3. Caging, Staging: Race and the Question of Human Life in Covid Times

Racialized Regimes of the Human and the Carceral Milieu

Faced with the biosecurity threat of Covid-19, nations around the world labored to securitize their populations through the generalized carceral milieu of quarantine, lockdown, and isolation. Like many nation-states, Australia instituted quarantine measures that restricted individuals’ movements by way of health policy mandates, heightened visibility (to make sure individuals and communities followed those mandates), and efforts to have individuals internalize governance of the self—against infection. The surveillance of space and individuals within it was key here. Tracking cases and morbidity, tracing contact vector points, testing blackwater/sewage, maintaining border controls, and requiring and reporting on population screening/testing (alongside genomic sequencing) were the most common forms of surveillance adopted to minimize the spread of the virus under conditions of quarantine. Given that quarantine was concerned with the protection and promotion of human life—“making life live”—it can be viewed as a care practice. Importantly, however, it can also cause harm, precisely because it can involve gradations of carcerality and distinct forms of biosecuritization based on gradations of the “human.”

To begin making sense of this claim, it is first necessary to consider the conceptual category of the “human” as that which is produced rather than natural or ontologically self-evident. Despite the fact that “we” are animals too, taxonomical borders have been erected between what we name as the “human” and the “animal,” with each positioned as putatively discreet categories. Indeed, the animal has been cast as the opposable limit to the figure of the human. Human and animal have been rendered separate because the human has been understood as being able to transcend their basic biological animality, to rise above their status as living animal. Human exceptionalism—that which makes “us” supposedly distinct from nonhuman animals—is to be found, so the logic goes, in the human capacity for reason, rationality, agency, knowledge production, and culture, and humans supposedly humanize themselves through a repudiation of animality so as to assume the form of the “cultural moral” human.4 As many animal studies scholars and others have established, these logics produce a discourse of speciesism, whereby humans are considered more morally important in species differentiation, species are differentially treated based on species membership, and nonhuman animals are excluded from the protections granted to humans.

As others have demonstrated, however, the invention of the human as an ontological category was always accompanied by the entwined production of “marginalized non/personhood,” highlighting that the discourse of species difference has been put to other uses: It is not only applied to nonhuman animals.5 The discourse of species “will always be available for use by some humans against other humans . . . to countenance violence against the other of whatever species—or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference.”6 Certain peoples have long been viewed as occupying lower positions in the Enlightenment ladder of civilizations, with “elite” white humans taken as “truly human” and distinguished from “lower” life forms, including nonhuman animals, working-class people, and people of color. Those designated outside the boundaries of whiteness have been understood as deficient in reason, higher feeling, and self-control, and they have been positioned as driven by impulse, as more aligned with the body and with nature. As such, racialized subjects have often been cast as “wild” and in need of taming, a reality Frantz Fanon marked when discussing the process of colonization. As he observed, “discipline, tame, subdue, and now pacify are the common terms used by the colonialists in the territories occupied.”7 The discourse of species has enabled “Western civilizations” to define themselves against those populations deemed insufficiently human or “dubiously human.”8

In the extreme, this discourse has also enabled what Cary Wolfe calls a “moral economy” whereby certain humans can be killed “by marking them as animal.”9 In Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the animality in question is that of the colonized or the native, Black and otherwise. As he states: “In plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal. And consequently, when the colonizer speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms. Allusion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors from the ‘native’ quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the seething and the gesticulations. In his endeavors of description and finding the right word, the colonist refers constantly to the bestiary.”10 Such ideas were generated from the earliest days of modern racial thought—which adapted classical and medieval beliefs in scala naturæ or the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchical system that ranked all creation and saw humans as sharing an affinity with animals, with the “lowest” human beings viewed as closest to the “highest” animals—and reached their crescendo in late eugenic logics and practices. This is not to say, however, that the idea of the insufficiently human has disappeared.

Gradations of the human persist in the ongoing biopolitical governance of the population and the promotion of its welfare, where certain humans have clearly counted more in terms of lives to be fostered. Such governance operates through scientific understandings of the biological properties of the human as species: it serves, as David Chandler and Julian Reid have argued, “to reduce the life of the human to its biological capacities, conceiving the human in the form of ‘the biohuman.’”11 If biopolitics protects “biohumanity”/human biological life in its generality, those deemed insufficiently human are not only devalued but are often seen to be a threat to biohumanity. And, as Michel Foucault insists, where biopolitics adjudicates species life—to “subdivide the species it controls”—it justifies exposing to death (“letting die” or, in the extreme, killing) those citizens who are viewed as a threat,12 supposedly to protect biohumanity—the broader population who are preferentially valued.

