Asylum shopping and the politics of postcolonial neo-liberalism

This article will explore how the negative discourses surrounding asylum seekers and refugees in Britain since the mid-1990s has been conditioned by the operation of certain logics of postcolonialism and neo-liberal modernity. Sensationalist headlines about ‘asylum shopping’ in the run up to the institution of the Dublin conventions, and continuing curtailments upon the freedom of movement of those seeking asylum across as well as within borders, signify a more fundamental insecurity in the identity of the neo-liberal subject. The article explores how erosions of collective models of solidarity and a dominant discourse promoting entrepreneurialism of the self have contributed to a negative and unjust asylum discourse in Britain. In this, outrage at asylum seekers’ perceived exercising of choice and freedom of movement have been indexed to deep-seated fears and uncertainties about the future, aspirations and opportunities (paranoia) and nostalgia for a more secure national or social identity in the past (melancholia). However, in drawing attention to the tenuous boundaries between neoliberal freedoms and controls upon choice, the news media and political discourses on ‘asylum shopping’ harbours a potential to subvert the very boundaries they ostensibly reinforce. Drawing upon post-Marxist and cultural studies theory this paper will seek to highlight the instabilities and fissures in dominant discourses surrounding asylum and refugee issues in Britain from which possibilities for new, more progressive perspectives might be articulated