Nina Glick Schiller | Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (original) (raw)
Books by Nina Glick Schiller
Offering an epistemological approach to migration, this chapter highlights the relationships betw... more Offering an epistemological approach to migration, this chapter highlights the relationships between the changing ways migration is viewed by states, political actors, and researchers and the
reorganization of intersecting, globe-spanning, multiscalar networks of power, dispossession and desire. Challenging the separation of studies of migration, including its transnational processes, from analyses of the restructuring of the global capitalist economy, the chapter argues that such restructuring is simultaneously an economic, political, and cultural process in which we are all actors and subjects. The chapter frames the contemporary moment of reorganization within an overview of migration in human history and the formation of migration regimes. This stance discards the binary between mobility and stasis and migrants and non-migrants. It helps situate the rise and
fall of transnational studies within specific conjunctural transformations of the networks within which capital and power are accumulated and legitimated. The epistemological approach to
migration also makes visible the processes that are constituting a dispossariat, producing political rage globally, and fueling authoritarian racialized nationalism. At the same time, this approach highlights the processes that are dispossessing both people classified as migrant and non-migrants, which creates the basis of a politics of equality, social justice, and climate action.
Combining history, autobiography, and ethnography, Georges Woke Up Laughing provides a portrait o... more Combining history, autobiography, and ethnography, Georges Woke Up Laughing provides a portrait of the Haitian experience of migration to the United States that illuminates the phenomenon of long-distance nationalism, the voicelessness of certain citizens, and the impotency of government in an increasingly globalized world. By presenting lively ruminations on his life as a Haitian immigrant, Georges Eugene Fouron—along with Nina Glick Schiller, whose own family history stems from Poland and Russia—captures the daily struggles for survival that bind together those who emigrate and those who stay behind.
According to a long-standing myth, once emigrants leave their homelands—particularly if they emigrate to the United States—they sever old nationalistic ties, assimilate, and happily live the American dream. In fact, many migrants remain intimately and integrally tied to their ancestral homeland, sometimes even after they become legal citizens of another country. In Georges Woke Up Laughing the authors reveal the realities and dilemmas that underlie the efforts of long-distance nationalists to redefine citizenship, race, nationality, and political loyalty. Through discussions of the history and economics that link the United States with countries around the world, Glick Schiller and Fouron highlight the forces that shape emigrants’ experiences of government and citizenship and create a transborder citizenry. Arguing that governments of many countries today have almost no power to implement policies that will assist their citizens, the authors provide insights into the ongoing sociological, anthropological, and political effects of globalization.
Georges Woke up Laughing will entertain and inform those who are concerned about the rights of people and the power of their governments within the globalizing economy.
“In my dream I was young and in Haiti with my friends, laughing, joking, and having a wonderful time. I was walking down the main street of my hometown of Aux Cayes. The sun was shining, the streets were clean, and the port was bustling with ships. At first I was laughing because of the feeling of happiness that stayed with me, even after I woke up. I tried to explain my wonderful dream to my wife, Rolande. Then I laughed again but this time not from joy. I had been dreaming of a Haiti that never was.”—from Georges Woke Up Laughing
Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement and Urban Regeneration addresses how glo... more Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement and Urban Regeneration addresses how globe-circulating, contemporary urban regeneration agendas were implemented in cities that were clearly not global powerhouses. The book explores the relationships between these cities and their migrants as these relationships became part of projects of urban transformation. Setting aside dichotomies between agency and structure, mobility and stasis, and migrant and nonmigrant, which so often configure urban and migration theory and research, this book offers a comparative multiscalar analysis that explores the inter-related processes of displacement, dispossession, accumulation, and emplacement through which urban life is constituted. We use the term “multiscalar” as shorthand to speak of sociospatial spheres of practice that are constituted in relationship to each other and within various hierarchies of networks of power. Many researchers, particularly in anthropology, use the terms “transnational or “translocal” to follow personal networks across borders but decline to connect the personal to the institutionalized power embedded in scalar relations. And they avoid a comparative methodology, while a comparative analytic perspective is central to this book.