During the Delta outbreak in Sydney, particular non-white communities were positioned as a health and biosecurity risk/threat, to be addressed by management and control in a way that suggests they were viewed as insufficiently human. The claim here is not that racialized minorities were depicted as animals: This would be too simplistic a read. Rather, the power/knowledge relation or discourse of species conditioned the biopolitical administration of life during the Sydney Covid-19 Delta outbreak in ways we might call zoological. If the subdivision of (human) species is central to the biopolitical administration of life, efforts to manage and control those viewed as insufficiently human—within the broader operation of biopolitics—constitute what could be referred to as “zoological governance.”

Zoological governance is predicated on the logic that certain beings are “lesser” (animals), as determined by the discourse of species difference, and more aligned with untamed bodily nature. It manages the social sphere according to this logic, via technologies often reserved for the collection, keeping, and exhibition of nonhuman animals and those historically situated in the liminal space between human and animal. This management confirms and augments the supposed lesser status of these peoples, perversely justifying operations of “let die.” In what follows, I trace out two key technologies deployed in the operations of zoological governance in the Sydney case: carcerality/caging and spectacle/staging. Carcerality is the primary mode of power in modern societies, where surveillance and discipline are diffused as principals of social organization.13 What makes this case specific is that rather than being based on inclusion with the aim of normalization, carcerality here seemingly dehumanizes and excludes those marked as racial others (ideas I later trouble). And, while spectacle supposedly disappears in carceral society, we see here that in the management of racial others it remains a key mode of power. Zoological governance, needless to say, generated unequal harms and led to dire consequences for the health of those in these communities and health equity more broadly.

Fence-in, Immobilize, Tame

The noun cage evokes notions of a structure of bars or wires in which birds or other animals are kept, or a prison cell or camp. The verb caged denotes confinement, constraint, or enclosure. In the broadest sense, it is possible to think of race as caged within the constraints of dominant epistemologies that delimit what race can be and mean. But we can also consider race itself as a caging mechanism that ensnares and restricts—in differential fashion—all those it marks under its terms. Caging, as it relates to race, is not simply metaphoric or discursive but instead has what Foucault called an “awesome materiality”:14 it institutes tangible, material effects, primarily that of (again) producing bodies—the flesh of the other—that need to be put in place. It is a material technology that, following philosopher Charles Mills, demarcates “civil” from “wild” spaces—and those who reside in them.15

In Sydney, this racialized and racializing technology of regulatory caging (or carceral control) was deployed almost a year into the pandemic, when the Delta outbreak hit in mid-June 2021. Delta initially appeared in the predominantly white and affluent Eastern suburbs, and moved through the city until June 26, when a citywide hard lockdown was put in place via an amendment to the state’s Public Health Act 2010 (NSW): strict stay-at-home orders were issued, and all essential businesses and schools closed. Such measures were adopted to secure life: biohumanity at large. However, what unfolded became a tale of two cities, where certain subjects were marked as distinct and efforts to affirm life actually exposed racial minorities to deadly conditions.16

This particular part of the story began a few weeks into the general lockdown, when three regions in the city’s Southwest were identified as hot spot “areas of concern”—later expanding to twelve areas throughout the Southwest and West. These areas, with high migrant, Black, brown, Asian, and refugee populations, were placed under restrictions never introduced in the East. Though there had been clusters of infection across the city prior to this, authorities justified the imposition of harsher restrictions in these areas because transmission case rates were rising rapidly in the Southwest, home to “essential workers” who were unable to shelter in place. Increasing infection rates were blamed on residents of these areas who officials repeatedly claimed were flouting Covid safety rules: not wearing masks or wearing them incorrectly, engaging in unnecessary travel, gathering in large groups, and living in extended or intergenerational family homes (a marker of racial otherness). What subsequently emerged was a spatialization of preemption—to “stop the spread”—achieved through a distinct form of carcerality.

