severance's imperial boomerang

i'm unfortunately so serious

Like most of us who are trying to Feel Something™, I have been watching Severance. It does feel important to note that I watched the first season at the time it aired so I am one of those wretched souls who've been waiting three years for the second season. Bless us.

And maybe it’s due to The Times We Are Living Through, but one of the recurring thoughts I’ve had this season, episode after episode, is: hmm … Severance has become very Imperial Boomerang-coded.

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If you’re alive and aware of what’s going on, even a little bit, you’ll recognize the effects of the imperial boomerang even if you don’t explicitly recognize the term. Aimé Césaire, the French Martiniquais poet and theorist, first elaborated upon the concept in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), although he then called it a “choc en retour.”¹²

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind-it's Nazism, it will. pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack. (Emphasis mine.)

Essentially, the notion of the imperial boomerang—which, relevantly, was based on the European version of colonialism, one in many ways different from the American model—tells us that at some point, the systems used to suppress and control colonized people will find its way back to the empire’s own people.

The theory says that the very use of these systems—the fact that they were deemed usable to begin with—abroad is enough to ensure their eventual use at home. Why? Because if a colonized people can be called “uncivilized” (a social construct and as such, a dynamic term) and deserving of such oppression, then there is nothing more than fragile social norms keeping a government from finding sectors of its own citizens to be “uncivilized” and deserving of the same.

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Césaire, writing in the postwar period and as a Martiniquais, spoke namely within the context of Nazism and its association to European colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

We, writing in 2025, can also add on the speech suppression of the Cold War, including its many proxy conflicts and the Red Scare, the surveillance mechanisms devised and proliferated following 9/11, and the torture practices incorporated to win the so-called War on Terror. Practices acceptable to and accepted by so many, if not most, because they were being dispatched against the “enemy,” broadly defined as anyone not subscribing to the state’s policy and security goals.

By its very nature, “enemy” is a malleable definition. More importantly, it is one subject to the state’s interpretation, leaving anyone who dares question its policies at risk of becoming a target.³

Many of these methods—mass surveillance, detainment without apparent charges, torture, police intimidation as a speech-suppression tactic—have indeed come home to roost. Did we not, after all, with our silence manufacture consent to these methods in the first place?

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In other words: the journey from civilized to savage is often brief, unpredictable, and outside of an individual’s control. As citizens, legal residents, and general holders of privileged legal status, understanding the precarity of our circumstances, our instinct should be to (1) lose familiarity with the imposed demarcations between ourselves and the so-called “uncivilized” groups, be they at home or abroad and (2) for as long as these divisions are artificially maintained, protest the inhumane treatment exacted by the state in the name of “security,” “safety,” or “law and order.”⁴

Right? But no. Because we have so internalized the belief that our differences are innate, that even against repeated evidence to the contrary, we keep trusting that violence unto others is not, actually, a threat to our future selves.

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Anyway. I guess this brings me to Severance’s own boomerang effect. It is not a perfect analogy and in fact I am being somewhat deranged for even engaging in this analysis, but that’s ok.

Photo: Apple TV+

For the sake of the analogy, we can establish a few things: that the company Lumon serves the function of “empire;” that severed employees—or more precisely, their innies—play the role of “colonized people;” and that Lumon’s management serves the function of the empire’s own citizens.⁵

What happened, then? Management (and here we can include Ms. Cobel, Mr. Milchick, and Helena Eagan) believed that severed employees’ innies (Irving, Mark, Dylan, Helly) were by their very nature inferior: flashback to Helena recording a video message to Helly when the latter tried to resign, where she called Helly “just an innie” and as such voiceless.

Because of this assumed inferiority, the methods used to keep severed employees in line (e.g., the break room that serves as a torture chamber, where innies are made to apologize over and over and over again until they’ll say anything to escape) are considered by Lumon and its management as not only necessary but acceptable. For what purpose? To preserve the integrity of the company’s goals.

Season two has seen these tactics boomerang. Minor spoilers ahead, I guess.

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Ms. Cobel, who once kept an eye on Mark by becoming his neighbor and also just in case his sister’s lactation consultant, is now running away from Lumon’s surveillance, and when she arrives at her childhood home, her aunt tells her that Lumon has already paid her a visit.