There is still insufficient research and theory that explores the relationship between projects to rebrand and regenerate cities with different degrees of political, economic, and cultural power, on the one hand, and the everyday sociabilities and social citizenship practices of city residents, on the other. Initially, exploration of cities in the global economy, as well as critiques of urban rebirth through regeneration and rebranding, focused on cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo, which were seen as global centers of economic, political, and cultural power. Studies of migrant incorporation also had tended to focus on such cities (Cross and Moore 2002), but increasingly urban researchers have expanded the scope of their inquiries into “midrange cities,” “gateway cities” and “ordinary cities” (Robinson 2006). Meanwhile, ethnographers began to examine the lives and social relations of migrants outside urban centers of global power, although with few exceptions interdependencies among processes of displacement, urban restructuring, and migrant emplacement have not been sufficiently explored.
The multiscalar analysis we offer rests on a critique of methodological nationalism and the ethnic lens. The challenge for researchers who are critical of methodological nationalism is to discard the binary between migrants and nonmigrants and yet keep in focus the migration experience, with its multiple forms of displacement as well as barriers to and modes of emplacement. We argue that because so many researchers, influenced by methodological nationalism and its bi-product, the ethnic lens, accept a deeply embedded binary between migrants and the mainstream of society, the crucial role of migrants within the city-making process often has been discounted within public and scholarly narratives (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2009; Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2011). Migrants must be approached as social actors who are integral to city-making, engaging in the daily life of cities via different and varied forms of social, political, economic, and religious action. While we place migrants and nonmigrants in the same analytical framework, we pay close attention to the racialization and stigmatization of international migrants, which are aspects of dehumanization. Various forms of dehumanization serve to legitimate the processes of dispossession and displacement that are at the analytical center of this book.
Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, 1994
This second chapter of Nations Unbound sets out the key theoretical premises that initiated the t... more This second chapter of Nations Unbound sets out the key theoretical premises that initiated the transnational framework for the study of migration. The framework (1) situated the concept and the migration pattern within a particular moment in the restructuring of capital; (2) offered a concept of transnational social field to explain how migrants reacted and reconstituted that moment by building social, political, familial, and economic networks across borders (3) critiqued bounded categories of social science that conflate territory, territory and identity ; and (4) highlight the ways in which transmigrants as they live their lives across borders engage in the nation-state building processes of two or more nation-states, simultaneously reinforcing and contesting categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Many subsequent scholars of transnational migration including Thomas Faist, Peter Koivisto, and Alejandro Portes seem to have overlooked this chapter or failed to cite it.
Papers by Nina Glick Schiller
Transborder citizenship: an outcome of legal pluralism within transnational social fields forthco... more Transborder citizenship: an outcome of legal pluralism within transnational social fields forthcoming in Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World. Franz Bender Beckman and Keebit Bender Beckman eds. London: Ashgate Nina Glick Schiller In this paper I will discuss the implications of migrants’ transnational connections and networks for the concept of citizenship and propose the concept of the transborder citizen. Transborder citizens are people who live their lives across the borders of two or more nation-states, participating in the normative regime, legal and institutional system and political practices of these various states. As all other citizens, they claim rights and privileges from government but transborder citizens claim and act on a relationship to more than one government. The fact that within the past decade an impressive number of states have adopted some form of dual citizenship or dual nationality is an important foundation of the de...