These areas were demarcated as internal spaces (within the broader city) to be contained and made subject to spatially specific control, surveillance, and policing, precisely because the bodies and behaviors of those residing within these spaces were deemed to be “problematic.” The racialization of these communities (and evocation of the discourse of species) became clear when the state health minister said that “people from other backgrounds . . . don’t seem to think that it is necessary to comply with the law and . . . don’t really give great consideration to what they do in terms of its impact on the rest of the community . . . [I] say to them, you need to because otherwise the forces of the law are coming after you.”17 With this statement, “people from other backgrounds” (that is, non-white) were named as distinct and cast as uncontrolled, and the response suggests they needed subdual or taming.

The first method of caging these populations was via confinement—marking the parameters of the cage and enclosing and isolating those within this internal “wildspace” who supposedly did not “comply with the law.” This was achieved through the specific public health measure of “ring-fencing.”18 As a term, ring-fencing is used in finance to distinguish between assets and liabilities; in politics it marks the history of the 1970s Belfast police strategy (later adopted in London) of erecting fences around major vehicle access points to halt the movements of the IRA—in this incarnation it refers to defending against terrorists; in farming, the term is used to demarcate farmland, mainly to enclose domesticated animals. In public health, to ring-fence is to identify and isolate hot spots of infection. While this strategy was applied in Australia at multiple scales—to control the borders of the nation and borders between various states—the harshest form of ring-fencing was applied to these minority hot spots. Here, the specter of liabilities, terrorism (from the Latin root, terror: the use of extreme fear to intimidate people), and domestication converged in ring-fencing within the parameters of city.

These areas were represented again and again in the media through visual maps that marked the fencing operation—often in bright danger red, while the rest of city was shown to recede in an unmarked blur (a point I return to in the following section). The mass inside these areas were targeted and homogenized as the threatening other, lacking the fundamental attributes that supposedly distinguish the modern human. For instance, broader (whiter, richer) Sydney was called on to use “common sense” in relation to the generalized health restrictions announced in the daily press conferences from the state premier and other authorities, essentially leaving them to interpret mandates as they pleased. The fact that these new emerging hot spots required extra-constraining measures suggests those residents were somehow culturally deficient, with compromised capacity for reason and control. The idea that these people represented a threat to securitizing public health was made clear when the state premier claimed that “the risk of seeding in other parts of the city remains . . . we [need to] have a high level of vigilance, particularly for those areas that border the suburbs that we’re most concerned about.”19 What became evident as this process unfolded was that these zones of carcerality were simultaneously geographies of securitization and abandonment. The stated aim was to protect society at large, including those within these areas, but the isolation of this cage began to look a lot like protecting the safety of those outside against (and at the expense of) those within.

With Delta on the loose, the state premier placed the police commissioner in charge of the state’s response to Covid-19, appointing him to the position of “emergency operations controller.” At this point, a policing rather than health approach was instituted. Unprecedented public health orders were decreed by police authority to govern those within the hot spots, with the stated aim of minimizing viral contact. Residents within “areas of concern” were prohibited from moving five kilometers from their homes, while broader Sydney could move ten kilometers. Only one person could leave the house once a day for essential goods. Only “authorized workers” in this zone of carcerality were permitted to work but were required to have a permit and mandatory Covid testing every seventy-two hours. Residents were restricted to one hour of exercise per day, while those outside these areas had no time limit. Added to this, residents had to carry proof of identification if they left home, and no one from outside these areas was allowed in, except authorized workers with a permit. Last, a 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew was decreed, on policing (not health) advice, making movement between these times illegal.20

Extra-surveillance was also instituted to enforce the new rules in these areas—to monitor the borderlines and internal spaces of this cage. A significantly increased police presence was put on the streets to patrol both on horseback and on foot for “infringements” by those repeatedly cited as posing an enhanced risk to controlling the virus. In a most controversial move, the Australian Armed Forces were called in for lockdown “compliance enforcement,” amounting to what many characterized as a “militarized army of lockdown and occupation.”21 The police and army conducted random daily door-to-door checks to make sure residents were at home, there were road-checks on drivers, and helicopters circled over the areas, using loudspeakers to order people to stay home. Under these forms of direct targeting, residents of these communities received more than double the number of arrests and fines (compared to other regions), and they were disproportionately subjected to additional searches during “Covid stop” incidents, in what amounted to a dragnet of broader racialized profiling.22 That these securitization measures signaled a simultaneous abandonment, as noted earlier, was captured by the mayor of one of these areas, when he stated, “This is the poorest community. . . . [Lockdown now means] [t]hey cannot afford to pay their mortgage, their rent, their bills, or put food on the table to feed their children.”23 As another commentator made clear: “It’s a recurring theme that our communities are not prioritized and that we are treated as lesser.”24

