The Turbulence of Migration E-Book

Nikos Papastergiadis

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 580

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This important book traces the impact of the movement of people, ideas and capital across the globe.

Das E-Book The Turbulence of Migration wird angeboten von Polity und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
movement; important book; people; experience; migrant; identity; history; slaves; industrialization; victims; displacement; peasantry; colonialism; forced migration; today; move; destination; complex; global; forms; mapping; chaotic; book; new

Leseprobe

The Turbulence ofMigration

Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity

Nikos Papastergiadis

Polity Press

Copyright © Nikos Papastergiadis 2000

The right of Nikos Papastergiadis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2004, 2007

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMaiden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes 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.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-0-7456-6813-0 (Multi-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataPapastergiadis, Nikos, 1962–

The turbulence of migration : globalization, deterritorialization and hybridity / Nikos Papastergiadis.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Emigration and immigration. 2. International economic relations. 3. Cultural relations. 4. Immigrants—Social conditions. I. TitleJV6032.P34 2000325—dc21

99-27521CIP    

Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Times by Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, Somerset

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxford

This book is printed on acid-free paper

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

For Teodor

Contents

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: The Turbulence of Migration

New concepts for a turbulent world

The ‘chaos’ of global migration

Modernity and migration

The stranger in modernity

Communities of difference

The limits of explanation

2 Mapping Global Migration

Historical patterns of migration: slavery and colonialism

Migration and the industrial contracts

The sociological theories of migration

Globalization and dispersal

Contemporary patterns of migration

Borders and flows

3 The Ability to Move: Defining Migrants

Defining migrants

Old routes and new borders

The stranger in social theory

The gender of the stranger

Conclusion

4 Globalization and Migration

Defining globalization

Globalization and the future of the nation-state

Global cities and migration

Globalization and a sense of place

New paradigms of flow and the third identity

5 The Deterritorialization of Culture

Defining culture

Between centre and periphery

From contamination to transformation

The doubling of cultures

Containing cultures

Circuits as spaces for community

Defining deterritorialization

Critical modalities and mobile subjectivities

6 The Limits of Cultural Translation

Syncretism and the signs of difference

Translation as a model for meaning

The politics of translation

Redefining the margin

Interweaving and retranslation

Translation as reactivation

7 Philosophical Frameworks and the Politics of Cultural Difference

Translation and the truth of the other

Beyond relativism and holism

Multiculturalism without essentialism

Recognition and partial blindness

Towards a critical multiculturalism

8 Tracing Hybridity in Theory

Eugenics and the hybrid body

Cultural hybrids and national reconciliations

Hybridity in colonialism

The semiotics of hybridity

Hybridity in postcolonial theory

9 Conclusion: Clusters in the Diaspora

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I began writing this book in 1993 when, with my first ever laptop computer, I headed out to Australia. After having ‘keyed in’ half of my first draft I experienced the now legendary ‘hard disk failure’. In retrospect, I am grateful for this little catastrophe for it punctured all my illusions about the infallibility of modern technology and alerted me to the pitfalls of writing on the road. Over the next five years this book slowly emerged in the form of long essays, many of which were prodded along by other editors. I would like to acknowledge the encouragement offered by Diana Nemiroff, Gilane Tawadros, Pnina Werbner and the editorial team of the Arena journal. This book would not have found its present shape without the incisive and helpful comments from Tony Giddens, John Thompson and Lynn Dunlop at Polity Press. The reader’s reports from John Solomos and John Rex were invaluable.

The breadth and texture of this book is mostly due to the different worlds in which I live and work. This is an attempt to bring them together, or at least to demonstrate that conversations that began in one place can be resumed in another. I am especially grateful to Scott McQuire, Bill Papastergiadis, Peter Ash, Rita Armstrong, John Berger, Victoria Lynn, Peter Lyssiotis, Constanze Zikos, Rasheed Araeen, Gillian Bottomley, Guy Brett, Ron Benner, Ann Brydon, Pavel Buchler, Anne Daniel, Jean Fisher, Helena Guldberg, Sneja Gunew, Jamelie Hassan, Richard Hylton, Vivian Kondos, Lois McNab, Don Miller, Stephen Snoddy, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nick Tsoutas, Liz Turnbull and Leon Van Schaik.

My greatest debt lies with my friends and colleagues at Manchester University. This book reflects the lively debates, conversation in corridors and long lunches that made me think through the connections between political economy and cultural theory. In particular, I would like to thank Teodor Shanin, Huw Beynon, Helen Sampson, Steve Quilley, Sheila Rowbotham, Simon Miller, Peter McMylor, Fiona Divine, Paul Kelemen, Mike Savage, David Morgan, Rod Watson, Rosemary Mellor, John Hutnyk, Anna Grimshaw, Peter Halfpenny, Jeff Henderson, Patrick Joyce, Marcia Poynton, Andrew Causey and Katherine Isaacs, who once gave me an invaluable piece of advice: ‘When you are in a hole, stop digging.’

