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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PGMC - Polity Global Media and Communication series
- Sprache: Englisch
Media practices and the everyday cultures of transnational migrants are deeply interconnected. Mediating Migration narrates aspects of the migrant experience as shaped by the technologies of communication and the social, political and cultural configurations of neoliberal globalization. The book examines the mediated reinventions of transnational diasporic cultures, the emergence of new publics, and the manner in which nations and migrants connect. By placing migration and media practices in the same frame, the book offers a wide-ranging discussion of the contested politics of mobility and transnational cultures of diasporic communities as they are imagined, connected, and reproduced by various groups, individuals, and institutions. Drawing on current events, activism, cultural practices, and crises concerning immigration, this book is organized around themes legitimacy, recognition, publics, domesticity, authenticity that speak to the entangled interconnections between media and migration.
Mediating Migration will be of interest to students in media, communication, and cultural studies. The book raises questions that cut across disciplines about cutting-edge issues of our times migration, mobility, citizenship, and mediated environments.
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Seitenzahl: 332
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
Transnational Topographies of Affiliation
Migration and Mediations
Text: Point of View and Flow
Notes
2. Legitimacy: Accumulating Status
Revisioning Citizenship
Languaging Bodies
Visible Invisibility
Bio-Scripts and Aspirations
Circulatory Politics
Notes
3. Recognition: Politics and Technologies
Digital Hunt
Faces, Facing, and Defacing
Cultures of Fear and Technologies of Recognition
Notes
4. Publics: Eyeing Gender
Uncovering the Alien Within
Modes of Publicizing Difference
Staging of the Modern Citizen
Conclusion
Notes
5. Domesticity: Digital Visions and Versions
Techno Publics and Affect
Digital Domesticity and Diaspora
Cosmopolitics of Flexible Taste
Places lived and remembered
Culinary flexibility
Gendered politics and mobile texts
Conclusion
Notes
6. Authenticity: Pursuits of Auras
Negotiating Auras
Re-Sounding Authenticity
Identity as Cultural Literacy
Digital Classicism
Educating the Diaspora
Presentations of the Authentic
Notes
7. Conclusion: Destinations and Beginnings
Document Power
Other Anxieties
Space Claims
Neoliberal Logics
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Global Media and Communication
Adrian Athique, Indian Media
Jean K. Chalaby, The Format Age
Terry Flew, Global Creative Industries
Myria Georgiou, Media and the City
Radha Sarma Hegde, Mediating Migration
Noha Mellor, Khalil Rinnawi, Nabil Dajani and Muhammad I. Ayish, Arab Media
Shani Orgad, Media Representation and the Global Imagination Stylianos Papathanassopoulos and Ralph Negrine, European Media
Mediating Migration
RADHA SARMA HEGDE
polity
Copyright © Radha Sarma Hegde 2016
The right of Radha Sarma Hegde to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0310-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hegde, Radha Sarma, 1953-Title: Mediating migration / Radha S. Hegde. Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, [2015] | Series: Global media and communication | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015022617| ISBN 9780745646329 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0745646328 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745646336 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 0745646336 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and immigrants. | Mass media and social integration. | Mass media and culture. | Immigrants--Social networks. | Immigrants--Cultural assimilation. | Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. | Emigration and immigration--Technological innovations.Classification: LCC P94.5.I48 H44 2015 | DDC 302.23086/91--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015022617
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
To Krishna, who has journeyed with me.
Acknowledgements
This book has emerged from my long-standing scholarly interest in the politics and narratives of migration. Writing the book has itself been a journey of sorts, on which I have been sustained and supported by many. The chapters all grew and developed from conversations with colleagues and friends, lectures in classes, discussions with students, and presentations delivered at various academic institutions.
For some years now, I have been teaching on the subjects of migration, media, and globalization. These courses have served as a testing ground for many of the ideas presented in this book. I wish to acknowledge my graduate and undergraduate students at New York University who have been intellectually curious, responsive, and involved with my work.