Those within this cage might be said, then, to have been domesticated via domination. The cage marked the periphery of unequal cultural status and mobility between those outside and those within. Those within were immobilized and effectively reduced to the status of “living animal” with the usual humanizing traits denied and human “protections” withdrawn (for instance, self-determination, protection against the deprivation of life). Like all cages, however, this was not a closed but porous system, allowing certain members of the community to move beyond the periphery for essential work. PCR testing enabled those authorized workers—in the manufacturing, food processing, care, and warehousing industries—to be temporarily individualized (in distinction to the homogenized group within the cage) in order to facilitate the needs, indeed the humanizing of others. But this was only another system of entrapment—entrapment another way: If they were already exposed to deadly conditions inside—marking a certain expendability or “killability” of these “sub-populations”—then going outside to improve their capacities for life only intensified the state of precarity. By working outside (leaving home) in jobs that keep the city functioning, their exposure to Covid was heightened, the virus spread, and these communities saw excess infection and mortality rates.

Stage, Display, Spectacularize

If caging was fundamental to the racialized zoological governance of Covid-19 in the Sydney case, the technology of visual spectacle—staging—was equally important. Etymologically, the word spectacle derives from the Latin root spectare, “to view, watch,” and specere, “to look at.” The Oxford English Dictionary provides a more complex set of understandings: “1. a) A specially prepared or arranged display of a more or less public nature (esp. on a large scale), forming an impressive or interesting show or entertainment for those viewing it. . . . 2. A person or thing exhibited to, or set before, the public gaze as an object either (a) of curiosity or contempt, or (b) of marvel or admiration. . . . 3. An event of striking or unusual character . . . 4. a. A sight, show, or exhibition of a specified character or description.” Prepared or arranged display, more or less public, and set before the public gaze are key elements to spectacle that I want to highlight here, but also the notion of heightened attraction that is produced for those viewing a spectacle.

While spectacle has been variously theorized, I am working in line with Jonathan Crary’s claim that spectacle must be understood as an “architecture of power” that creates and maintains social inequality.25 Spectacle arranges ways of seeing (in this case, the racialized other as distinct, knowable, and lesser human) and creates both ideological and material divisions. In relation to the Sydney case, I am principally concerned with spectacles of difference, wherein racial alterity (non-whiteness) is produced and resecured.26 Racial alterity is indeed generated through a regime of representation: that is, a persistent and recursive visual repertoire or racial scripting (within dominant culture) that presents bodies, identities, and communities in terms of narrow and essentialized/naturalized characteristics. Such spectacles generally confirm and compound the discourse of species difference.

The exhibition of minority hot spots and residents within them via spectacles of racial alterity occurred in the first instance through the very operation of geo-mapping hot spots. Earlier, I noted one particular form of map—circulated again and again with slight variations as new hot spots emerged—which demarcated minority areas in highly visible “danger red” while other, whiter, areas of the city remained unmarked in a visual blur, thus receding in consciousness as threatening viral spaces. Another form of map showed Sydney divided by local government areas (LGAs), with sequential darkening pigmentation of areas (white and yellow, through to red and finally black) in line with the perceived march of Covid caseloads.27 Two key factors become evident through this map.

First, in this blackening of certain minority areas as geographies of concentrated contagion, we see that geo-mapping and its visualization fixes the virus in place as a spatial ontology, as if it is to be found there, essential to there, rather than mobile.28 Moreover, this kind of visualization fails to account for conditions that give rise to increased rates of infection: that is, lack of access to health resources (such as health care or adequate culturally and linguistically specific health information), increased pre-existing conditions, lower economic status, more crowded living conditions, and so on. Health in general, and how the virus tracked across communities, needs to be understood as not simply biological or of the body but as social. Also, as Jenna Loyd reminds us, “health inequalities can be understood as spatial inequalities to the degree that health is shaped by uneven social relations and material environments. This makes the geographic scales at which people understand ‘health’ and ‘health promotion’ prime areas of conflict.”29

