Sanctuary Syllabus

On January 27, 2017, Executive Order 13769 went into effect, banning foreign nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. Within hours, Customs and Border ...

On January 27, 2017, Executive Order 13769 went into effect, banning foreign nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. Within hours, Customs and Border Protection agents were detaining travelers, including those with visas and green cards. By the next day, protesters had crammed into airport arrival halls bearing signs of welcome to international travelers, as family members of the detained, lawyers, health workers, clergy, translators, state, local, and city officials, and journalists provided assistance to those affected by the ban. That night, a judge heard the ACLU challenge to the executive order and issued a temporary stay on the ban, but the struggle for immigrants’ rights was not over.

In the months since, President Trump has attempted two more versions of the travel ban and announced the repeal of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) policy, stripping rights to work and study from 800,000 young people. The spectacular scenes of detention and border enforcement at the airports brought to light the intersecting roles of war, law, policing, and racism in the current situation. But protesters transformed these spaces of control and surveillance into grounds for civil disobedience and creativity, manifesting the power of the public to demand and create sanctuary.

As educators, we see how new limits on immigration threaten the movement of both people and ideas. We seek to imagine how universities and scholars can participate in the burgeoning movement to build sanctuary for affected immigrants and Americans. The Sanctuary Syllabus emerges in this context.

This course introduces readers to the intellectual and social histories that have given life to today’s sanctuary movement. Movements for “sanctuary” can trace their roots back to the stowaway houses and escape routes of the abolitionist movement. They are most associated, however, with efforts to protect Latin American refugees fleeing US-sponsored Cold War violence in the 1980s. Religious leaders along the southern US border established their houses of worship as sanctuaries and coordinated routes for transporting individuals between them. These sanctuaries provided shelter, material goods, publicity, and legal advice.

Today, sanctuary states, cities, congregations, and campuses work to protect their residents, students, and neighbors from detention and deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to keep families together, to develop systems of community support for immigrants seeking refuge, and more broadly to maintain communities in which immigrants, people of color, and people of all religious faiths can safely live, work, and study.

Our syllabus asks readers to cross borders; we’ve placed the analytical alongside the artistic, the practical alongside the inspiring. Readings in the first section, “Why Sanctuary?,” explain the historical and structural causes of immigration, migration, and displacement in the US and globally. In the second section, “Who Needs Sanctuary?,” we explore the regulation of citizenship, and its effects on undocumented citizens as well as racially, religiously, and sexually marginalized groups. Finally, the syllabus offers resources and strategies for studying, organizing, and creating sanctuary. Many of the weekly themes take their titles from political calls to action. We offer the syllabus to be used as a dynamic tool, one that students, educators, activists, and those who simply want to know more can shape to the needs of their communities.

 

The NYU Sanctuary Syllabus core group includes Paula Chakravartty, Yoav Halperin, Monica Kim, Rachel Kuo, Molly Nolan, Sonya Posmentier, Sarah Sklaw, and Shivani Srivastav. We also thank members of the NYU Sanctuary Coalition, the New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC, and the Cross-Campus Sanctuary Group at The New School, CUNY, and Barnard and Columbia.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Why Sanctuary?

1. “Sanctuary Now!”: Civil Disobedience Past & Present

2. “No Wars, No Borders”: Militarism & Refugees

3. Migration & Ecological Crises

4. “No Bans on Stolen Lands”: Dispossession & Indigeneity

5. “No Raids, No Broken Windows”: Police & State Violence

 

Who Needs Sanctuary?

6. “No Person Is Illegal:” Law, Race, & Citizenship

7. “SinDACA Sans Papier Sin Miedo”: Understanding Undocumented Lives

8. “#MuslimBan”: Racializing Islam & Disciplining Difference

9. Gendering Migration: Intimacy, Family, & Reproduction

 

How Do We Organize Sanctuary in Precarious Times?