Each of the chapters was shaped over the course of an academic and social journey. I am deeply appreciative of the scholars who have engaged and invited me to present my work when it was still evolving and in formation. These interactions have been crucial to the completion of this book. Many of the ideas in the introduction were shaped in two keynote addresses that I delivered, the first at a conference arranged by the Academy of Finland, and the next at the Nordic Network for Media and Migration, University of Helsinki. My thanks to Karina Horsti, Minna Aslama, and Petteri Pietikäinen. The ideas for chapter 2 were inspired by my meetings with young undocumented activists in New York City. I presented the arguments of this chapter in a panel at the International Communication Association conference along with Karina Horsti, Mirca Madianou, Tanja Thomas, and Elke Grittmann, to all of whom I extend my thanks. Parts of chapter 3 were presented at St. Louis University at Madrid and also at the University of Western Washington. My thanks to Brian Goss, Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre, Angharad Valdivia, Cameron McCarthy, and Natalie Fenton for their engagement with the ideas and arguments presented in that chapter. Parts of chapter 4 have also been presented at Freie Universität Berlin, where I deeply value the collegiality of Margreth Lünenborg and Elfriede Fürsich. Chapter 5 took shape in presentations at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference in Paris, and at the Diasporic Foodways Conference at the University of Toronto. My thanks to Ajaya Sahoo and the referees for valuable editorial input on a version of this chapter that was published in the Journal of South Asian Diaspora.Chapter 6 on music, technology, and the diaspora has benefited greatly from discussions that followed presentations at Cambridge University, Yale University, the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Hyderabad. For these opportunities and conversations, I wish to thank Mirca Madianou, Inderpal Grewal, Susan Ossman, Usha Raman, Vinod Pavarala, Aparna Rayaprol, and Amit Kumar Mishra. My thanks to Cynthia Carter and Lisa McLaughlin of Feminist Media Studies for their constant support. A very special thanks to Shani Orgad and Linda Steiner for their input, timely comments, and extremely helpful suggestions. To Linda, a special thanks for instant advice on sentences that go astray. I am also grateful to the activists, food bloggers, and musicians who generously gave me of their time and whose narratives I have incorporated into the book.
The intellectual space, support, and stimulation I have received at New York University, and especially from my colleagues in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, have been invaluable. For his rich intellectual mentorship and support, I owe my deep gratitude to Arjun Appadurai, my colleague, whose scholarship has been truly inspirational to my intellectual pursuits, and in particular to this book on migration. Arjun, thank you very much for all the stimulating conversations and for being most generous with your time. To Arvind Rajagopal, my deeply felt thanks for his sustained intellectual support, insightful conversations, and friendship. Over the years, I have learnt much from my friend and colleague Allen Feldman, and I am deeply grateful for the conversations we have had on many of the ideas presented here. To my colleagues Helen Nissenbaum and Deborah Borisoff, I would like to express my profound gratitude for their friendship and unswerving support of this project right from the very beginning. Checking in with Helen about (impossible) writing goals and logging our daily word counts has been crucial to the completion of this book. Debbie, thank you for your timely and dependable academic mentoring and keeping me centered with humor and friendship. To Marita Sturken and Lisa Gitelman – thank you for your collegiality and enabling various academic processes that helped me along the way.
There are several others who have helped shape this book through its growth and development. To Robert Wosnitzer, I wish to express my deep thanks for the many conversations and engaged discussions we have had along the way. Jacqueline Rohel and Laura Norén – thank you for your help and thoughtful suggestions, especially on the topic of food and food blogs. To my students, Uma Anand, Anya Kandel, Rahma Mian, Jonathan Zalman, Miriam Halsey, and Chris Nolan – thanks for the conversations, research help, and/or collectively alerting me to just about everything that was being written about migration anywhere in the world. Daniel Bloch has shared with me his avid interest in diasporic literature and film, introducing me to new publications, film events, and book releases. Danny, thanks for having been an important part of this journey from its very nascent stages.
