David Farrier''s Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law draws on asylum legislation, ethics and political theory, to highlight the tension between postcolonial studies'' emblematic interest in migrancy and the politics and poetics of deterritorialisation (''diaspoetics''), its reconfiguration of the marginal and the peripheral as spaces of embedded agency, and the problematic figure of the asylum seeker.The asylum seeker, Farrier opines, is an unsettling figure for postcolonial studies, one that occludes traditional distinctions between categories of inclusion and exclusion. The book opens with an image documenting a protest staged in February 2002 by Mahzer Ali and other asylum seekers detained at the Woomera Immigration Removal and Processing Centre, Australia. Ali, protesting against the detention of children in the centre, scaled the perimeter fence * he is pictured seminaked and prone, caught unmoving in the razor wire circling the boundary of the centre as his fellow detainees raise a banner bearing the words ''Freedom or Death''. For Farrier, Ali''s body, trapped in the razor wire fence of the boundary, caught ''between the spaces of the citizen and non-citizen'' (2), best articulates ''the scandal of the refugee'' * he ''incarnates the political and ethical absence to which each asylum seeker is relegated'' (7). It is precisely this absence that Postcolonial Asylum seeks to interrogate. The introductory chapter makes productive use of Giorgio Agamben''s theory of the sovereign ban - as outlined in Homo Sacer (1998) - to demonstrate the legal paradox faced by asylum seekers. The sovereign ban describes ''a condition where the subject of the ban is held within the purview of law''s censure but excluded from its protection'' (12), such as is the case for the asylum seeker whose asylum claim has been refused.

In such circumstances, left only with the (non)choice between deportation or withdrawal of state support and the threat of destitution, the asylum seeker is literally abandoned by the law, but the law remains far from indifferent to them; they are in fact held by the law''s vested interest in their exclusion. Unable to stay or return, they incarnate the very worst of border-living. (12)With a focus on UK and Australian asylum regimes, the framing of asylum seekers as contemporary figures of the infrahuman, their departure from within and indeterminate position ''before the law'' is developed and expanded in subsequent chapters. Chapter One for instance, examines the use of extraterritorial processing and border ''flexibilization'' by both Britain and Australia, in concerted efforts to consolidate sovereign control of the border. Importantly, Farrier supplements Agamben''s work with the crucial interventions made by Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe, to suggest that the legal machinations of present day asylum regimes connect to a longer heritage of colonial infrahumanity. Coetzee''s Waiting For the Barbarians (1980) is read as ''a parable of the infrahuman within coloniality'' (44), and the cases of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solen Young, Australian citizens wrongfully detained under immigration legislation as ''unlawful noncitizen[s]'' , demonstrate the convergence of asylum and postcolonial concerns ''in Australia''s insistence on the infrahumanity of its indigenous and asylum-seeking populations'' (49).Farrier covers a lot of ground; at every stage counterpointing his theoretical discussion with narratives of contemporary asylum legislation and examples of its enforcement, as well as an impressive range of cultural representations of asylum/refugee experience. He grants space in his analysis to, amongst others, Melanie Friend''s photography, Tina Gharavi''s digital installation work, Pip Starr''s documentary Through the Wire (2004), Stephen Frear''s film Dirty Pretty Things (2002), and literary novels by Leila Aboulela, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Caryl Phillips.

Given the sheer breadth of reference, some readers may be less than satisfied with the occasionally synoptic readings offered. Farrier frequently retreats to the theoretical underpinnings of his argument, but is at his most interesting when he reads - as he often does - representative asylum narratives as works that intervene in prevailing asylum/refugee discourse, and at the same time test the limits of some of the more established theoretical positions within postcolonial studies. Postcolonial Asylum provides a lucid, cogently argued examination of a subject situated at a complex admixture of academic fields. Given the continuously shifting legal and political terrain surrounding the issue of asylum, as Farrier duly acknowledges, it resists easy or comprehensive analysis. In developing a concept of postcolonial asylum, Farrier''s approach is explicitly contrapuntal, and he posits a wide range of critical positions, not all of them complementary, but always carefully qualified in his argument. Giorgio Agamben''s diagnoses of contemporary biopolitical conditions of existence feature prominently in Farrier''s discussion, and readers would be well served with some grounding in Agamben''s political theory before approaching this highly theoretical text; however, this does not detract from what remains a challenging and engaging work that certainly charts new ground.