Interrogating Intersectionalities, Gendering Mobilities, Racializing Transnationalism

Laura Oso, Ramon Grosfoguel, Anastasia Christou

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367133580
• eBook ISBN: 9781351850292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Encouraging a conversation among scholars working with questions of transnationalism from the perspective of gender and race, this book explores the intersectionality between these two forms of oppression and their relation to transnational migration. How do sexism and racism articulate the experience of transnational migrants? What is the complex relationship between minorities and migrants in terms of gender and racial discrimination? What are the empirical and theoretical insights gained by an analysis that emphasizes the 'intersectionality' between gender and race? What empirical agenda can be developed out of these questions?

Bringing a transnational lens to studies of migration from an intersectional perspective, the contributors focus on how power geometries, articulated through sexisms and racisms, are experienced in relation to a migration and/or minority context. They also challenge the rather fixed notions of what constitutes an intersectional approach to the study of oppressions in social interactions. Finally, the book's inter- and multi-disciplinary range exhibits a variety of methodological 'takes' on the issue of transnational intersectionalities in migration and minority context. Taken together, the volume adds theoretical, empirical and historical insight to ethnic, racial, gender and migration studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

‘Racism’, intersectionality and migration studies: framing some theoretical reflections

Ramon Grosfoguel, Laura Oso and Anastasia Christou

The concept of ‘racism’ has faced many difficulties in migration studies. Depending on definitions, islamophobia is a form either of religious discrimination or of racism. The same is true in contemporary debates in Europe about xenophobia against immigrants from the Global South. This article provides an alternative way of thinking about racism and its relationship with questions of intersectionality and discusses the relationship of these issues to migration theory. In the first part, we discuss intersectionality in relation to Fanon’s definition of racism. Then, we establish a dialogue between the work of de Sousa Santos and Fanon that could enrich our understanding of intersectionality in the framework of modernity and the capitalist/imperial/patriarchal/racial colonial world-system. Finally, we analyse this discussion’s implications for migration theory, highlighting how migration studies tend to reproduce a northern-centric social science view of the world that comes from the experience of others in the zone of being.

The use of the concept ‘racism’ has faced many difficulties in migration studies. For instance, the rise in discrimination against Muslim immigrants/minorities in Western Europe and the United States after 9/11 has posed a crucial theoretical question: Is islamophobia a form of racism? There is a lack of clarity and multiple responses to this issue. In the European Union, many countries oppose the recognition of islamophobia as a form of racism. The problem with this question is that it requires an answer to a prior issue for debate, namely a definition for racism. What is racism? Depending on the response, islamophobia is either simply a form of religious discrimination or a form of racism. The same is true of contemporary debates in Europe today regarding xenophobia against immigrants from the Global South. Extreme right parties are growing and winning massive numbers of votes in successive elections across Europe with islamophobic and xenophobic anti-immigrant discourses. The unprecedented entrance into parliament of the fascist ‘Golden Dawn’ party in the recent Greek elections; the significant increase in votes of Marine Le Pen and the front national in France; as well as extreme right parties’ electoral offensive in Norway, Sweden, UK, The Netherlands, Switzerland and many other parts of Europe are clear examples of this. Their defence against accusations of racism includes the argument that they do not consider ‘immigrants’ biologically inferior, but rather ‘culturally inadequate’ to European societies. Is this racism? Moreover, European Union citizens such as Roma people have been expelled from France and interned in camps in Italy despite the free mobility of European citizens across national borders. The argument used to legitimate this act is that they are ‘nomadic’ and have settled in forbidden places. Although Roma people are not in fact nomadic, the argument is still used to gain legitimacy in the eyes of other Europeans. Is this racism? This article will provide an alternative view of racism and its relationship with questions of intersectionality. Moreover, in the section entitled ‘Migration and the coloniality of power’, it will discuss the implications of the alternative concept of racism discussed here for migration theory. Part of the problem is how, with few exceptions, migration theory has focused on human mobility across borders, underestimating the significance of race and racism in processes of migrant incorporation.

What is racism?

Racism is a global hierarchy of human superiority and inferiority, politically, culturally and economically produced and reproduced for centuries by the institutions of the ‘capitalist/patriarchal western-centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system’ (Grosfoguel 2011, 2013). The people classified as above the line dividing superior from inferior human beings are recognised socially as human beings and thus enjoy access to rights (human rights, civil rights, women’s rights and/or labour rights) and social recognition of their subjectivities, identities, epistemologies and spiritualities. Those classified below this line are considered subhuman or non-human; that is, their humanity is questioned and, as such, negated (Fanon 1967). In the latter case, access to rights and recognition of their subjectivities, identities, spiritualities and epistemologies are denied. We must pay attention to several important issues with this definition.

This definition of racism allows us to conceive diverse forms of racisms, evading the reductionisms of many existing definitions. Depending on the varying colonial histories in a number of world regions, the hierarchy of human superiority/inferiority can be constructed through various racial markers. Racism can be marked by colour, ethnicity, language, culture and/or religion. Although since colonial times colour racism has been the dominant marker of racism in most parts of the world and this was also accompanied by physiognomy and craniometry, it is not the sole form of racism. On many occasions, we confuse the specific social form of marking racism in one region of the world with what is taken to be as the exclusive form or universal definition of racism. This has created countless conceptual and theoretical problems. If we conflate the particular social form that racism adopts in the region or country of the world in which we have been socialised with the universal definition of racism, then we lose sight of the diverse forms of racisms that are not necessarily marked in the same way in other regions of the world. This leads us to the false conclusion that racism does not exist in other parts of the world if the form of marking racism in one particular region or country does not coincide with the ‘common-sense’ way of marking it in our own country. This forms part of the pervasive ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2006; Amelina et al. 2012) that obscures the broader and transnational understanding of a modern/colonial problem such as racism.

