ABSTRACT
In a project concerned with interrogating migration and diaspora in Caribbean literature and the constituent tropes that reveal and complicate historical and contemporary motivations and restraints for Caribbean travelers, as well as the material constraints that impact mobility and settling for Caribbean people, a discussion of deportation holds central place. Deportation, or the legal act of removing criminal and illegal aliens from a host country back to a sender country, may be read as a strange culmination of the migrant experience in a caricature of return and a parody of remittance. Deportation brings together most parties involved in migration; the sender and the host communities and the sender and host governments in a noteworthy complication/reversal of the terms “sender” and “host.”1 Indeed the various movements and migrations that constitute Caribbean subsume the disparate movements of diaspora and deportation, underscoring the tension between the two. Theories of boundarylessness that celebrate diaspora are problematized in this discussion, for in the legal act of deportation, borders and boundaries are enforced by governments whose legal and political weight overshadow the diasporic aspirations of cultural communities across different geographic locations, thus shattering the romance in which diaspora is always ultimately a state of power.
