From Transnationalism to the Emergence of a New Transnational Research Field (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
Abstract Focusing on the interaction between migrants and stay-at homes, this paper shows how the host country experience at once facilitates and structures immigrants' involvements with the countries from which they come. The vehicle is a study of a migration universal: the associations that bring together migrants displaced from a common hometown. These associations provide a strategic research site, allowing us to take apart the two very different aspects–namely, state and nation–that the transnational concept conflates.
Stuart Hall famously summed up the painful predicament of international migration as the dawning realization that one can never return home. 1 Overseas migration sets in motion a process of dislocation along with the encounter with new social environments and landscapes. Over time, these change migrants' consciousness, their intimate knowledge, and taken-for-granted expectations, while in their absence the countries and friends they left behind change too, often to the extent that on their return they find they are no longer in the same country. Describing himself as a "cosmopolitan by default," Hall (2008) reflects on the sense of loss, noting that "every diaspora has its regrets": Although you can never go back to the past, you do have a sense of loss. There is something you have lost. A kind of intimate connection with landscape, and family, and tradition, which you lose. I think this is the fate of modern people-we have to lose them, but [we believe] we are going to go back to them. (pp. 349-350) The sense of lost intimacy-the knowing of a place and all its taken-for-granted ways of thinking, interacting and "systems of relevancies"-was first theorized by Alfred Schütz in "The Homecomer" (1945), a foundational article on the sociology of everyday life: Home means one thing to the man who never has left it, another thing to the man who dwells far from it, and still another to him who returns. "To feel at home" is an A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, First Edition. Edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani.
Dimensions of Transnationalism
Feminist Review, 2017
This article identifies and analyses links between conceptualisations of trans-gender and trans-national and aims for a critical redefinition of political agency. Through an examination of theories on transing, passing and performativity in queer-, trans-, and transnational feminist knowledge production and illustrated by discursive examples from transgender communities and Romanian migrant communities, I call for a conceptualisation of entangled power relations that does not rely on fixed, pre-established categories but defines subjectivity through risk in political struggle. I suggest that ‘transing’ the nation and ‘transing’ gender could be thought as critical moves for a radical deconstruction of gendered and national belonging. Rather than provide a static definition of the term ‘transnationalism’, the article explores potentials and limits of going beyond ‘the national’ and ‘gender’ and intervenes in forms of minority nationalism that reproduce racism, sexism, heteronormativity and gender binary as the norm of Western national belonging. In particular, building on Jasbir Puar’s conceptualisation of homonationalism, the article shows how forms of nationalism in Western transgender and migrant communities rely on a combination of heteronormative binary gendering and the exertion of racism. While a conventionalised approach to transnationalism defines the term as a political strategy based on transnational politics, I play with suggesting different dimensions of transnationalism: it could mean ‘transgender nationalism’; the 'assimilation of transgendered persons to the Western nation'; or 'cross-border-nationalism', a form of nationalism often established in migrant communities that constructs the diaspora as a nationalist extension of the homeland. My focus, therefore, is on analysing privilegings, contradictions and ambivalences in gendering, racialising and nationalising ascriptions of (non)belonging. Overall, and as an alternative to romanticised knowledge productions of crossing national and gendered borders, I suggest a power-sensitive epistemological and methodological shift in thinking entangled power relations, belonging and subjectivity in trans-national feminist knowledge productions.
This paper revisits the concept of migrant transnationalism. I review how the concept emerged and highlight which dimensions were subsequently developed in the literature. I also consider the notion of 'diaspora' and suggest that it provides an important heuristic tool. I examine the literature on transnationalism and integration and propose that while the literature on transnational social fields has developed an effective model for examining migrants' experiences that enables scholars to move away from 'container' notions of society, it has limited applicability in terms of second generation immigrants. This paper then suggest a research path that moves away from the duality of sending and receiving localities to instead consider the impact of the global on the local. I end by suggesting how a 'transnational spectrum' could help us map how the transnational dimension of everyday life impacts on identity-formation and integration people of immigrant background
Localising transnationalism. Researching political and cultural events in a context of migration
2007
Migration studies have extensively dealt with networks, transnational spaces and migration fields during the last 15 years. Recently, the focus has gone back to the very local rooting of these transnational spaces: Ludger Pries links geographic and sociological aspects by analysing the "spatial spanning of the social"; Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse çağlar develop a "theory of locality in migration studies". In francophone social geography there is a similar research agenda influenced by Gildas Simon and in migration sociology there are growing interests in researching local-global embedding processes, such as Alain Tarrius' "La mondialisation par le bas" (globalization from below). Inspired by these approaches, I give two empirical examples for localising transnationalism: By researching political and cultural events in a context of migration, I will show how the understanding of a specific event within an urban context can help us to recognize the rooting of transnational networks. Therefore, my epistemological focus considers festive events as platforms for the negotiation of inclusion/exclusion and transformation processes within migration. Minorities and majorities are therefore seen as historically-evolved dynamic categories. This choice avoids taking an a priori-defined ethnic, religious or sociocultural category as a key issue in the processes of communitarization. The link of theoretical debates on rituals and events, on translocal social spaces and on globalization leads to innovative methodological instruments in action theory.
