Walking the Places of Exception: The Tule Lake National Monument

Abstract

In places of exception, human lives cease to be, as Judith Butler (2004) explains, “grievable” (p. 20). Places of exception take form in prisons, jails, concentration camps, immigration detention centers, Indigenous boarding schools, suspension rooms in schools, and the refugee camp. While their contexts and architectures vary, these places share a political logic and purpose, designed to exclude or contain persons and populations deemed security threats to the state (Agamben, 1998, 1999, 2005). Often located in remote areas, these sites permit persons to be stripped of certain rights and obligations. Their bodies are rendered vulnerable to harm and, in the most egregious cases, mass murder. Places of exception are part of the “cartographies of dispossession—the kind that rips away, distances, alienates” (Morrill & Tuck, 2016, p. 4). When such places fall out of use, their material structures are disassembled, relocated, and repurposed. Still, the vestiges of the camps remain: the foundation of a latrine, the ruins of a mess hall, the white shards of pottery. Walking these places of exception, we are haunted by the residue of the social violence that occurred in these sites (Gordon, 2008; Trigg, 2012).