Educational theorizations of the subject inspired by Butler’s analysis of performativity in Gender Trouble have built on the discursive nature of power and subjectification to stress that a discursive understanding of power implicates a dynamic understranding of submission, resignification and agency.  The discursive framing of subjectification renders more complex the meaning of subversion. The regulatory injunctions that bring subjects into being can be re-iterated, re-enacted, re-claimed, perverted.  These regulatory injunctions, however, are vulnerable to defiance for the same reason they can be effective in subjecting individuals to regimes of power and truth, i.e., they are performative, para-performative and discontinuous. 

The goal of this paper is to re-iterate this analysis of subjectification and defiance with reference to racist hate speech in urban school contexts, more specifically, racial interpellations of Arab refugees by national subjects and defiant self-reinscriptions by the racially interpellated subjects.  The empirical context from which examples of racial discourse are cited is ethnographic research in high schools that host refugee students from Iraq.  Confronted with various instantiations of raciologies (Gilroy 2006), refugee male Arab teenagers attempt to break from the biopolitical range of race by enacting a new biopolitics of national belongingness. Enacted as a formation of blood ties (e.g., by donating blood), their claim of national belongingness (to the ‘receiving’ country) uses discourses of blood to disrupt, presumably post-racist and more ‘dignified’, discourses of national belongingness.

Instead of theorizing defiance along the lines of Butler’s paradigmatic example of counter-talk and subversive re-articulations of racial taint (e.g, “Proud to be Black”, “I’m Black”, as in Excitable Speech), I examine how raced subjects reclaim biopolitics as a register for resignifying the body as one’s biopower for a country that is yet to become one’s own. From this perspective, racialization is not just as an act acted by those who ‘own’ racist discourse against/upon those refugee others in the name of a nation free of racial taint. Rather, the refugees’ racialization (a haematological racialization) of belongingness draws attention to the racial (blood) origin of the nation. The re-racialization of the nation and the re-nationalization of the refugee raced self are two gestures that supplement each other in reclaiming performative biopolitics (such as blood donation, voluntary army, giving birth to the nation’s children) from the state (and its for uses state control and migration border patrols) and put it into new uses in order to fashion (and re-racialize) forms of national belongingness and solidarity. The paradigmatic gesture through which such kind of biopolitics is performed is not the migrant’s quest for hospitality into civic citizenship by a nation in whose name they are already ‘singing’ as citizens, as in the manner of illegal Hispanic migrants singing the American national anthem in Spanish (Butler, 2006), but the refugee’s offer to give the gift of one’s blood for a jus sanguinis nation to un-become.

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