1

Introduction: The Turbulence of Migration

The subjects of history, once the settled farmers and citizens, have now become the migrants, the refugees, the Gastarbeiter, the asylum seekers, the urban homeless.

Neal Ascherson, The Black Sea

Migration, in its endless motion, surrounds and pervades almost all aspects of contemporary society. As has often been noted, the modern world is in a state of flux and turbulence. It is a system in which the circulation of people, resources and information follows multiple paths. The energy and barriers that either cause or deflect the contemporary patterns of movement have both obvious and hidden locations. While nothing is utterly random, the consequences of change are often far from predictable. For the most part, we seem to travel in this world without that invisible captain, who can see ahead and periodically warn us to ‘return to our seats and fasten our security belts’. The journey nowadays is particularly treacherous, with financial storms which can break out in Hong Kong and have repercussions in New York, acid rains generated in the north drifting south, the global emission of CFC gases directly affecting the growth of the hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, the threat of atomic fallout looming larger as the nuclear arsenals of thirty or more countries are positioned along jagged lines of brinkmanship, and the systemic flooding of the ranks of the unemployed as the chilling technology of economic rationalization bites into every locale. These are just some of the known sources of fear. There may be other storms on the horizon which we cannot name, let alone control, that force people to move.

The turbulence of modern migration has destabilized the routes of movement and created uncertainty about the possibilities of settlement. The scale and complexity of movement that is occurring currently has never been witnessed before in history, and its consequences have exceeded earlier predictions. To take account of this excess, migration must be understood in a broad sense. I see it not just as a term referring to the plight of the ‘burnt ones’, the destitute others who have been displaced from their homelands. It is also a metaphor for the complex forces which are integral to the radical transformations of modernity. The world changes around us and we change with it, but in the modern period the process of change has also altered fundamental perceptions of time and space. Countless people are on the move and even those who have never left their homeland are moved by this restless epoch.

These changes have a profound effect on the way we understand our sense of belonging in the world. It is impossible to give an exact location and date for the emergence of modernity. Modernity has had multiple birthplaces. Giddens’s general definition of modernity, as referring to the institutional changes that took place somewhere around the eighteenth century, is about as accurate as one can get.1 Throughout the modern period, most people have understood their sense of belonging in terms of an allegiance to a nation-state. This task of conferring clear and unambiguous forms of belonging was never a straightforward operation. Nation-states were from the outset composed of people with different cultural identities. Among the central aims of the project of nation-building was the unification of these diverse peoples under a common identity, and the regulation of movement across their territorial borders. However, the complex patterns of movement across national boundaries, and the articulation of new forms of identity by minority groups that emerged in the past couple of decades, have destabilized the foundations of the nation-state.

This book seeks to examine the interconnected processes of globalization and migration and to explore their impact on the established notions of belonging. It seeks to question the dominant forms of citizenship and cultural identity which defined belonging according to national categories and exclusive practices of identification, by exploring the emergent forms of diasporic and hybrid identities. There is a great urgency in our need to rethink the politics of identity. If the historical and cultural field that shapes contemporary society is increasingly diverse and varied, then we can no longer exclusively focus on the traditions and institutions that have taken root in a given place over a long historical period. The identity of society has to reflect this process of mixture that emerges whenever two or more cultures meet.

The political will to adopt such an approach towards migrant communities and minority groups has not been readily forthcoming. While there is a growing recognition that we are living in a far more turbulent world, a critical language and affirmative structures to address these changes have been lagging behind. A haunting paradox lurks at the centre of all claims to national autonomy: while the flows of global movement are proliferating, the fortification of national boundaries is becoming more vigilant. Every nation-state is at once seeking to maximize the opportunities from transnational corporations, and yet closing its doors to the forms of migration that these economic shifts stimulate. New pressures and new voices have emerged in the cultural and political landscape. Even countries like Germany and Japan, which have boasted of their ethnic homogeneity and aggressively restricted the right to citizenship, are increasingly confronted with the inevitability of seeing themselves as multiethnic societies. As nation-states are losing more and more of their power to regulate activities within their territory, they are becoming increasingly aggressive about the defence of their borders. Tougher laws against asylum-seekers, the rounding up of gypsies and ruthless eviction of ‘economic migrants’ are some of the ways in which governments vent their frustration in a world where they have seemingly lost control but dare not admit it. The need for global action to address local issues has never been more necessary, but there are few signs of supranational co-operation, nor any new agencies with the powers and responsibilities to address human needs on a global scale.