Second, we also see that certain spaces, occupied by certain people, were set before the public gaze as distinct from the rest of the population. But communities were racialized and race was spectacularized here without naming race—in what amounted to a visual semiotics of purity/impurity, safety/danger. This ostensibly race-blind representation was accompanied by race-blind language, where de-racialized nomenclature—“area of concern,” “hot spot,” “people from other backgrounds”—stands in for racial otherness. Importantly, the very use of color-coding on the map, as it is overlaid with preexisting knowledge about the racialized makeup of these spaces, predisposes the viewer to read the map in particularly racialized ways. And then this map and others like it were endlessly shown in spectacular fashion, reproducing these associations over and over again. Such maps position racialized minorities as simultaneously within and beyond (other to) the nation—foreign to public health governance. They are within the nation because they appear on the map, but they are outside because of color/ing, perhaps an incantation of the dark continent within. Like those on that other dark continent, these peoples are topologically represented as far away (as humans) but close simultaneously (because they are threatening), highlighting the interplay of proximity and distance/likeness and otherness. Ultimately, the map is a way of arranging knowledge about certain spaces and the people within them, it is a way of comprehending and relaying knowledge about viral outbreak, and it shapes the attention of and instructs the populace to view both peoples and how the virus works in particular ways.

Spectacles of racial alterity also occurred through media coverage of residents under conditions of caging. Here, supposed disparities or differences were made into spectacle, and various tropes were deployed to produce “lesser humans.” Such operations recursively recall the living “ethnic” exhibitions of human zoos, a Western phenomenon harking from the early nineteenth century. There were various exhibitionary contexts for these human zoos: world’s fairs, theaters, circuses, and public zoological gardens. But the underlying logic regardless of context was to show the lesser varieties or typologies of humans (and the lesser or indeed inhuman behaviors naturalized to them) within an overarching system that presumed hierarchization led by white Europeans. Spectacle here was an operation of power that simultaneously marked and produced gradations of humans. If, as Lisa Uddin argues, traditional zoos and their species display endorsed the idealized human subject/spectator as racialized white—“through immersion in its own fantasy of autonomy, reason, benevolence, morality, mobility, and invisibility”30—human zoos only compounded this operation. Especially after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (and the subsequent rise of the discourse of evolution), the “ethnic peoples” in these displays “became easily defined as ‘missing links’ between human and other animal forms on an increasingly fluid chain of being.”31 The logic central to human zoos—to show “lesser variation” and thus justify their differential treatment—seemed to echo through media spectacles of racial alterity in the Sydney case via the use of particular exhibitionary strategies deployed in traditional human zoos.32

In the first instance, like with human zoos, the inhabitants of these hot spots were presented in their fenced-off areas—in this case in an almost endless news cycle. The populace saw imagery of apartment buildings being fenced off or locked down, with residents of one block of fifty apartments in the West, for instance, put under police guard and fourteen days of what a resident characterized as mandatory “imprisonment.” The populace saw imagery of cleaners and HAZMAT-suited health workers sanitizing areas deemed infected in these hot spots.33 They saw media spectacle of police and army containing otherness: patrolling the streets on foot and with road checkpoints, and helicopters monitoring street movement in these areas, alongside imagery of residents under police lockdown being fed by authorities, hanging over balconies, or behind glass windowpanes because they could not go outside. Such imagery assured viewers that “threatening behavior” had been curtailed.

Alongside and intersecting this first strategy from human zoos was a second: the rendering of abject humanity for certain groups of people through select imagery or treatment within their confined environments. This is a staging to stress difference, amounting to what L. L. Wynn refers to as “pathological imagery of otherness.”34 Two key examples attest to what we could see as the production of abject humanity of minority groups in the Sydney case. First was the police treatment and media coverage of an “illegal gathering” of members of Christ Embassy Church in Sydney’s West, whose Nigerian leader was clearly identified and shown in the media as refusing the lockdown and declaring it over.35 Authorities took an unprecedented heavy hand, bringing in a police squad team to “break up” the gathering and fining attendees in excess of $35,000. But more than this, the media covered the event by showing the faces of the mainly Black parishioners, one of the only times this was done in reporting on a gathering, and networks circulated historical footage of the church’s services. By focusing so intently on this one instance of noncompliance with health orders, the supposed “blackness” of the church was unmistakably marked and singled out as twinned with aberrance and lack of rational deliberation. A second and perhaps more distressing visual example came when police detained a Middle Eastern Australian man (again clearly identified by name and imagery in the media), for not wearing a mask: They handcuffed him on the ground in such a violent manner that paramedics had to revive him with a defibrillator and CPR. He remained handcuffed throughout the four-minute ordeal.36 Treatment such as this only confirms perceived lesser status and the maintenance of racial alterity for certain groups—or indeed racialized non/inadequate personhood—especially when juxtaposed with other imagery of scores of carefree people flocking to the golden sands of Bondi and Coogee Beaches outside the zones of concern: In these other (whiter, richer) areas, authorities sanctioned residents to enjoy and breathe the “free air.”

