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Conclusion: Muslim African Refugees in Perpetual Passage

Cawo M. Abdi

in Elusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and a Borderless Muslim Identity

The conclusion underscores how instead of only focusing on economic incorporation or taking a celebratory position on transnational lives and identities, the case studies presented in this book call ... More

The conclusion underscores how instead of only focusing on economic incorporation or taking a celebratory position on transnational lives and identities, the case studies presented in this book call for more attention to the role of the imaginary, to geopolitical forces, and to nationality as well as to the migrant’s social, religious, racial, and gender positioning in the country of settlement. These multiple positionings ultimately shape how the cultural tool kit that migrants bring with them is reconstituted in light of the structural arrangements they encounter in their new settlements. It shows how migrants develop distinct adaptive strategies in each social context, depending on the milieux they encounter. It is in this meeting—between the individual and surrounding social structures—that all of our lives are given shape. The migrant experience, of course, necessitates an additional, and more complex, meeting, as the individual reckons with social structures across multiple borders. The conclusion ends by stating the author’s hope that by immersing oneself in the particulars of these transnational lives, one can gain a better understanding both of migrants and refugees themselves and of the shifting contours of a globalized yet highly bordered world.Less

Transnational Lives: Home, Privilege, and Exclusion

M. Cristina Alcalde

in Peruvian Lives across Borders: Power, Exclusion, and Home

This chapter draws the reader into everyday transnational experiences and the role of exclusion in Peruvian racial-class-gender hierarchies. It introduces the main themes and concepts of the book, ... More

This chapter draws the reader into everyday transnational experiences and the role of exclusion in Peruvian racial-class-gender hierarchies. It introduces the main themes and concepts of the book, its methodological approaches, and research locations: Peru, the United States, Canada, and Germany. It also presents the main topical and theoretical concepts and trajectories within the book: home and belonging, exclusion, return, intersectionality, exclusionary cosmopolitanism, and transnational lives.Less

Privilege, Racialization, and Exclusionary Cosmopolitanism in Transnational Trajectories

M. Cristina Alcalde

in Peruvian Lives across Borders: Power, Exclusion, and Home

This chapter introduces exclusionary cosmopolitanism as a theoretical framework for approaching transnational Peruvian identities. Within transnational Peruvian and more specifically limeño spaces ... More

This chapter introduces exclusionary cosmopolitanism as a theoretical framework for approaching transnational Peruvian identities. Within transnational Peruvian and more specifically limeño spaces cosmopolitan belonging is often shaped by existing hierarchies: some migrants belong, others are denied inclusion by middle and upper- class limeños. The chapter examines racialization and racial hierarchies in Peru, particularly in Lima, and the construction and treatment of indigenous internal migrants as the historically inferior other for middle and upper-class limeños. It brings into the discussion of cosmopolitan belonging how processes of racialization and othering also impact and are reinforced by international migrants, who had previously considered themselves to be part of the unmarked privileged middle and upper- classes.Less

Transnational Contentions: The Moral Economy of Postconflict Migration

in Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War

This chapter examines the moral economy of postconflict migration in Machaze, Mozambique. It considers migrancy as a new transnational life strategy and as a form of public performance implicated in ... More

This chapter examines the moral economy of postconflict migration in Machaze, Mozambique. It considers migrancy as a new transnational life strategy and as a form of public performance implicated in the negotiation of this new social strategy's legitimacy. This chapter analyzes the narratives of migrants and suggests that migrancy served not only as the key mechanism for enacting a range of new transnational life strategies but also as a form of moral performance implicated in the negotiation of the social legitimacy of those strategies.Less

Worklife connections: technologies of mobility and transnational lives

Torben Krings, Elaine Moriarty, James Wickham, Alicja Bobek, and Justyna Salamońska

in New mobilities in Europe: Polish migration to Ireland post-2004

This chapter examines the mobility patterns of Polish migrants in the context of new ‘technologies of mobility’. Of particular importance was low-cost air travel which facilitated the initial ... More