10. Health Care & the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship

11. Racial Justice in a Fake News World: Media Structures, Media Tools

12. “Sí Se Puede!” Migrants & Workers

13. Decolonizing the University: Sanctuaries for Dissent

14. “Sanctuary Is Solidarity”: Resources for Building & Practicing Sanctuary


WEEK 1

“Sanctuary Now!”: Civil Disobedience Past & Present

 

Readings

Multimedia and Storytelling

  • Immigrant Nation!: The Battle for the Dream, directed by Esaú Meléndez (2010).

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 2

“No Wars, No Borders”: Why We Need Sanctuary

 

Readings

  • Hannah Arendt, “We, Refugees,” and Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, edited by Marc Robinson (Harvest, 1996).
  • Didier Fassin, “From Right to Favor,” The Nation, April 5, 2016.
  • Anna Holian and G. Daniel Cohen, eds., “The Refugee in the Postwar World, 1945–1960,” special issue, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 25, no. 3 (September 2012).
  • Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012).

Multimedia and Storytelling

Tools and Policies

  • United Nations High Commission for Refugees, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016” (2017).
  • Neta C. Crawford, Catherine Lutz, and Stephanie Savell, project directors, “Costs of War,” Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2011–2017).

 

WEEK 3

Migration & Ecological Crises

 

Readings

Multimedia and Storytelling

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 4

“No Bans on Stolen Lands”: Dispossession & Indigeneity

 

Readings

  • Jodi Byrd, “Introduction: Indigenous Critical Theory and the Diminishing Returns of Civilization,” in The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
  • Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4 (2006).
  • Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 3, nos. 3–4 (2013).
  • Audra Simpson, “Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State” and “A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and Kahnawà:ka,” chaps. 1–2 in Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014).
  • Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).

Multimedia and Storytelling

  • Harsha Walia, “Decolonizing Together: Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization,” in The Winter We Danced: Voices From the Past, The Future, and the Idle No More Movement, edited by The Kino-nda-niimi Collective (AK Press, 2014).

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 5

“No Raids, No Broken Windows”: Police & State Violence

 

Readings

  • Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra!: A History of the US Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010).
  • Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
  • Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017).
  • Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (University of California Press, 2014).
  • Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (University of California Press, 2015).

Multimedia and Storytelling

  • Angel Island Poems, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
  • Coco Fusco, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (Seven Stories Press, 2008).
  • Swet Shop Boys, “T5” (2016).

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 6

“No Person Is Illegal:” Law, Race, & Citizenship

 

Readings

  • Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004).
  • Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton University Press, 2008).
  • Susan Bibler Coutin, Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2007).
  • Leo Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford University Press, 2013).
  • Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 106, no. 8 (1993).

Multimedia and Storytelling

  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014).
  • Jill Anderson and Nin Solis, Los Otros Dreamers (independent, 2014).

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 7

Living & Being Undocumented

 

Readings

  • Roberto G. Gonzales, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press, 2015).
  • Anne McNevin, “Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era: The Struggle of the Sans-Papiers,” Citizenship Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (2006).
  • Esther Yoona Cho, “A Double Bind–‘Model Minority’ and ‘Illegal Alien,’Asian American Law Journal, vol. 24 (2017).
  • Denise Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014).

Multimedia and Storytelling

  • No Le Digas a Nadie (Don’t Tell Anyone), directed by Mikaela Shwer (2015).
  • Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Vintage, 2007).

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 8

“#MuslimBan”: Racializing Islam & Disciplining Difference

 

Readings

  • Malcolm X, “Letters from Abroad,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, edited by George Breitman (Grove, 1965).
  • Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3 (2002).
  • Saba Mahmood, “Religion, Feminism, and Empire: The New Ambassadors of Islamophobia,” in Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and John D. Caputo (Indiana University Press, 2011).
  • Yassir Morsi, Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-Racial Societies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
  • Moustafa Bayoumi, “Racing Religion,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (2006).

Multimedia and Storytelling

  • Kiana Karimi, “At JFK,” LRB blog, London Review of Books, January 29, 2017.
  • Narcy, “Phatwa” (music video).