Social & Cultural Geography, 2019
In H Berking Editor Lokalen in Einer Welt Ohne Grenzen Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World Frankfurt Main Campus Verlag 2006 P 105 144, 2006
Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological Encounters, 2022
In so many places in the world today, impoverished workers and an increasingly precarious middle ... more In so many places in the world today, impoverished workers and an increasingly precarious middle class seem to be voting or demonstrating their way into fascist movements against those defi ned as outside the nation. In this fractured political landscape, what can those of us who aspire to social and economic justice do? Joe Hill, a Swedish-American anarchist union organizer of the early twentieth century, who was murdered in Utah by a government fi ring squad for his activism, advised us to not 'waste any time in mourning. Organize' (Taylor 1990). However, the question of organizing with whom to do what remains unanswered in this response to repressive violence. Answering this question, which falls within the purview of anthropological research and theory building, has become ever more pressing in our current fractious times in which the forces of reaction seem to be doing the most successful organizing. In order to organize effectively for social and economic justice, we need to understand and confront the social dynamics that move people into political life, and then we need to identify ways to respond to those dynamics. Various lineages of anthropologists have highlighted the need for ethnographers to understand the interconnections between actors on the ground and broader social forces in order to bring about change. Günther Schlee, celebrated in this volume, can be counted among these ranks. Insisting that tracing the interconnections between actors on the ground and institutions of power is an aspect of anthropological research, he has argued that 'any theory about societal processes (the emergence of coherence, integration, confl ict or social change)
Nordic Journal of Migration Research
To contribute to the growing literature on comparative urban research, this article speaks to the... more To contribute to the growing literature on comparative urban research, this article speaks to the theoretical and methodological challenges that underlie recent calls for comparative relational approaches to city-making. The relational comparative analysis
we develop highlights the multiscalar transformations of relations of power across time and space, which reconstitute urban life within changing historical conjunctures.The article offers a working vocabulary for a relational comparative approach, together
with methodological illustrations drawn from our research on three seemingly very different disempowered cities located in Germany, the United States, and Turkey. This methodology includes identification of comparative parameters. These parameters
enabled exploration of the similar and different dynamics and paradoxes of interrelated key processes in the three cities. Such comparative dimensions might prove useful infuture work on disempowered cities. Our multiscalar approach enabled us to explore the ways in which migrants and non-migrants can be understood as actors reconstituting the city within the conjunctural transformations brought about by neoliberal urban
regeneration. Keywords: relational urban comparison, multiscalar, neoliberal urban regeneration, conjuncture, migrants, city-making.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 1998
Migration world magazine, 1987
Many believe that the political and economic motivations of Haitian migrants can not be separated... more Many believe that the political and economic motivations of Haitian migrants can not be separated. Since Haiti 1st became an independent nation small numbers of its citizens have emigrated, but after France's Duvalier took power in 1957, the flow of migrants reached major proportions. For several reasons, the approximate 100,000 Haitians who arrived between 1960 and 1972 identified themselves as members of an immigrant population rather than as refugees. The new Haitian organizations that arose from 1965-1972 tried to organize Haitians as an ethnic interest group in the U.S. When Haitians 1st arrived by boat there was no strong political movement in the U.S., 1st to popularize the possibility of identifying oneself as a political refugee, and then to nurture and encourage such as stance. Even at the height of the movement to support the boat people and win then status as political refugees, perhaps the majority of the Haitian population and ertainly the majority of the Haitian o...
In: Wanni W. Anderson and Robert G. Lee , editor(s). New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press; 2005. p. 159-178., 2005
... He rightly warns us that focusing on transnational economic activi-ties and discarding other ... more ... He rightly warns us that focusing on transnational economic activi-ties and discarding other aspects of transnational connection as nothing new, as Portes (1996) at one point suggested ... Both Dorais and Maira remind us that there are many forms of cross-border networks. ...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1992
Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 1997
Dans les divers pays exportateurs de l'emigration, il y a des politiques et des dirigeants qu... more Dans les divers pays exportateurs de l'emigration, il y a des politiques et des dirigeants qui tentent de revitaliser le nationalisme et le concept de l'Etat-nation, dans un contexte ou l'economie globale definit les Etats-nations comme transnationaux. Dans le present article, nous defendons a partir de l'exemple de Haiti, que l'on peut trouver derriere le concept de l'identite nationale celui de la race. Les identites nationales sont des identites raciales dans ce sens qu'elles se basent sur le concept de la descendance a travers des liens de sang, ce qui mene a pouvoir les attribuer une base plutot biologique. Les Etats exportateurs d'emigration sont en train de definir, actuellement, leur nationalite a travers la descendance, et non par une langue, une histoire politique, une culture ou un territoire partages. La liaison entre la nation et la race, profondement enracinee dans la theorie de l'Etat-nation, est en train de devenir le trait distinc...
Migration world magazine, 1987
Many believe that the political and economic motivations of Haitian migrants can not be separated... more Many believe that the political and economic motivations of Haitian migrants can not be separated. Since Haiti 1st became an independent nation small numbers of its citizens have emigrated, but after France's Duvalier took power in 1957, the flow of migrants reached major proportions. For several reasons, the approximate 100,000 Haitians who arrived between 1960 and 1972 identified themselves as members of an immigrant population rather than as refugees. The new Haitian organizations that arose from 1965-1972 tried to organize Haitians as an ethnic interest group in the U.S. When Haitians 1st arrived by boat there was no strong political movement in the U.S., 1st to popularize the possibility of identifying oneself as a political refugee, and then to nurture and encourage such as stance. Even at the height of the movement to support the boat people and win then status as political refugees, perhaps the majority of the Haitian population and ertainly the majority of the Haitian organizations in New York stayed away from open discussion of Haitian politics. Today, some Haitian leaders tend to put aside the issue of Haitians as members of the Haitian diaspora, while others focus on the continuation of political repression in Haiti. The self-definitions of the Haitian population in the US in the future will continue to be shaped by and in turn help shape, political and economic conditions both in the US and Haiti.
