Whose Shadow? On Camps and Counter-Camps

Confronting with the current proliferation of administrative detention facilities for displaced and illegalized persons, the paper traces the different manifestations of this specific border apparatus back to a more general and abstract “camp form”—one whose origins date back to the colonial realm, finding in the colonial subject the first internable figure. To such institutional form, it opposes the relentless production of informal, occupied, and often clandestine encampments, dwelled by people on the move and scattered along as many hidden and illegalized routes. By rereading current makeshift camps and hidden routes though the historical lens of the US pre-civil war Underground Railroad, the article suggests to conceive of them in terms of as many counter-spaces of a possible “Underground Europe” whose material and unauthorized existence, often supported by criminalized solidarity networks, mirrors and reverses that one of a “Borderland” or “fortress Europe”. By the same token, it suggests to conceive of these temporary, precarious and informal zones in terms of as many “reverse shot” of the institutional “camp-form”, defining them as counter-camps and focusing on the political, spatial and temporal relation between these two opposed polarities.