Emily Goldsher-Diamond and Madhurim Gupta have worked tirelessly with me through the various aspects of getting this manuscript ready for publication. I simply could not have done it without them. Emily – I deeply appreciate the meticulous research assistance. Overcoming all time-space constraints, Madhurim has worked with me down to the wire on the final details. Madhurim – thank you very much. Andrea Drugan and Joe Devanny were both truly supportive of this endeavor and their encouragement was crucial to the launching of this project. Elen Griffiths of Polity Press has been simply wonderful to work with. Elen, thank you very much for your support, patience, and professionalism.
To Rita Chaudhuri I owe a special debt of gratitude for her steadfast friendship over the years. Thanks, Rita, for both steering and cheering me to the finish line.
Nirupama Shree, my daughter, has been ever ready to edit at short notice, and provide instant, honest critique. Thanks Niru, as always. Krishna – thank you for everything, too numerous to be named:
Radha Sarma HegdeNew York City; Chennai
A version of chapter 4 was published as Hegde, R. (2010) Eyeing Publics: Veiling and the Performance of Civic Visibility. In Brouwer, D. C. and Asen, R. (eds.) Public Modalities. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, pp. 154–72. A version of chapter 5 was published as Hegde, R. (2014) Food Blogs and the Digital Reimagination of South Asian Diasporic Publics. South Asian Diaspora 6(1), 89–103.
1Introduction
In the summer of 2008, an unverified piece of gossip made its way into the Brazilian Voice, an ethnic newspaper published in Newark, New Jersey. A report in the newspaper claimed that the winning ticket of the New Jersey state mega-millions lottery had been purchased by a Brazilian immigrant, at a supermarket in a neighborhood with a large Brazilian and Portuguese population. A guessing game began and conjectures started to fly. Was the winner an undocumented immigrant and therefore reluctant to claim the prize for fear of being deported? Another rumor claimed that the winner was from Governador Valadares, known as Brazil’s most American city, and home to a large number of immigrants in the United States. While this news was bouncing back and forth between the United States and Brazil, the owner of the supermarket in Newark where the ticket was sold identified the winners and described them as humble, hardworking, and living the American dream.1
The plot line of this riveting story features the key themes of our times – immigration, communication, and speculation. Its global contours are shaped not only by the rapid travel of information through talk, text, Internet, telephone, and print, but also by the crisscrossing of intricate, transnational networks of connection. An ethnic newspaper that typically raises no fanfare rapidly converges with other forms of technology speeding up the global dispersal of information, revealing the continuing connections maintained between nations, homelands, and the diaspora. The rumor that ricocheted from Newark to Rio de Janeiro captures a basic premise of globalization: that an immigrant community’s local identity is always already transnationally situated. The story itself, a public recital of the precarity of immigrant life, hinged on a familiar binary: was the winner legal or illegal? In the ethnic neighborhoods of Newark, the story raised a compelling question: what would an undocumented immigrant do in such a circumstance? After all, claiming the prize meant inviting the risk of being investigated. First and foremost, what was being evoked was the line separating the settled, legal migrant possessing papers from the undocumented migrant whose presence was unregistered and hence invisible. Migration has always been about navigating new risks, uncertainty, and the contested terrain of mobility. However, under the social conditions defined by the global economy and communication technologies, the politics and problematics of migration have been radically recalibrated.
Migration, a contested topic on national agendas, is at the forefront of current discourses on globalization. Political crises, instabilities, and deep structural inequities within countries and between nations have led to the increased flow of migrants in search of better economic opportunities and stable political conditions. Media representations of migrants frequently stir up controversies about the presence of the Other in the national imaginary. The public, particularly in the West, are routinely exposed to images of men, women, and children undertaking the harsh journey across Central America, migrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa on their perilous sea voyages to reach Spain or Italy, or refugees fleeing war-torn regions like Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq. These accounts are often sensationalized or exaggerated through the use of apocalyptic representations of exodus (de Haas, 2008), sometimes through the narrative of unassimilability and difference (Chavez, K. R., 2013), or through the entangled framing of migrants either as threat or as victims eligible for compassion (Horsti, 2003, 2013). We are witnessing both a surge in the number of irregular or undocumented migrants crossing borders and a significant increase in the efforts by governments worldwide to regulate and control the flow of migrants (Castles, de Haas, and Miller, 2013). Migratory flows have also intensified nationalist discourses and stirred up debates on border control, racial difference, immigration regulations, and the meaning of citizenship. As the growing structural demand for labor drives immigration and shapes the dreams of hopeful migrants particularly from the Global South, the repercussions are felt not only in terms of policy and state action, but also in the transformations of localities, markets, and lived experiences. In the contemporary context, the way in which these social and cultural changes are experienced is intricately connected to the world of media and communication.