Mr. Milchick, who once ran the break room sessions for his employees, is now being violently admonished in a similar manner by his boss for the crime of using multisyllabic words. Something he has always done, by the way, and has only recently become a problem. What constitutes a punishable offense is always subject to the state’s interpretation.

And Helena, who once denied her innie the freedom to quit her job, is now being denied that same freedom herself, forced to continue serving as a severed employee despite being not only management, but the owner’s daughter.

It is only now, when the same methods they used on others are being applied to them, they who thought themselves immune from the empire’s tactics, that they recognize the oppressive nature of the same.

It is only now, when they are themselves adversely affected, that they are beginning to push back—Ms. Cobel by collaborating (perhaps) with Mark and his sister; Mr. Milchick, by boldly telling Mr. Drummond to devour feculence; and Helena, by doing something for herself (and against the company’s wishes) and seeking out Mark outside of Lumon.⁶

They are rebelling against the very tactics they once championed because their use has, predictably, been turned against them.

If only they’d read Césaire; they’d never have trusted their own immunity to begin with.

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If you read all of that, thank you. There’s a fairly lengthy bibliography below.

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Further reading:

• Beyond Boomerang | International Politics Reviews

  • If you read anything from the bibliography, make it this. It has one of the best ledes I’ve read in a while, and focuses specifically on American imperialism. It reviews Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders, which challenges the assumption that America’s militarized and racialized policing began abroad: “Even more dangerous, the boomerang’s supposed trajectory from a pristine democratic core to the chaotic periphery and back again, occludes America’s long history of racial and imperial violence, its origins as, in Aziz Rana’s words, a “settler empire”—slave holding, expansionist, and violent.”

• The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate bac | Verso Books. In 2020, Verso Books completed a five-part series on the imperial boomerang. This is the first part.

• Dismantling the Imperial Boomerang: A Reckoning with Globalised Police Power - Longreads. This essay focuses on the history of America’s colonization of the Philippines’ and its long-lasting effects on both countries policing.

• Prisons Are Building Databases of Inmates' Voice Prints. This article is from 2019, but I only read it this week and found it chilling.

  • “Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.”

• Total Information Awareness: The High Costs of Post-9/11 U.S. Mass Surveillance. This is a grad paper from Brown University. I love including student papers in my research because they tend to be very good at setting a foundation and their citations are comprehensive.

And some pertinent recent news:

• The Detention of Mahmoud Khalil Is a Flagrant Assault on Free Speech | The New Yorker

• Did Trump Defy Court Ruling: Administration Claims It Wants To Make El Salvador Flight Information ‘State Secret’

• N.Y. Leaders Considering Ban on Wearing Face Masks in Public

• Deported R.I. doctor was in ‘precarious position’ arriving at Logan, expert says

• Why Are Visa/Green-Card Holders Being Detained and Deported?

• Trump administration deports hundreds of immigrants, despite court order | AP News

• French academic denied entry to US for ‘personal opinion’ on Trump

1. I know this is a lengthy quote, but it’s worth reading it in context; the link above clicks to a full pdf of Discourse.

2. The term is occasionally called “Foucault’s boomerang” as well, as Michel Foucault spoke of it in his 1976 lecture “Society Must Be Defended,” saying: “It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.”

3. Policies like the leveling of entire cities, the disappearance of people who are quietly moved into overseas prisons, the mass surveillance of citizens and residents; all things seen as essential to preserving the vague notion of a state’s security, all the while doing away with its humanity.

4. The concept of self-interest as the sole or principal motivating force toward solidarity is distasteful and not one I particularly adhere to, but it’s difficult not to hinge a discussion of the imperial boomerang around it.

5. You’ll note that I’ve created a very limited universe for this analogy, which is one of the reasons why it doesn’t work perfectly. I’ve excluded, for instance, anyone who is not directly related to Lumon; what about them, the people who’ll still likely be impacted by the company and its many “innovations?” Severance has shown us that some of them—like Ricken, for instance, and the opportunity he is offered to develop a sort of innie script—will eventually be commandeered into the Lumon world (and its many offenses). But these are suggestions.

6. I’d written “devour flatulence” in an earlier draft btw. Which would’ve been embarrassing. Mr. Milchick would never have forgiven me. Credit to

Marion Teniade

for catching it, and to her and

Totally Recommend

for giving this a read when I frantically texted them asking, “can you please give this a quick look to make sure I don’t sound insane?” Vibe checks and peers are very important.