Truly one of the best examinations of nationalist myth/race making and racialized violence as a foundational element to capitalism.

5 stars but definitely not a quick or easy read. The text forced me to slow down and take my time with it which was only an issue because I severely underestimated how long it would take me to read the 220 pages for one of my book clubs. Such a heavy but important topic and I’m so glad I picked this book up!

This book packs so much information and analysis in barely over 200 pages. Walia analyzes how capitalist exploitation manufactures displacement and the way migrants are seen simultaneously as undesirable excess population and ultra exploitable source of (permanently) temporary labour. She writes that borders are not merely lines drawn on a map but not internal and external active productions of the state that use citizenship as a means to segregate and racialized populations within and without. Or course, capitalism and imperialism are the crux of the issue, and anti capitalist struggles must include these highly vulnert groups of people who are displaced due to imperialist exploitation.

"While workers are declared illegal, the surplus value they create is never deemed illegal."

"International phenomena such as "Overseas Friends of BJP" or "Hindus for Trump" are best explained through the prism of Hindutva’s brahminical supremacy and adjoining Islamophobia, rather than typical explanations of whitewashed, model minorities or upward class mobility; savarna caste supremacy and Islamophobia tether but are not synonymous with these symptoms."

"The appropriation of gender and sexuality in the service of power has a capacious trajectory: imperial feminism justifies military interventions to save women from patriarchy, homonationalism claims to liberate queers from sexually repressive cultures, carceral feminism vindicates prison expansion under the guise of victims’ rights, trans-exclusionary feminism reduces gender to biological determinism, and secular femonationalism unveils migrant women from their allegedly primitive religions."