"Passport, please": Legal, literary, and critical fictions of identity

College Literature, Winter 1998 by Higgins, Lesley, Leps, Marie-Christine

I. THE UNIMAGINABLE MRS. SHIPLEY

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.

(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country including his own, and to return to his country.

United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, Article 13

The right to travel is a part of the 'liberty' of which the citizen cannot be deprived without the due process of law under the Fifth Amendment.... Freedom of movement across frontiers in either direction, and inside frontiers as well, was a part of our heritage. Travel abroad, like travel within the country, may be necessary for a livelihood. It may be as close to the heart of the individual as the choice of what he eats, or wears, or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values. Mr. Justice Douglas, delivering the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Kent v. Dulles, April 1958.

Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada Act 1982), sec6 (1) "Mobility Rights"

In practice, however, this right can only be exercised when one is granted the privilege of a passport-an identification document established during World War I as a temporary security measure that was soon adopted, and never abandoned, around the world. Once again, ideology and practice appear to be in opposition: the hegemonic recognition of individual freedom of movement, its prominent place in the structure of feelings of Western countries (from popular "road movies"to supreme court decisions recognizing it as "part of our heritage") is contradicted by the extensive range of government prerogatives where passports are concerned. Each state retains the authority to dispense travel documents (passports, visas, work permits) at will, simply through bureaucratic regulations, and thereby reserves the right to locate and control individuals and peoples according to the changing demands of economic, social, and political contingencies. From the late 1930s to the 1950s, for example, all American applicants were subject to the scrutiny and approval of Ruth B. Shipley, who became Chief of the Passport Division in 1938. A 1941 New York Times magazine profile highlighted the extent of her powers: "Although she has ninety assistants in the passport division,"Harold Hinton explained, "Mrs. Shipley examines each application personally. Despite this extra work she never seems hurried. The door to her office is always open, and any applicant with a grievance can see that she is there and can walk right in, and people of high and low degree do.... She is completely immovable, however, once a decision has been reached, according to those who have watched her at work for years. She has an inexhaustible fund of patience during the negotiating period, but when she has once said `no,' the disappointed applicant might as well save himself further conversation"(21). A 1948 news report confirmed her ongoing, "complete discretion to grant or reject [a] request"for a passport (New York Times 14). How can an unelected, unknown bureaucrat wield so much power? How can her counterparts operate in consular offices worldwide (Wildes 887-909)? What forms of rationality allow these potentially draconian administrative procedures and instruments to appear so commonsensical and benign? Why, in short, is Mrs. Shipley, or her authority, almost unimaginable and therefore largely unquestioned?

Perhaps because we are accustomed to thinking in universal terms such as the State and the People, Ideology and Practice, Truth and Falsehood-binaries which inevitably exclude the everyday exigencies of actual governmental procedures. Following the work of Michel Foucault, this paper considers power differently, by focusing on a particular instance of its exercise-the passport-and by analyzing this document as a matrix in which specific relations of power (such as control over exit and entry, determination of the individual's status within and without sovereign borders) and domains of knowledge (concerning individual and national identities, citizenship, security, territory) are articulated, and from which other relations are excluded (subjectivity, cultural hybridization). The passport is emblematic of governmentality, or the "art of government" invented by modernity and implemented as the dominant mode of power in the twentieth century. This method of government-a form of bio-power-targets the life of the one and the many, of the population as a whole and of each individual.1 It works not only through laws and regulations securing the biological, economic, and political health of the nation, but also through the fostering of individual pleasures and passions, desires and ambitions-our very sense of who we are. The passport, as an instrument of governmentality, instantiates some of the mechanisms that subject individuals through their identification-in terms of nationality, gender, race, class, and the plethora of ever more specifying subcategories such as alienage, patriality, residency, asylum, visitorship. The passport in Western industrialized countries exemplifies one of the many governmental tactics devised to cope with the consequences of nationalism, imperialism, and decolonization in the twentieth century-tactics often justified as measured responses to an unsettling shift from cultural homogeneity to heterogeneity.