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 9

Gendering Migration: Intimacy, Family, & Reproduction

 

Readings

  • Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute, 1987).
  • Eithne Luibhéid, Lionel Cantú, eds., Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
  • Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura, eds., Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology (New York University Press, 2003).
  • Miriam Ticktin, “Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Where French Feminist and Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Meet,” Signs, vol. 33, no. 4 (2008).
  • Patricia Zavella, “Migrations,” “Migrant Family Formations,” and “The Divided Home” in I’m Neither Here Nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty (Duke University Press, 2011).

Multimedia and Storytelling

Tools and Policies

  • Priscilla Huang. “Anchor Babies, Over-Breeders, and the Population Bomb: The Reemergence of Nativism and Population Control in Anti-Immigration Policies,” Harvard Law & Policy Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (2008).

 

WEEK 10

Healthcare & the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship

 

Readings

  • Heide Castañeda et al., “Immigration as a Social Determinant of Health,” Annual Review of Public Health, vol. 36 (2015).
  • Sarah Willen, ed., “Migration, ‘Illegality,’ and Health: Mapping Embodied Vulnerability and Debating Health-Related Deservingness,” special issue, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 74, no. 6 (2012).
  • Charlene Galarneau, “Still Missing: Undocumented Immigrants in Health Care Reform,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, vol. 22, no. 2 (2011).
  • Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, and Peter Guarnaccia, eds., A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
  • Jan Hoffman, “Sick and Afraid, Some Immigrants Forgo Medical Care,” New York Times, June 26, 2017.
  • Seth M. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (University of California Press, 2014).

Multimedia and Storytelling

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 11

Racial Justice in a Fake News World: Media Structures, Media Tools

 

Readings

  • Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (SAGE, 1995).
  • Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014).
  • Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (University of Texas Press, 2002).
  • Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013).
  • Cristina Beltrán. “‘No Papers, No Fear’: DREAM Activism, New Social Media, and the Queering of Immigrant Rights,” in Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics, edited by Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero (NYU Press, 2014).
  • Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist, vol. 42, no. 1 (2015).

Multimedia and Storytelling

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 12

“Sí Se Puede!” Migrants & Workers

 

Readings

  • Elizabeth Mavroudi and Caroline Nagel, “Migrant Labour in the Economy,” Global Migration: Patterns, Processes, and Politics (Routledge, 2016).
  • Vanesa Ribas,` On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South (University of California Press, 2015).
  • Natasha Iskander, “Informal Work and Protest: Undocumented Immigrant Activism in France, 1996–2000,” British Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 45, no. 2 (2007).
  • Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
  • Aziz Choudry and Mondli Hlatshwayo, eds. Just Work?: Migrant Workers’ Struggles Today (Pluto, 2015).

Multimedia and Storytelling

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 13

Decolonizing the University: Sanctuaries for Dissent

 

Readings

Tools and Policies

 

WEEK 14

“Sanctuary Is Solidarity”: Resources for Building & Practicing Sanctuary

 

Readings

  • Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge, eds., Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, esp. part 1, “Why Now?: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis,” and part 5, “Speaking Up! Standing Up!: Local Struggles against Walls and Cages” (University of Georgia Press, 2012).
  • Veronica Terriquez, “Intersectional Mobilization, Social Movement Spillover, and Queer Youth Leadership in the Immigrant Rights Movement,” Social Problems, vol. 62, no. 3 (2015).
  • Randy K. Lippert and Sean Rehaag, eds., Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship and Social Movements (Routledge, 2013).
  • Harald Bauder, “Sanctuary City,” chap. 6 in Migration Borders Freedom (Routledge, 2017).
  • Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass, eds., “Borders and the Politics of Mourning,” special issue, Social Research, vol. 83, no. 2 (Summer 2016).

Multimedia and Storytelling

Tools and Policies

Featured image: Scott Richard, Sanctuary City (2017). Photograph by torbakhopper / Flickr