The media, argue Mitchell and Hansen (2010: xxii), broker the giving of space and time within which concrete experience becomes possible, and “rather than determining our situation, we might better say media are our situation.” The media frame the very manner in which the contemporary realities of migration are articulated and publicized. Hence media forms, communicative practices, and the nature of mediated connections have to be factored into current theorizations about migration. Issues about immigration and borders explode in transnational space even as they are sensationalized in new echo chambers of convergent media. It is through diverse and changing media practices that migrants themselves create networks of transnational connections and reimagine the meaning and reach of communities. Writing about globalization, Jameson (1999) notes that although it is by no means a new phenomenon, its definitional contours have changed due to the technological character of contemporary life. Similarly, media and communication technologies have redefined the terms and conditions of the migrant experience with reference to both the immediacy of connection and the urgency of its implications.
Media practices have historically shaped the imagining of forgotten pasts and possible futures. Old letters in shoeboxes, fading black-and-white images of distant histories, and long-distance telephone calls with crackly connections have given way to new media platforms and affordances, which now constitute the transformed epistolary base and the communication infrastructure of the migrant experience.2 Electronic mediation and mass migration, according to Appadurai (1996: 4), “mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination.” This book builds on and extends a similar premise: that examining migration and mediation together provides a vantage point from which to understand the politics of mobility in the global present. There is a descriptive and not deterministic narrative to relate about the devices and technologies of reproduction that migrants now use to stay connected, to plan their pathways, manage their affective worlds, and navigate their contested locations. The discussions in this book follow Mitchell and Hansen’s (2010: xv) suggestion: to take note of the shift in emphasis from media as artifactuality to media as processes of mediation. For instance, the point is not merely to view migrants as producers or consumers of one particular media form or another, but rather to understand how the cultural politics, social dynamics, and lived geographies of migrants are entrenched within media worlds. A less mediacentric approach, as Morley (2011: 744) argues, which takes into account cross-border mobilities, “effectively places questions of media and communication in the broader frame of their material context and settings.” Taking its cue from these lines of argument, this book contextualizes the complex constitutive connection between media forms and practices, mediated environments, and the politics of migration. Using diasporic itinerancy as a point of departure also forces a rethinking of assumptions that structure bounded and fixed understandings of community, belonging, communication, and location. In the chapters that follow, I offer a particular narration of migrant experiences as shaped by technologies of communication and the social, political, and economic configurations of globalization.
Transnational Topographies of Affiliation
The arguments and descriptions in this book cohere around the perspective that the subject of immigration and the debates around it have to be understood in terms of their transnational and cross-border implications. Here in this section, I capture some aspects of these transnational entanglements that we need to consider in our contextualization of migration. Every story and crisis around immigration reveals that the subject of migration is neither linear nor contained within the nation-state. The dramatis personae involved, the issues and implications, are all geographically dispersed and yet transnationally interconnected. However, historically the study of migration has been framed by the centrality of the nation and the compartmentalization of immigration as an isolable subject that can be turned on and off according to national interests (Castles, 2002: 1145). Migrants and their relocated lives have for long been studied as modular, exchangeable units that move across borders. Writing about the state of research on Mexican migration to the United States, Rouse (1992: 47) notes that there has been a general tendency to oversimplify immigrant worlds, by construing them in “the anodyne language of adaptation, coping and fit.” He argues that migration in general has been analyzed mainly in bipolar terms, where communities are conceptualized as autonomous bodies who simply shift their social ties from one community to another. These forms of reductive oversimplifications have been fairly common in the dominant approaches to the study of immigrants and borders in the social sciences. A strictly behavioral emphasis on studying the adaptation patterns of individuals and groups largely obscures the innovative practices and multi-layered relations that migrants forge as they construct new forms of transnational communities (see Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton-Blanc, 1995).