Transnationalism Unbound: Detailing New Subjects, Registers and Spatialities of Cross‐Border Lives
Geography Compass, 2009
The emergence of transnationalism as a central focus in the study of migration in the early 1990s marked a significant departure in scholarly understandings of cross-border movements and their consequences. Indeed, the recognition that migrants do not simply follow linear pathways of departure, settlement and assimilation or return has both highlighted the importance of and provided an empirical base for reconfiguring conceptualisations of nations, societies and cultures in the light of globalising processes. Initially, this emergent cross-disciplinary field was dominated by anthropologists, sociologists and political scholars and less so by geographers, resulting in a reduced concern for the spatial characteristics and consequences of transnationalism. More recently, however, geographers have taken significant interest in both the theoretical and empirical study of transnationalism and have made a significant contribution to understandings of different subjects, registers and spatialities of this phenomenon. This article examines the different ways that geographers have engaged with issues relating to transnationalism. In particular, I argue that the work of geographers has served to unbind the study of transnationalism from its concern only with sustained forms of transnational activity, as well as the latent representational fixes and limited geographical foci of the field. Latent gaps within and future possibilities for the study of transnationalism within geography are also outlined.
Review Article: An Excellent Introduction to Diaspora Theory and Transnationalism
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
While discussing human migration, scholars such as Stuart Hall and Simon Gikandi agree that the absent nation stands for the ideology into which the migrant had been interpellated before his or her journey away from the homeland. Speaking in the context of postcolonial diaspora in the new globalized order, Gikandi (2005) argues that these cultural or national ideologies become objects of transnational border crossings: "in the old global order, the nation was the reality and the category that enabled the socialization of subjects and hence structuralization of cultures; now, in
Connecting and confronting transnationalism: bridging concepts and moving critique
Identities
This article traces the trajectory of transnationalism as a perspective and field of study and suggests that new impetus can be given to its development by establishing a dialogue between transnationalism and other key concepts. While the research agenda of the early stages was characterised by a need to distinguish transnationalism from related terms, such as globalisation, we argue that the field could now regain momentum by exploring synergies with other concepts. In this special issue we stage confrontations between transnationalism and, respectively, the (perspectives opened up by the) concepts of 'borders', 'translocality', 'precarity', 'queer', 'moralities', 'the state', and 'brokerage'. Conceptually, this allows us to go beyond an internal critique that exposes the shortcomings of a transnational perspective, by suggesting novel frameworks and toolkits. Substantively, this issue's articles demonstrate the need to refocus transnational studies' attention to the unevenness, instability and inequality of transnational space.
Transnationalism: Issues and Perspectives
2006
Well-known social scientist and humanist from USA, Latin America and Spain, such as Saskia Sassen, Garcia Canclini or Monsivais, worked together at an international conference held in Los Angeles (Cal.) in order to make a compelling case for the transnational as an operative analytical category. Their essays, collected in this volume, consider how cultural studies, political analysis, urban studies and the study of migrations change when using a sort of a transnational perspective, that goes beyond the economic determinism underlying the liberal concept of “globalization” and the more critical of “mundialization”. After an introduction that carves out a scientific space for a transnational frame of reference and clarifies its political dimensions, the book deals with three main issues: the interaction of global (supra-national) and local (infra-national) forces in global cities, post-metropolis and other post-national spaces; a critical consideration of current use of modern politic...