Offering an epistemological approach to migration, this chapter highlights the relationships betw... more Offering an epistemological approach to migration, this chapter highlights the relationships between the changing ways migration is viewed by states, political actors, and researchers and the
reorganization of intersecting, globe-spanning, multiscalar networks of power, dispossession and desire. Challenging the separation of studies of migration, including its transnational processes, from analyses of the restructuring of the global capitalist economy, the chapter argues that such restructuring is simultaneously an economic, political, and cultural process in which we are all actors and subjects. The chapter frames the contemporary moment of reorganization within an overview of migration in human history and the formation of migration regimes. This stance discards the binary between mobility and stasis and migrants and non-migrants. It helps situate the rise and
fall of transnational studies within specific conjunctural transformations of the networks within which capital and power are accumulated and legitimated. The epistemological approach to
migration also makes visible the processes that are constituting a dispossariat, producing political rage globally, and fueling authoritarian racialized nationalism. At the same time, this approach highlights the processes that are dispossessing both people classified as migrant and non-migrants, which creates the basis of a politics of equality, social justice, and climate action.
Combining history, autobiography, and ethnography, Georges Woke Up Laughing provides a portrait o... more Combining history, autobiography, and ethnography, Georges Woke Up Laughing provides a portrait of the Haitian experience of migration to the United States that illuminates the phenomenon of long-distance nationalism, the voicelessness of certain citizens, and the impotency of government in an increasingly globalized world. By presenting lively ruminations on his life as a Haitian immigrant, Georges Eugene Fouron—along with Nina Glick Schiller, whose own family history stems from Poland and Russia—captures the daily struggles for survival that bind together those who emigrate and those who stay behind.
According to a long-standing myth, once emigrants leave their homelands—particularly if they emigrate to the United States—they sever old nationalistic ties, assimilate, and happily live the American dream. In fact, many migrants remain intimately and integrally tied to their ancestral homeland, sometimes even after they become legal citizens of another country. In Georges Woke Up Laughing the authors reveal the realities and dilemmas that underlie the efforts of long-distance nationalists to redefine citizenship, race, nationality, and political loyalty. Through discussions of the history and economics that link the United States with countries around the world, Glick Schiller and Fouron highlight the forces that shape emigrants’ experiences of government and citizenship and create a transborder citizenry. Arguing that governments of many countries today have almost no power to implement policies that will assist their citizens, the authors provide insights into the ongoing sociological, anthropological, and political effects of globalization.
Georges Woke up Laughing will entertain and inform those who are concerned about the rights of people and the power of their governments within the globalizing economy.
“In my dream I was young and in Haiti with my friends, laughing, joking, and having a wonderful time. I was walking down the main street of my hometown of Aux Cayes. The sun was shining, the streets were clean, and the port was bustling with ships. At first I was laughing because of the feeling of happiness that stayed with me, even after I woke up. I tried to explain my wonderful dream to my wife, Rolande. Then I laughed again but this time not from joy. I had been dreaming of a Haiti that never was.”—from Georges Woke Up Laughing
Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement and Urban Regeneration addresses how glo... more Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement and Urban Regeneration addresses how globe-circulating, contemporary urban regeneration agendas were implemented in cities that were clearly not global powerhouses. The book explores the relationships between these cities and their migrants as these relationships became part of projects of urban transformation. Setting aside dichotomies between agency and structure, mobility and stasis, and migrant and nonmigrant, which so often configure urban and migration theory and research, this book offers a comparative multiscalar analysis that explores the inter-related processes of displacement, dispossession, accumulation, and emplacement through which urban life is constituted. We use the term “multiscalar” as shorthand to speak of sociospatial spheres of practice that are constituted in relationship to each other and within various hierarchies of networks of power. Many researchers, particularly in anthropology, use the terms “transnational or “translocal” to follow personal networks across borders but decline to connect the personal to the institutionalized power embedded in scalar relations. And they avoid a comparative methodology, while a comparative analytic perspective is central to this book.
