavement.

I think that this part somewhat echoes with Lisa Lowe’s investigation of the paradigmatic shift in exploiting labors in American plantations in an earlier period, in which while the indentured Asian worker was favored than African slave to comply with the wave of freedom, alienation was in fact exacerbated via more sophisticated techniques to segregate, control, and tame labors. Seen in this light, how do we consider Chinese immigrants’ forced sojourn and its poetic epiphenomenon on the Angel

The absence of woman in the Chinese self-governing organization and also the poetic writing may find a plausible explanation in the general ill-educated and patriarchal-dominated status of Chinese women back then, and this does not necessarily prevent women from academic investigation, or we can further argue that it is because of the apparent absence that makes the women more significant for research in a reflexive manner. Under the unique circumstances of the Angel Island, where women were segregated from men and their lives was involved with the interaction with Chinese American and white women (matrons and assistants, some with religious background), we should further ask for the women’s perspective for and reaction against the function of bio-power in