A third key strategy of human zoos was also used here, that of those on display being treated as needing to be led by a white guide or instructor. In the Sydney case, the media acted as the “showman” or white guide, relaying/interpreting the conditions of lockdown and the actions of hot spot inhabitants to the general populace. State authorities also acted as guides or instructors (who both protected and restrained), imposing the differential restrictions discussed previously. But this perceived requirement was staged in specific ways that compounded the idea that certain groups of people are not only compromised biological citizens—lacking self-government—but persons. For instance, the state health minister, on ABC’s Insight program, stated there was significant reluctance among what he called large “refugee family groups” with lower incomes to come forward to state health authorities (for contact tracing). “They’ve suffered greatly in their own nations, in their own countries,” he said, continuing that “we are challenged in the south-western suburbs . . . it’s a very difficult community to gain the confidence of, and to have them respond in a way that we need them to respond.”37 He compared these communities to those of the (whiter) Northern Beaches Christmas and Eastern suburbs lockdowns that, he said, saw “high level[s] of compliance.”38 He also mentioned how the Muslim community had recently observed Eid, and that noncompliance for such events may lead to further outbreaks.

Through these various examples we see that spectacle created and deployed an “us-vs.-them,” “east-vs.-west” reasoning that positions certain people as the “problem.” This hierarchical arrangement maintains a clear caesura in the population—a break within what Foucault refers to as “the biological continuum” addressed by biopolitical administration:39 spectacle governs populations through performing separation.40 As part of this, spectacle instructs viewers as to their positioning within the biopolitical field: It shapes the attention of those included in the “we,” encouraging certain segments of the population to view themselves as somehow exceptional and deserving against nondeserving others. Visibility and exposure are modes of zoological governance then—where the population is administered along racial lines. But these kinds of spectacle ultimately materialize alterity and the supposedly insufficiently human through the production of differential status and value.

Zoo-logos

Within Western culture, racialized groups have long been likened to animals. The standardized view is that these groups of people have been dehumanized, stripped of their human status. But racialized peoples have never been viewed as fully human. The category “human” within Western knowledge systems was always already defined against animality, and the production of racial difference was always tethered to animality and nature.41 As a taxonomy of power, race divides—with whites taken as the quintessentially human and all non-whites arranged to varying degrees (and shifting in various temporal periods) in a transient space between human and animals. Inseparable from the discourse of speciesism, the production and maintenance of race is thus predicated on zoo-logos—a knowledge related to animality42—and, as such, racialization is zoological. What I have tentatively called zoological governance manages the social sphere according to this logic (zoo-logos) and this operation (racialization as zoological).

In this chapter I have been interested in thinking through these ideas in relation to the pandemic and particularly the Delta outbreak in Sydney. If Covid-19 presented a generalized biosecurity threat to the nation, and biohumanity needed to be protected against this virus, it becomes necessary to ask: Who is the “we” of biohumanity? Clearly, what becomes evident across the empirical terrain of the Sydney case is that those deemed “lesser human” are not protected in the same ways as others and, indeed, that the biosecuritization of health operates according to differential valuations of those within the population—in line with racial difference. More than this, however, certain (racialized) segments of the population were positioned as biological threats to generalized biohumanity and thus in need of specific forms of administration—zoological governance. This selective quarantine did not ameliorate disparities and the overrepresentation of Black and ethnic minority groups in Covid incidence and mortality rates. Instead, health inequalities were undeniably deepened, generating unequal harms. By early 2022, Australian Bureau of Statistic figures on deaths from Covid noted that those Australians born in North Africa and the Middle East were about ten times more likely to die from the virus than those born in Australia (after age was accounted for). People from Southeast Asia and southern and central Asia recorded twice as many Covid-19 deaths. In distinction, those born in the United Kingdom and Ireland had the lowest death rate.43