The longevity of the nation and the individual, as organizing units of analysis in the research and policy on migration, has also limited our ability to examine the assemblage of factors within which the subject of migration is embedded (Sassen, 1998). While the nation-state remains the arbiter of immigration policy, the materiality of the migratory experience is deeply rooted in processes that cut across and between nations and cultures. The human drama of immigration and the everyday realities of mobile populations stand often in strong contrast to the official narratives of citizenship proclaimed by nations. As Quayson and Daswani (2013: 2) note, “taken together the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism promise a broad understanding of all the forms and implications that derive from the vast movements of populations, ideas, technologies, images, and financial networks that have come to shape the world we live in today.” The multi-layered contexts and contested experiences of migration today require a critical rethinking of the ways in which the nation as a category is mobilized in the global present: a rethinking that critically works the idea of the transnational in order to draw attention to the transformatory aspects of social life and imagination in the global present.3
In his eloquent, pioneering, and widely cited publication Modernity at Large, Appadurai theorizes the global disjunctures that exist between the economy, culture, and politics through a series of interconnected landscapes (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, ideoscapes). He describes the “scapes” as “perspectival constructs inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors” (Appadurai, 1996: 33). Appadurai’s discussion of the various “scapes” has been profoundly important in shaping scholarly engagement with the fluid cultural forms of globalization, and the deterritorialized modalities of action and performance that drive transnational communities. Returning to the issues of global circulation, capital, infrastructure, and social justice, Appadurai (2006: 30) describes how the grounded, centralized, vertebrate structures of the nation are now encountering the mobile, modular, and cellular forms of global capital:
Returning to the always fragile idea of a world of national economies, we can characterize the current era of globalization – driven by the triple engines of speculative capital, new financial instruments, and high-speed information technologies – as creating new tensions between the wanton urge of global capital to roam without license or limit and the still regnant fantasy that the nation-state assures a sovereign economic space.
This distinction, yet dependence, between vertebrate and cellular systems captures the crisis of circulation and the nature of capitalism in the contemporary context.4 Appadurai’s provocative model and insightful arguments open up lines of inquiry about the transformations in the interdependent fields of migration and global capitalism. The tension between the vertebrate structures of the nation and the cellular logics of flexible capital provides a rich contextual framing of the current politics and global pathways of migration. This tension characterizes many of the issues and examples raised in the chapters that follow.
The global flow and flexible forms of capital accumulation have led to an expansion of precarious forms of labor that include temporary, short-term, and subcontracted jobs that typically fall outside of forms of state protection (for example, social welfare, insurance, or benefits). At the same time, globalization has also accelerated the increasing erosion of the welfare state, the rise of privatization, and the emphasis on the individual over the collective. The steady expansion of zones of insecure employment has consequently benefited the labor needs of the Global North Atlantic societies (Papadopoulous, Stephenson, and Tsianos, 2008). Other factors like deindustrialization, the economic policies of the Global North, growing inequalities between rural and urban life, militarization, and war have led to massive demographic movement of people from rural to urban areas and from the Global South to the North.5 Migrants follow the pathways of capital typically in search of refuge, employment, and the hope of a better life. The very idea of a better life is itself visualized and experienced transnationally, as the chapters in this book will show. The goal here is not to reduce the migration narrative to one that is merely economistic, but rather to emphasize that migration is a dynamic process that shapes, exceeds, and cuts across individuals, communities, economies, nations, and borders. The scholarly challenge is to find the methodological and conceptual stance to capture the intricacies of these intersections.
