Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which many Nepali-Bhutanese refugees—already exceptional to the Nepalese national order of things—were made into what I term “exceptional exceptions” through their illegal employment as English-speaking teachers in Nepal.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores, through the stories of male Nepali-Bhutanese refugees who worked as teachers in Nepalese boarding schools, the ways in which the intersections of global capital and transnational flows of people, discourses and labor open up existential spaces of exception in nation-states wherein refugees or migrant laborers may be employed in a quasi-legal fashion. The men in this study found that they could describe their personal refugee experiences as positive ones. The existential spaces these men inhabited were exceptional: outside the law, yet ultimately subjected to its rule. The spaces in which the male refugee teachers found themselves were also necessarily liminal ones: removed from the politico-legal structure, excluded from a structured, legible place in the symbolic order that organizes what we may call the Nepalese national space. These liminal spaces of exception come about through conflicts between different modalities of sovereignty and governance, global capital being the catalyst. I term these English-speaking refugee teachers exceptional exceptions. The idea of an exceptional exception, referencing Agamben's work, refers to a further exception to the original exception (the naming of the refugee) and its focus on the "exceptional" points to a qualified statement of value that comes into being outside of the jurido-political framework of the nation-state. It is this value, which is here tied to the discourses of global capital, attained through a knowledge of the English language, that makes these men exceptional exceptions. This exception to the exception is, in essence, a reinscription of value onto bare life.