This chapter examines the mobility patterns of Polish migrants in the context of new ‘technologies of mobility’. Of particular importance was low-cost air travel which facilitated the initial migration move to Ireland and allowed for subsequent two-way traffic between the two countries. However, what was even more remarkable was the extent to which Ireland became a jumping-off point for visiting new places in Europe and beyond. Arguably, the Irish migration experience introduced many Polish migrants to a new world of mobility and travel as they began to discover new countries and destinations. In addition to physical movement, new information and communication technologies (ICTs) were of particular importance in maintaining transnational contacts. In conjunction with new travel opportunities, ICTs created a new experience of mobility beyond the ‘container’ of the nation-state, as Polish migrants increasingly lived a transnational life ‘in-between’.Less

How to Live a Transnational Life: Between Heaviness and Lightness

Olga Kanzaki Sooudi

in Japanese New York: Migrant Artists and Self-reinvention on the World Stage

This chapter examines the ambivalence inherent in Japanese migrants' relationships to one another in everyday life through an analysis of three stories: an extended ethnographic vignette of the ... More

This chapter examines the ambivalence inherent in Japanese migrants' relationships to one another in everyday life through an analysis of three stories: an extended ethnographic vignette of the relationships between the Japanese and Mexican staff in a high-end Japanese restaurant; a Japanese film entitled Hazard (Sono Sion, 2002), about a young man's dubious flight to New York City to become a gangster; and a personal history of a middle-aged Japanese artist living in Brooklyn for the past thirty years. By interweaving these experiences and cultural texts, the chapter highlights the stakes involved in living a transnational life. More specifically, it shows that migrants yearn for lightness, for freedom and autonomy, yet desire the heaviness of community and social ties based on shared language and national origin. Finally, it uses Georg Simmel's concept of the stranger to theorize Japanese migrants' ambivalence toward alliances in relation to their notion of light-footed autonomy.Less

Afghan Migrants and Urban Life in Central Asia

Magnus Marsden

in Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants Across Modern Frontiers

This chapter explores Afghan traders’ experiences of and reflections on life in a range of settings across the former Soviet Union. It documents the ways in which traders talk about their ability to ... More

This chapter explores Afghan traders’ experiences of and reflections on life in a range of settings across the former Soviet Union. It documents the ways in which traders talk about their ability to work in starkly different contexts by focusing on their personal and family histories, their comparative experiences of working life in Central and South Asia, and the modes in which they present these, both to the author and to one another. The chapter analyses the worlds that the traders create and inhabit and shifts the book’s focus away from their economic agency to a consideration of how their mobility across modern frontiers feeds into their collective and personal self-understandings.Less

Introduction

Konstantina Zanou

in Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation

The Introduction presents the book’s topics and objectives. It introduces the characters of the story—men and a few women of letters and politics, who lived along the shores of the Adriatic during ... More

The Introduction presents the book’s topics and objectives. It introduces the characters of the story—men and a few women of letters and politics, who lived along the shores of the Adriatic during the first half of the nineteenth century, most of whom have disappeared from the historical record; the setting—the post-Venetian Adriatic Sea and more widely the Eastern Mediterranean with its old empires and new colonial powers (Ottoman, Napoleonic, Russian, Habsburg, British) and nation-states (Italy and Greece); and the main intellectual concepts—‘transnational patriotism’, ‘imperial nationalism’, ‘conservative liberalism’, and ‘Orthodox Enlightenment’. Finally, it offers a historical overview of the Ionian Islands, Napoleonic and Restoration Italy, the Greek revolution, and the formation of the Greek state.Less

Government Censorship of Family Communication, 1942–1964

Ana Elizabeth Rosas

in Abrazando el Espíritu

Using the correspondence of U.S. government officials and Mexican immigrant children, women, and men of varying legal status, this chapter examines how censorship was used to maintain the separation ... More

Using the correspondence of U.S. government officials and Mexican immigrant children, women, and men of varying legal status, this chapter examines how censorship was used to maintain the separation of bracero families across the U.S.-Mexico border. This historical consideration of how the U.S. government’s censorship and obstruction of these families’ correspondence emerged as an underestimated and, in turn, effective border enforcement measure in support of the Bracero Program’s conditions and terms illustrates this government’s selective acknowledgment of bracero families. It also proves most revealing when striving to understand the deep-seated anxiety, restlessness, and silences of the program.Less