Changes in immigration policy and control in the Global North inevitably have transnational repercussions. Whether it is deportation, naturalization, asylum policies, or refugee resettlement, all these involve assertions of national sovereignty but have consequences that are felt beyond national borders. For example, in 2010, President Obama signed into law a $600-million Border Bill to pay for border security and surveillance drones on the southwest border of the United States. Under the proposal brought forward by Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the resources for border surveillance were to be paid for by a $2,000 increase on visa fees for temporary skilled workers.6 In turn, this dealt a financial blow to firms that take advantage of the skilled visa program to bring in temporary skilled workers from India to the United States. While Indian technology outsourcing companies that send thousands of skilled employees to the US raised an outcry and called the bill discriminatory, the bill was applauded by Janet Napolitano, then Secretary of Homeland Security: “It’s just a great package.”7 The US legislation controls one form of economic migration in order to clamp down on the porosity of another border. In this manner, the strategy of clamp, control, and containment adds complex transnational twists to both the biopolitical management and political economy of migration. This is but one example of many such global instances. Discussions about refugees and immigrant populations in other parts of the world involve similar shifts between strategic assertions of national sovereignty, transnational institutions, and a cast of private and public actors. For example, African migration to various European countries is being increasingly perceived as a supranational crisis involving not only national borders but Schengen borders as well (Horsti, 2008). As states outsource various functions related to the security, detention, and transportation of undocumented immigrants to corporate control, there has also been a growing trend in the privatization of immigration management.8 Any study of diasporic publics and spaces should factor in these global considerations, especially how transnational regimes of border control, markets, and cultural institutions together shape and regulate desires, struggles, and practices on the ground.
As the nation-state continues to retain yet modify its sovereign control of populations and their mobility, there are also complex forms of interdependencies between nation-states, diasporas, and transnational institutions. Ong (1999: 16) describes these relations as “complicated accommodations, alliances and creative tensions between the nation-state and mobile capital, between diaspora and nationalism, or between the influx of immigrants and the multicultural state.” Both nations and diasporic communities work these tensions, leading to new types of social connections, configurations, and subject positions. Nations reach out to the diaspora and their economic power by offering them various types of financial incentives and access. For example, the government of India has created a special category for its diaspora, termed “non-resident Indian” and commonly referred to as NRI. Through this category and the state’s offer of an overseas citizenship of India, the nation attracts financial investment from its diaspora, privileging especially its middle-class skilled and entrepreneurial migrants (van der Veer, 2005). Silicon Valley is full of stories of young, cosmopolitan, immigrant entrepreneurs shuttling between Palo Alto, Bangalore, and Taipei, forming globally distributed entrepreneurial networks (Saxenian, 2006), and exemplifying new modes of subject-making valorized by the logics of neoliberal globalization (Ong, 1999). Similarly, in the Philippines, for example, both the state and corporate actors are highly invested in the diaspora, both for their remittances and for their spending power as consumers. The cultivation of consumer subjectivity boosts the neoliberal agenda by serving both the market and the state’s market-based agenda (Padios, 2011). In rapidly growing economies like India, the diaspora serves an important economic and symbolic function in the assertion of a global and cosmopolitan national identity (Koshy and Radhakrishnan, 2008). Nations strategically and selectively include citizens and immigrants who serve as nodes in the flow of capital and as key players in the scripts of a highly mediated global modernity, a theme that will be explored in this book, particularly in the conclusion.
Diasporic communities and nations also leverage transnational locations to influence national politics and reinforce allegiance. Vertovec (2009) argues that overseas communities are increasingly engaging themselves in the economic, social, and political life of their country of origin while states try to channel this engagement to their own advantage. For example, in the year 2000, Vincente Fox actively campaigned among Mexicans living in the United States to support his bid for presidency.9 Even though in most cases, they cannot vote from abroad, immigrant communities are considered an important group exerting considerable influence on their social networks back home. As early as in 1990, the Irish president Mary Robinson identified herself in her inaugural speech as leader of “the extended Irish family abroad,” asserting that “the State is not the only model of community that Irish people can and do identify.”10 Other groups like the diasporic Sri Lankan Tamils, Kurds, and Uyghurs have all made different types of interventions into national politics using global and digital forms of networking and communication. At the same time, there continues to be a deep disjuncture between these transnational modes of political subjectivity and nation-based forms and expectations of citizenship.
