The Figure of the Migrant

Author: Thomas Nail
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804796688
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time. Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.

Figures of the Migrant

Author: Siobhan Brownlie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000434109
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
This volume seeks to investigate the representation of the migrant and migration in literary texts and the arts. Through studies that examine works in a range of art forms ‒ novels, theatre, poetry, creative non-fiction, documentary films and performance and video installations ‒ that evoke a variety of historical and (trans)national contexts, the volume focuses on the question of the roles of literature and the arts in representing migration. An important issue considered is the extent to which artistic figuration can act as a counterpoint to social discourse on migrants that often involves stereotypes and reductive views. The different contributions to the volume illustrate that literature and the arts can provide readers and viewers with a space for fluid knowledge production and affective expansion and that within that overarching function, artistic works play three main roles with regard to representing migration: undertaking a socio-political and cultural critique, presenting alternative views to stereotypes that highlight the singularity and complexity of the migrant and providing proposals for different futures.

The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema

Author: Temenuga Trifonova
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150136250X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema explores contemporary debates around the concepts of 'Europe' and 'European identity' through an examination of recent European films dealing with various aspects of globalization (the refugee crisis, labour migration, the resurgence of nationalism and ethnic violence, neoliberalism, post-colonialism) with a particular attention to the figure of the migrant and the ways in which this figure challenges us to rethink Europe and its core Enlightenment values (citizenship, justice, ethics, liberty, tolerance, and hospitality) in a post-national context of ephemerality, volatility, and contingency that finds people desperately looking for firmer markers of identity. The book argues that a compelling case can be made for re-orienting the study of contemporary European cinema around the figure of the migrant viewed both as a symbolic figure (representing post-national citizenship, urbanization, the 'gap' between ethics and justice) and as a figure occupying an increasingly central place in European cinema in general rather than only in what is usually called 'migrant and diasporic cinema'. By drawing attention to the structural and affective affinities between the experience of migrants and non-migrants, Europeans and non-Europeans, Trifonova shows that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate stories about migration from stories about life under neoliberalism in general

Theory of the Border

Author: Thomas Nail
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190618671
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Despite -- and perhaps because of -- increasing global mobility, there are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life. Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

The Migrant Image

Author: T. J. Demos
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822353407
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
In The Migrant Image T. J. Demos examines the ways contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, the stateless, and the politically dispossessed. He presents a sophisticated analysis of how artists from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East depict the often ignored effects of globalization and the ways their works connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic crisis. Demos investigates the cinematic approaches Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl employ to blur the real and imaginary in their films confronting geopolitical conflicts between North and South. He analyzes how Emily Jacir and Ahlam Shibli use blurs, lacuna, and blind spots in their photographs, performances, and conceptual strategies to directly address the dire circumstances of dislocated Palestinian people. He discusses the disparate interventions of Walid Raad in Lebanon, Ursula Biemann in North Africa, and Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri in the United States, and traces how their works offer images of conflict as much as a conflict of images. Throughout Demos shows the ways these artists creatively propose new possibilities for a politics of equality, social justice, and historical consciousness from within the aesthetic domain.

Migrants and Migration in Modern North America

Author: Dirk Hoerder
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822350514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call “transcultural societal studies,” an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns. They describe the ways that people have fashioned cross-border lives, as well as the effects of shifting labor markets in facilitating or hindering cross-border movement, the place of formal and informal politics in migration processes and migrants’ lives, and the creation and transformation of borderlands economies, societies, and cultures. This collection offers rich new perspectives on migration in North America and on the broader study of migration history. Contributors. Jaime R. Aguila. Rodolfo Casillas-R., Nora Faires, Maria Cristina Garcia, Delia Gonzáles de Reufels, Brian Gratton, Susan E. Gray, James N. Gregory, John Mason Hart, Dirk Hoerder, Dan Killoren, Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu, Catherine O’Donnell, Kerry Preibisch, Lara Putnam, Bruno Ramirez, Angelika Sauer, Melanie Shell-Weiss, Yukari Takai, Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

Handbook of Art and Global Migration

Author: Burcu Dogramaci
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110476673
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Book Description
How can we think of art history as a discipline that moves process-based, performative, and cultural migratory movement to the center of its theoretical and methodical analyses? With contributions from internationally renowned experts, this manual, for the first time, provides answers as to what consequences the interaction of migration and globalization has on research in the field of the science of art, on curatory practice, and on artistic production and theory. The objective of this multi-vocal anthology is to open up an interdisciplinary discourse surrounding the increased focus on the phenomenon of migration in art history.

The Migrant's Paradox

Author: Suzanne M. Hall
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965005
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Connects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” maps onto place across the globe, state, and street In this richly observed account of migrant shopkeepers in five cities in the United Kingdom, Suzanne Hall examines the brutal contradictions of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins. Hall locates The Migrant’s Paradox on streets in the far-flung parts of de-industrialized peripheries, where jobs are hard to come by and the impacts of historic state underinvestment are deeply felt. Drawing on hundreds of in-person interviews on streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London, and Manchester, Hall brings together histories of colonization with current forms of coloniality. Her six-year project spans the combined impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, austerity governance, punitive immigration laws and the Brexit Referendum, and processes of state-sanctioned regeneration. She incorporates the spaces of shops, conference halls, and planning offices to capture how official border talk overlaps with everyday formations of work and belonging on the street. Original and ambitious, Hall’s work complicates understandings of migrants, demonstrating how migrant journeys and claims to space illuminate the relations between global displacement and urban emplacement. In articulating “a citizenship of the edge” as an adaptive and audacious mode of belonging, she shows how sovereignty and inequality are maintained and refuted.

Reaching for the Stars

Author: José M. Hernández
Publisher: Center Street
ISBN: 1455522813
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
The book that inspired the new film A Million Miles Away. Born into a family of migrant workers, toiling in the fields by the age of six, Jose M. Hernàndez dreamed of traveling through the night skies on a rocket ship. Reaching for the Stars is the inspiring story of how he realized that dream, becoming the first Mexican-American astronaut. Hernàndez didn't speak English till he was 12, and his peers often joined gangs, or skipped school. And yet, by his twenties he was part of an elite team helping develop technology for the early detection of breast cancer. He was turned down by NASA eleven times on his long journey to donning that famous orange space suit. Hernàndez message of hard work, education, perseverance, of "reaching for the stars," makes this a classic American autobiography.

Deportable and Disposable

Author: Lisa A. Flores
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271088656
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
In the 1920s, the US government passed legislation against undocumented entry into the country, and as a result the figure of the “illegal alien” took form in the national discourse. In this book, Lisa A. Flores explores the history of our language about Mexican immigrants and exposes how our words made these migrants “illegal.” Deportable and Disposable brings a rhetorical lens to a question that has predominantly concerned historians: how do differently situated immigrant populations come to belong within the national space of whiteness, and thus of American-ness? Flores presents a genealogy of our immigration discourse through four stereotypes: the “illegal alien,” a foreigner and criminal who quickly became associated with Mexican migrants; the “bracero,” a docile Mexican contract laborer; the “zoot suiter,” a delinquent Mexican American youth engaged in gang culture; and the “wetback,” an unwanted migrant who entered the country by swimming across the Rio Grande. By showing how these figures were constructed, Flores provides insight into the ways in which we racialize language and how we can transform our political rhetoric to ensure immigrant populations come to belong as part of the country, as Americans. Timely, thoughtful, and eye-opening, Deportable and Disposable initiates a necessary conversation about the relationship between racial rhetoric and the literal and figurative borders of the nation. This powerful book will inform policy makers, scholars, activists, and anyone else interested in race, rhetoric, and immigration in the United States.