While this imperiling of minoritized lives is by no means a new story—but centuries old and recursively reiterated in multiple national contexts—the Sydney case highlights particular modalities of zoological governance, specifically as it plays out in the administration of health. Zoological governance manages an always already stratified population. As examined in this chapter, the key technologies deployed in this governance are carcerality (caging) and spectacle (staging), where caging contains and seeks to achieve domestication, here a hygenicized reality in the Covid biosecurity calculus, and where staging fixes minority racialized populations in selective spectacles of difference, in turn justifying distinct treatment and administration. In this sense, spectacles of racial alterity must also be understood as forms of racial caging.

Zoological governance targets racialized groups for intervention, containment, and subdual. This is a disciplining of those who are deemed unable to govern themselves. Importantly, however, the function of this disciplinary targeting is not to transform those deemed as other—to normalize—and thus bring them into the fold of the population (a function that is key to carceral society in its generality). Nor is the function to exclude or expel certain subjects from the national populace. Instead, minoritized subjects are intervened upon to maintain racial order and the hierarchical relations it entails. Racialized minorities are included—but as lesser beings within the overarching settler-colonial state. They are conditionally incorporated on dominant terms, that is, within a system of population control delineated by race and determined by the enduring white state. Ghassan Hage refers to this operation as a “generalized domestication” predicated on “the fantasy whereby we [white settler subjects] make our existence viable by seeking homeliness [struggling to be at home in the world] through aggression and domination.”44 We might see this as an excluded inclusion, then, where racialized others are included on limited grounds. They are included to the extent that they service the dominant (zoological) order as fulcrum—and constitutive other—to the (category) human. They are included in order to recursively resecure what is positioned as “legitimate authority.” And, ultimately they are included in ways that augment a system that instructs the populace as to their position within the order—that is, the order of differential status and value.

Notes

1. 1. See “Sydney’s South-West Now Ground Zero for Covid,” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 8, 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/national/sydney-s-south-west-now-ground-zero-for-covid-19-outbreak-20210708-p5883n.html.

2. 2. Hunter Fergus, “Show of Force: How NSW Police Took Command to Combat COVID-19,” The Sydney Morning Herald, November 28, 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/show-of-force-how-nsw-police-took-command-to-combat-covid-19-20201126-p56i7s.html.

3. 3. See “Police COVID Crackdown in South-West Sydney Slammed as Racist and Heavy-handed,” The New Daily, July 9, 2021, https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/07/09/coronavirus-police-sydney/.

4. 4. As Foucault famously argues, “for millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (Penguin Books, 1998), 176.

5. 5. See, for instance, Zakiyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (Duke University Press, 2020). Also see Megan Glick, Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/personhood (Duke University Press, 2018).

6. 6. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8.

7. 7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (Grove Press, 2004), 228.

8. 8. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso, 2006), 91.

9. 9. Wolfe, Animal Rites, 6.

10. 10. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7.

11. 11. David Chandler and Julian Reid, The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016), 108.

12. 12. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (Picador, 2003), 255.

13. 13. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Penguin, 1991).

14. 14. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge (Pantheon, 1972), 216.

15. 15. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), 41.

16. 16. On this concept see Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar, Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

17. 17. Rashida Yosufzai and Janice Petersen, “Gladys Berejiklian Defends Brad Hazzard Over ‘Other Backgrounds’ Comment,” SBSNews, September 16, 2021, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/gladys-berejiklian-defends-brad-hazzard-over-other-backgrounds-comment/0vt3pgrhm.

18. 18. The New South Wales state government did not officially adopt “ring-fencing,” but the restrictions and lockdown of particular regions amounted to ring-fencing, even if it was not named as such.

19. 19. Emily Cosenza, “Suburbs of ‘Great Concern’ to Health Authorities as NSW Outbreak Grows,” The Australian, August 23, 2021, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/breaking-news/suburbs-of-great-concern-to-health-authorities-as-nsw-outbreak-grows/news-story/99152f6e1567a625dfb93e24e7410035.