There is still insufficient research and theory that explores the relationship between projects to rebrand and regenerate cities with different degrees of political, economic, and cultural power, on the one hand, and the everyday sociabilities and social citizenship practices of city residents, on the other. Initially, exploration of cities in the global economy, as well as critiques of urban rebirth through regeneration and rebranding, focused on cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo, which were seen as global centers of economic, political, and cultural power. Studies of migrant incorporation also had tended to focus on such cities (Cross and Moore 2002), but increasingly urban researchers have expanded the scope of their inquiries into “midrange cities,” “gateway cities” and “ordinary cities” (Robinson 2006). Meanwhile, ethnographers began to examine the lives and social relations of migrants outside urban centers of global power, although with few exceptions interdependencies among processes of displacement, urban restructuring, and migrant emplacement have not been sufficiently explored.
The multiscalar analysis we offer rests on a critique of methodological nationalism and the ethnic lens. The challenge for researchers who are critical of methodological nationalism is to discard the binary between migrants and nonmigrants and yet keep in focus the migration experience, with its multiple forms of displacement as well as barriers to and modes of emplacement. We argue that because so many researchers, influenced by methodological nationalism and its bi-product, the ethnic lens, accept a deeply embedded binary between migrants and the mainstream of society, the crucial role of migrants within the city-making process often has been discounted within public and scholarly narratives (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2009; Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2011). Migrants must be approached as social actors who are integral to city-making, engaging in the daily life of cities via different and varied forms of social, political, economic, and religious action. While we place migrants and nonmigrants in the same analytical framework, we pay close attention to the racialization and stigmatization of international migrants, which are aspects of dehumanization. Various forms of dehumanization serve to legitimate the processes of dispossession and displacement that are at the analytical center of this book.
Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, 1994
This second chapter of Nations Unbound sets out the key theoretical premises that initiated the t... more This second chapter of Nations Unbound sets out the key theoretical premises that initiated the transnational framework for the study of migration. The framework (1) situated the concept and the migration pattern within a particular moment in the restructuring of capital; (2) offered a concept of transnational social field to explain how migrants reacted and reconstituted that moment by building social, political, familial, and economic networks across borders (3) critiqued bounded categories of social science that conflate territory, territory and identity ; and (4) highlight the ways in which transmigrants as they live their lives across borders engage in the nation-state building processes of two or more nation-states, simultaneously reinforcing and contesting categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Many subsequent scholars of transnational migration including Thomas Faist, Peter Koivisto, and Alejandro Portes seem to have overlooked this chapter or failed to cite it.
Transborder citizenship: an outcome of legal pluralism within transnational social fields forthco... more Transborder citizenship: an outcome of legal pluralism within transnational social fields forthcoming in Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World. Franz Bender Beckman and Keebit Bender Beckman eds. London: Ashgate Nina Glick Schiller In this paper I will discuss the implications of migrants’ transnational connections and networks for the concept of citizenship and propose the concept of the transborder citizen. Transborder citizens are people who live their lives across the borders of two or more nation-states, participating in the normative regime, legal and institutional system and political practices of these various states. As all other citizens, they claim rights and privileges from government but transborder citizens claim and act on a relationship to more than one government. The fact that within the past decade an impressive number of states have adopted some form of dual citizenship or dual nationality is an important foundation of the de...