In the state formulations of citizenship articulated in naturalization ceremonies, there is the formal requirement of a severing of one’s previous national affiliations and transference of loyalty to the adopted nation. The oath of allegiance read at the naturalization ceremony in the United States exemplifies this daunting finality: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.”11 Yet paradoxically, newly naturalized citizens often have a host of social, political, and even banal reasons to acquire a different citizenship. The reasons might extend from gaining safety in a new locale to the ease of travel with a United States passport or sponsoring family members back home, or to other entrepreneurial needs. Under the conditions of a connected global world, naturalized citizenship is not only about establishing new loyalties; it often enables and facilitates existing national affiliations, connections, and travel. As an asylum applicant cited by Coutin (2013: 511) states, “the day that I receive (legal permanent residency) papers, that very day, I’m catching a plane to go to El Salvador again. It’s been 11 years since I’ve seen my parents.” To many immigrants, naturalization and the ritual of renunciation of ties enable, ironically, the possibilities of maintaining global networks of local connections. These layers of contradiction, complicated by media technologies, serve as the contextual backdrop for the discussions that follow. The topography of migrant life today refuses containment and is entangled, spread out, and dispersed transnationally.
Migration and Mediations
The 2014 prizewinning entry in the World Press Photo contest, “Signals” by John Stanmeyer, captures the silhouettes of men under a deep-blue night sky raising their glowing cell phones skyward to catch a signal. According to one of the jurors, “It’s a photo that is connected to so many other stories – it opens up discussions about technology, globalization, migration, poverty, desperation, alienation, humanity.”12 The men in Stanmeyer’s visual composition are standing on the shore of the Red Sea on a moonlit night in Djibouti City, a stop-off point for migrants in transit from countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea. Stanmeyer calls this image, “a picture of hope” that shows “that natural desire of needing to connect is universal in all of us.” There is indeed a haunting quality to the image, and it is a scene that is being replayed in many global locations, as migrants anxiously navigate their passage across borders.
While the photographer’s theory about the universal expression of connection is indeed true on some level, there are raw particularities that are inscribed in those silhouettes of migrants holding their digital devices. To cautiously balance any quick claim of universality, we need to think about the hidden narratives that exceed the frame of the photograph. In a powerful argument, Azoulay (2008: 14) notes that the photograph constitutes an event and is a source of heterogeneous knowledge: “One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it. The verb to watch is usually used to regard phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image.” Following this critical intervention, let us consider the exclusions and negations that underwrite this powerful image by Stanmeyer. What social, political exigencies and personal journeys brought these migrants to this geographical location facing the Red Sea? What are the countries and borders they have traversed already and how many more are there to come before they reach their destinations? What other journeys, trials, or surprises await them? What structural conditions or configurations of violence have led to these migratory journeys and aspirations? What types of connections enable their aspirations and keep them journeying? The cell phone becomes emblematic of their need to connect across borders, to locate themselves and find their bearings in an uncertain environment of risk and impending danger. Yet the very object that may connect them also signals their precarity, their state of being outside the possibility of connection or communication. This photograph is a stark reminder of the politics of mobility, connectivity, and mediation that characterize the contemporary moment.
