(T)races of terrorism beyond ports of entry: a retrospective assessment of the limits of profiling in the regulation of airport passenger traffic during the 2010 FIFA World Cup
Masemola, Kgomotso; Chaka, Phil Mpho
A critical function of post-9/11 surveillance worldwide was to manage the‘terrorist’ spectacle in public spaces such as airports and stadia. With the prospect
of the 2010 World Cup looming large, aviation security in South Africa had
accordingly gained significance in proportion to the expansion of airports and
construction of stadium infrastructure countrywide. Private sector and government
intentions to defend and consolidate the developmental spinoffs of expansion and
infrastructure construction were expected and, with this, real and perceived threats
from both ‘terrorists’ and banned football hooligans from Europe seem to demand
surveillance based on racial profiling. The resultant profile picture of surveillance,
this paper argues, is in monochrome: black terrorists and white yobs. Mobilising
Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical work on deterritorialisation – based on the
destabilisation of traditional concepts of territory – aviation ports of entry are seen
to transmogrify into points of entry into the public discourse of the Arabic-African
militant, on the one hand, and the English-European yob menace, on the other. In
the final analysis, surveillance discourse moves beyond the confines of the airport
and enters the public domain as it conflates the political (militant) and the social
(menace) in a single, profiled, ossified narrative of ‘race’.
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