Social & Cultural Geography, 2019
In H Berking Editor Lokalen in Einer Welt Ohne Grenzen Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World Frankfurt Main Campus Verlag 2006 P 105 144, 2006
Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological Encounters, 2022
In so many places in the world today, impoverished workers and an increasingly precarious middle ... more In so many places in the world today, impoverished workers and an increasingly precarious middle class seem to be voting or demonstrating their way into fascist movements against those defi ned as outside the nation. In this fractured political landscape, what can those of us who aspire to social and economic justice do? Joe Hill, a Swedish-American anarchist union organizer of the early twentieth century, who was murdered in Utah by a government fi ring squad for his activism, advised us to not 'waste any time in mourning. Organize' (Taylor 1990). However, the question of organizing with whom to do what remains unanswered in this response to repressive violence. Answering this question, which falls within the purview of anthropological research and theory building, has become ever more pressing in our current fractious times in which the forces of reaction seem to be doing the most successful organizing. In order to organize effectively for social and economic justice, we need to understand and confront the social dynamics that move people into political life, and then we need to identify ways to respond to those dynamics. Various lineages of anthropologists have highlighted the need for ethnographers to understand the interconnections between actors on the ground and broader social forces in order to bring about change. Günther Schlee, celebrated in this volume, can be counted among these ranks. Insisting that tracing the interconnections between actors on the ground and institutions of power is an aspect of anthropological research, he has argued that 'any theory about societal processes (the emergence of coherence, integration, confl ict or social change)
Nordic Journal of Migration Research
To contribute to the growing literature on comparative urban research, this article speaks to the... more To contribute to the growing literature on comparative urban research, this article speaks to the theoretical and methodological challenges that underlie recent calls for comparative relational approaches to city-making. The relational comparative analysis
we develop highlights the multiscalar transformations of relations of power across time and space, which reconstitute urban life within changing historical conjunctures.The article offers a working vocabulary for a relational comparative approach, together
with methodological illustrations drawn from our research on three seemingly very different disempowered cities located in Germany, the United States, and Turkey. This methodology includes identification of comparative parameters. These parameters
enabled exploration of the similar and different dynamics and paradoxes of interrelated key processes in the three cities. Such comparative dimensions might prove useful infuture work on disempowered cities. Our multiscalar approach enabled us to explore the ways in which migrants and non-migrants can be understood as actors reconstituting the city within the conjunctural transformations brought about by neoliberal urban
regeneration. Keywords: relational urban comparison, multiscalar, neoliberal urban regeneration, conjuncture, migrants, city-making.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 1998
Migration world magazine, 1987
Many believe that the political and economic motivations of Haitian migrants can not be separated... more Many believe that the political and economic motivations of Haitian migrants can not be separated. Since Haiti 1st became an independent nation small numbers of its citizens have emigrated, but after France's Duvalier took power in 1957, the flow of migrants reached major proportions. For several reasons, the approximate 100,000 Haitians who arrived between 1960 and 1972 identified themselves as members of an immigrant population rather than as refugees. The new Haitian organizations that arose from 1965-1972 tried to organize Haitians as an ethnic interest group in the U.S. When Haitians 1st arrived by boat there was no strong political movement in the U.S., 1st to popularize the possibility of identifying oneself as a political refugee, and then to nurture and encourage such as stance. Even at the height of the movement to support the boat people and win then status as political refugees, perhaps the majority of the Haitian population and ertainly the majority of the Haitian o...
In: Wanni W. Anderson and Robert G. Lee , editor(s). New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press; 2005. p. 159-178., 2005
... He rightly warns us that focusing on transnational economic activi-ties and discarding other ... more ... He rightly warns us that focusing on transnational economic activi-ties and discarding other aspects of transnational connection as nothing new, as Portes (1996) at one point suggested ... Both Dorais and Maira remind us that there are many forms of cross-border networks. ...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1992
Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 1997
Dans les divers pays exportateurs de l'emigration, il y a des politiques et des dirigeants qu... more Dans les divers pays exportateurs de l'emigration, il y a des politiques et des dirigeants qui tentent de revitaliser le nationalisme et le concept de l'Etat-nation, dans un contexte ou l'economie globale definit les Etats-nations comme transnationaux. Dans le present article, nous defendons a partir de l'exemple de Haiti, que l'on peut trouver derriere le concept de l'identite nationale celui de la race. Les identites nationales sont des identites raciales dans ce sens qu'elles se basent sur le concept de la descendance a travers des liens de sang, ce qui mene a pouvoir les attribuer une base plutot biologique. Les Etats exportateurs d'emigration sont en train de definir, actuellement, leur nationalite a travers la descendance, et non par une langue, une histoire politique, une culture ou un territoire partages. La liaison entre la nation et la race, profondement enracinee dans la theorie de l'Etat-nation, est en train de devenir le trait distinc...