Mediated practices have always been a part of the immigrant experience and their tenuous relational lives. There has been considerable research on both media representations of immigrants and the ways in which they use media in innovative ways to negotiate cultural space and forge transplanted communities. In fact, scholars studying the media usage of specific diasporic groups have challenged some traditional and territorially rooted ways of understanding media production and reception (e.g. Gillespie, 1995; Cunningham and Sinclair, 2001; Fazal and Tsagarousianou, 2002; Karim, 2002; Bailey, Georgiou, and Harindranath, 2007; Kosnick, 2007). Georgiou (2006: 22), in her study of Greek Cypriots in London and New York, argues that the interactivity and the simultaneity of media enable the diasporic experience to transcend spatial limitations and renew social relations between dispersed homes and transnational positions. Tsagarousianou (2004) notes that diasporic media allows its audiences to produce new spaces where remote localities and diasporic experiences come together. An impressive body of research critically examines the journalistic practices of reporting immigration news and the representation of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the Western media. 13 The increasing amount of research attention paid to the particularities of different diasporic groups and their media worlds has significantly extended the global base of media studies scholarship.14 Scholarship on media and migrants enables a more nuanced and differentiated understanding of the media environment, which, as Morley (2000) theorized, has long been premised on the universalist assumption of the dominant and racialized culture of the nation. Arguing for the need to rethink uninterrogated assumptions regarding home and national cultures in the context of global changes, Morley (2000: 3) writes:
Certainly, traditional ideas of home, homeland and nation have been destabilized, both by new patterns of physical mobility and migration and by new communication technologies which routinely transgress the symbolic boundaries around both the private household and the nation state. The electronic landscapes in which we now dwell are haunted by all manner of cultural anxieties which arise from this destabilizing flux.
These spaces of flux bristle with questions that demand our attention, especially with regard to what Appadurai (1996: 4) terms the “new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities.”
Migration and media have not only to be understood in conjunction, but also to be situated within a global frame. Taken together, globalization and mediation, in Naficy’s (2007: xiv) words, constitute a “Janus-faced feature of our contemporary times, one necessitating the other.” Whether migrants are following the trail of capital to better their lives or leaving politically dangerous situations, migrant lives are embedded in media ecologies that document, archive, entertain, connect, and shape their experiences. In addition, migrants are also subject to elaborate forms of profiling, fingerprinting, systems of recognition, and surveillance at borders, immigration checkpoints, and more. New communication modalities, platforms, and practices enable the very possibilities of maintaining familial ties across spatial and temporal divides. These interactive options have reworked the deep ruptures with the homeland that characterized diasporic life in the past. The chapters that follow show how categories such as home, nation, and citizenship have been radically redefined by migrants through their mobility, transnational visibility, and modes of connection.
New technologies enable both the disciplining and self-expression of migrant communities worldwide. Devices, technologies, and various types of changing media platforms are being widely used by migrants to reinvent and redefine identity. More visibly, in ethnic neighborhoods in cities like New York, Los Angeles, London, Toronto, or Berlin, local entrepreneurs stock a motley selection of commodities that cash in on migrant nostalgia and longing for the homeland. It is common to see ethnic stores selling an assortment of things including movies, music, phone cards, luggage, balikbayan boxes, and gadgets in different voltages for use in various countries. There are almost always money-exchange centers transferring money to relatives and family back home. In short, there is a visible predominance of media objects and communication technologies that redefine the terms of connection with the homeland and bridge the affective distances in immigrant lives. Satellite dishes, for example, are a characteristic sight in ethnic neighborhoods. These technologies of connectivity remap local spaces anew as globally connected hubs. Displaced populations and migrants who have always, of necessity, been media savvy (see Naficy, 2007) now use blogs, social media, chat rooms, YouTube, Twitter, and mobile apps to connect to the various “elsewheres” in their lives and navigate different experiential terrains. For example, I received an invitation to a wedding in India that listed the time of the wedding in three international time zones, providing handy information for diasporic relatives and friends to tune in via Skype technology for the ceremony. The elaborate wedding ceremony and the performance of the rituals are often radically redesigned as a media spectacle. This enables the extended family in the diaspora to be involved, have a visual experience via technology, and participate in real time. Diasporic events are shared in the same way with distant relatives.
Everything from weddings to raising children or learning to cook traditional dishes is now becoming mediated transnational social experience, using digital technologies. By industry accounts, it is immigrants who make