20. 20. Kevin Nguyen, “Sydney Lockdown Extended for One Month as NSW Records 644 COVID-19 Cases, Four Deaths,” ABC News, August 20, 2021, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-20/nsw-records-644-covid-19-cases-and-four-deaths/100392702.

21. 21. Clifford Stott et al., “A Turning Point, Securitization, and Policing in the Context of Covid-19: Building a New Social Contract Between State and Nation?” Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice 14, no. 3 (2020): 574–78, 577.

22. 22. Anton Nilsson, “NSW Police Covid-19 Fines: Double the Amount Issued in Western Sydney Compared to Eastern Suburbs,” news.com.au, August 1, 2021, https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/crime/nsw-police-covid19-fines-double-the-amount-issued-in-western-sydney-compared-to-eastern-suburbs/news-story/e505c427317003d5ec5e371cf02c9a20.

23. 23. Elias Visontay and Josh Taylor, “Tougher Covid Restrictions for Western Sydney Criticised for Threatening Wellbeing of State’s Poorest,” The Guardian, August 21, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/20/tougher-covid-restrictions-for-western-sydney-criticised-for-threatening-wellbeing-of-states-poorest.

24. 24. Khanh Tran, “‘Our Communities Are Treated as Lesser’: The View from South-West Sydney’s Lockdown,” Honi Soit, July 28, 2021, https://honisoit.com/2021/07/our-communities-are-treated-as-less-the-view-from-south-west-sydneys-lockdown/.

25. 25. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2000).

26. 26. See Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (Sage Press, 1997).

27. 27. See Shiloh Krupar and Nadine Ehlers, “The Racial Spectacular: Pandemic Governance Through Dashboards and State Biosecurity,” Science, Technology, and Human Values (STHV) 0, no. 0 https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241265641.

28. 28. Krupar and Ehlers, “The Racial Spectacular.”

29. 29. Jenna Loyd, Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978 (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 16.

30. 30. Lisa Uddin, Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Urban Ghetto (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 11.

31. 31. Nigel Rothels, “Aztecs, Aborigines, and Ape-People: Science and Freaks in Germany, 1850–1900,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemary Garland Thomspon (New York University Press, 1996), 160.

32. 32. See Guido Abbattista, “Dehumanizing the Exotic in Living Human Exhibitions,” in The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, ed. Maria Kronfelder (Routledge, 2021).

33. 33. Daniella White, “This Is Imprisonment: Blacktown Apartments in Lockdown After COVID Outbreak,” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 27, 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/blacktown-apartment-in-lockdown-after-covid-outbreak-20210727-p58d7h.html.

34. 34. L. L. Wynn, “The Pandemic Imaginerie: Infectious Bodies and Military-Police Theater in Australia,” Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 3 (2021): 350–59, 335.

35. 35. Sarah McPhee and Daniella White, “Church and Worshippers Fined $35,000 After 60 People Attend Blacktown Service,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 23, 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/church-and-worshippers-fined-35-000-after-60-people-attend-blacktown-service-20210823-p58l64.html.

36. 36. Elizabeth Farrelly, “So Fresh Air Is Good for Seaside Residents but Not LGAs of Concern? Spare Me Your Concern, Mr Hazzard.” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 17, 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/so-fresh-air-is-good-for-seaside-residents-but-not-lgas-of-concern-spare-me-your-concern-mr-hazzard-20210916-p58seq.html.

37. 37. Natassia Chrysanthos, “Berejklian Launches August Jab Campaign, as Sydney Records 239 New Local Cases,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 2, 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-records-239-new-cases-with-35-infectious-in-the-community-20210801-p58esl.html (my emphasis).

38. 38. Chrysanthos, “Berejklian Launches.”

39. 39. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255.

40. 40. Krupar and Ehlers, “The Racial Spectacular.”

41. 41. Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 24. Also see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989).

42. 42. Claire Jean Kim, “Murder and Mattering in Harambe’s House,” Politics and Animals 3 (2017): 1–15, 10.

43. 43. Stephanie Dalzell, “Government Data Reveals Being Born Overseas Increases Your Risk of Dying from COVID-19 in Australia,” ABCNews, February 16, 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-17/abs-data-cald-communities-worse-affected-by-covid-outbreaks/100834104.

44. 44. Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Debating Race) (Polity, 2017), 92.