Migration world magazine, 1987
Many believe that the political and economic motivations of Haitian migrants can not be separated... more Many believe that the political and economic motivations of Haitian migrants can not be separated. Since Haiti 1st became an independent nation small numbers of its citizens have emigrated, but after France's Duvalier took power in 1957, the flow of migrants reached major proportions. For several reasons, the approximate 100,000 Haitians who arrived between 1960 and 1972 identified themselves as members of an immigrant population rather than as refugees. The new Haitian organizations that arose from 1965-1972 tried to organize Haitians as an ethnic interest group in the U.S. When Haitians 1st arrived by boat there was no strong political movement in the U.S., 1st to popularize the possibility of identifying oneself as a political refugee, and then to nurture and encourage such as stance. Even at the height of the movement to support the boat people and win then status as political refugees, perhaps the majority of the Haitian population and ertainly the majority of the Haitian organizations in New York stayed away from open discussion of Haitian politics. Today, some Haitian leaders tend to put aside the issue of Haitians as members of the Haitian diaspora, while others focus on the continuation of political repression in Haiti. The self-definitions of the Haitian population in the US in the future will continue to be shaped by and in turn help shape, political and economic conditions both in the US and Haiti.
European Journal of Sociology, 2002
I appear as natural enemies of a political world di-vided into culturally homogenous an... more I appear as natural enemies of a political world di-vided into culturally homogenous and territorially bounded nations each represented by a sovereign state. This perception has influenced social science theory and methodology and, more specifically, its discourse on ...
Caderno Crh Vol 13 N 33 2000, Aug 31, 2006
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1992
Rather than serving to combat the epidemic, the use of seemingly politi-cally neutral epidemiolog... more Rather than serving to combat the epidemic, the use of seemingly politi-cally neutral epidemiological categories to portray AIDS risk groups as culturally distinct may have impeded AIDS education and prevention ef-forts. This article critiques the construction of intravenous drug users ( ...
2023 in Routledge International Handbook of Transnational Studies, edited by Margit Fauser & Xóchitl Bada , 2023
Offering an epistemological approach to migration, this chapter highlights the relationships bet... more Offering an epistemological approach to migration, this chapter highlights the relationships between the changing ways migration is viewed by states, political actors, and researchers and the reorganization of intersecting, globe-spanning, multiscalar networks of power, dispossession and desire. Challenging the separation of studies of migration, including its transnational processes, from analyses of the restructuring of the global capitalist economy, the chapter argues that such restructuring is simultaneously an economic, political, and cultural process in which we are all actors and subjects. The chapter frames the contemporary moment of reorganization within an over view of migration in human history and the formation of migration regimes. This stance discards the binary between mobility and stasis and migrants and non-migrants. It helps situate the rise and fall of transnational studies within specific conjunctural transformations of the networks within which capital and power are accumulated and legitimated. The epistemological approach to migration also makes visible the processes that are constituting a dispossariat, producing political rage globally, and fueling authoritarian racialized nationalism. At the same time, this approach highlights the processes that are dispossessing both people classified as migrant and non-migrants, which creates the basis of a politics of equality, social justice, and climate action.
Handbook on Migration and Development. Raul Delgado Wise Carl-Ulrik Shierup, Ronaldo Munck, Branka Likić-Brborić, eds. Edward Elgar Publishing
Building on but extending the critiques of concepts of development and migration and development,... more Building on but extending the critiques of concepts of development and migration and
development, this article offers a political economic analysis of dispossessive “growth and
development.” It speaks to contemporary crises including displacement that are actuated by the
interlinked processes of physical mobility and downward social mobility. The article challenges
the assumption that migration dynamics can be understood as separate from a global history of
human mobility and settlement and the growth of imperial structures and networks of power,
past and present. This analysis of multiscalar processes of accumulation by dispossession allows
us to go beyond statistical or ethnographic descriptions of impoverishment and inequality and
make sense of multiple contemporary forms of political rage including both racist reactionary
forms of despair and anti-racist decolonizing social movements for equitable justice.
Lost in the struggles about who is a refugee, what the word means, and who should be allowed to c... more Lost in the struggles about who is a refugee, what the word means, and who should be allowed to cross an international border and settle are some basic questions including the one asked by a Haitian women confined in a US detention center and awaiting deportation. She asked, "What is wrong with fleeing ‘our country in search of food and drink?" If parents let their children starve in the US, UK, or Germany they are charged with child abuse. If they cannot find the way to support them in one place and seek support for them across a border (or in some countries even move within their country) they become criminals. Thinking about the struggles around the term refugee and its different meanings also raises the questions of what an immigrant is. This short essay asks “what’s in a word” and is a challenge to use the term refugee to rethink the dominant approach to migration and open a discussion of the dispossession that both migrants and non-migrants are currently facing all around the world.