Racial hierarchies can be constructed and marked in diverse ways. Westernised elites of the Third World (African, Asian or Latin American) reproduce racist practices against particular ethno/racial groups, depending on the local/colonial history. While the ethnic/racial hierarchy of superiority/inferiority is marked by skin colour in many regions of the world, in others it is constructed by ethnic, linguistic, religious or cultural markers. Racialisation occurs through the marking of bodies. Some bodies are racialised as superior, others as inferior. The important point here is that those subjects classed as superior live in what Afro-Caribbean philosophers, following Fanon’s work, called the ‘zone of being’, while subjects that live on the inferior side of the demarcating line live in the ‘zone of non-being’ (Fanon 1967; Gordon 2006; Wynter 2003; Maldonado-Torres 2008). The latter is not a geography but a positionality in racial/ethnic hierarchies.

Differentiated intersectionalities/entanglements: zone of being and zone of non-being

In an imperial/capitalist/colonial world, race constitutes the transversal dividing line that cuts across multiple power relations such as class, sexual and gender relations on a global scale. This is what has become known as the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000). The ‘intersectionality’ of race, class, sexuality and gender power relations, a concept developed by Black feminists (Davis 1983; Crenshaw 1991), occurs in both zones of the world that Fanon describes. However, the lived experience of diverse oppressions and the particular way in which intersectionality is articulated differs in the zones of being and non-being.

Despite being racialised as superior beings, there are people in the zone of being who are subjected to class, gender and/or sexual oppressions. However, they do not experience racial oppression but rather racial privilege. As will be discussed below, this has fundamental implications for how class, gender and sexual oppression is lived. Given that in the zone of non-being subjects are racialised as inferior, they live with racial oppression instead of racial privilege. The entanglement of class, sexual and gender oppressions that exist in the zone of non-being are therefore qualitatively distinct from the way these oppressions are lived and articulated in the zone of being. In the zone of non-being, the class, sexual and gender oppressions are aggravated by racial oppression. The issue that should be emphasised here is that there is a qualitative difference between how intersectional/entangled oppressions are articulated and lived in the zone of being and the zone of non-being in the ‘Capitalist/Patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric Modern/Colonial World-system’ (Grosfoguel 2011).

Neither of these zones is homogenous. Both are heterogeneous spaces. Following Fanon (1967), we could say that within the zone of being, continuous conflicts exist between what the Hegelian dialectic characterises as the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’. In the ‘I’ and ‘Other’ dialectic within the zone of being, there are conflicts, yet these are non-racial conflicts, as the oppressor ‘I’ recognises the humanity of the oppressed ‘Other’. The ‘I’s in the imperialist/capitalist/patriarchal global system are Western, heterosexual, masculine, metropolitan elites and/or Westernised, heterosexual, masculine elites in the peripheries of the world-system. Internal colonialism exists as much in the centre as in the periphery. For Fanon, the Hegelian ‘Other’ consists of the populations of the Western metropolitan centres or the Westernised subjects within the periphery whose humanity is recognised, but who at the same time live under racial privilege oppressions based on class, sexuality or gender, dominated by the imperial ‘I’ in their respective regions or countries. The zones of being and non-being are not specific geographical places, but rather positions within racial power relations that operate at a global scale between centres and peripheries, but that are also manifested at a national and local scale against diverse racially ‘inferior’ groups. Zones of being and non-being exist at a global scale between Westernised centres and non-Western peripheries (global coloniality). However, zones of being and non-being exist not only inside the metropolitan centres (internal racial/colonial subjects in urban zones, regional spaces, ghettos, segregated communities, etc.), but also within the peripheries (internal colonialism). The zones of non-being within a metropolitan or peripheral country are the zones of internal colonialism. However, it is here that the critical decolonial sociology of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010) contributes to clarifying the racial difference between the zones of being and non-being.

Fanon’s zones and de Sousa Santos’ abyssal line

According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007, 2010), modernity is characterised by an abyssal line between inhabitants above and below the line. The abyssal line is the line demarking the zones where codes of law are recognised among European empires and the lawless zones where violence is the rule. The zones of law correspond to Europeans, and the lawless zones to the colonial territories in the Americas. Boaventura de Sousa Santos refers here to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Portuguese and Spanish empires. This Treaty was made to clarify the confusion created between the two empires by the newly claimed colonial territories in the new world.

If we translate the abyssal line into the Fanonian concept of the line of the human and we consider those that live above the abyssal line to live in the zone of being, while those that live below the line are in the zone of non-being, we can establish a dialogue between the work of de Sousa Santos and Fanon that could enrich our understanding of modernity and the capitalist/imperial/patriarchal/racial colonial world-system we inhabit. For de Sousa Santos (2006), the way conflicts are managed in the zone of being (above the abyssal line) is through what he calls mechanisms of regulation and emancipation.

‘Regulation’ refers to codes of civil/human/women/labour rights, relations of civility, spaces of political negotiation and action that are recognised to the oppressed ‘Other’ in conflict with the oppressor ‘I’ within the zone of being. ‘Emancipation’ refers to discourses of liberty, autonomy and equality that form part of the discourses and institutions used for the management of conflicts in the zone of being. Overall, conflicts in the zone of being are managed through non-violent means. Violence is used only in exceptional moments. This does not deny that moments of violence also exist in the zone of being, but they are the exception, rather than the rule.

In contrast, as de Sousa Santos (2007, 2010) affirms, in the zone of non-being – below the abyssal line – where people are dehumanised in the sense of being considered below the line of the human as non-humans/subhumans, the methods used by the imperial/capitalist/masculine/heterosexual ‘I’ and its institutional system of managing and administering conflicts are through violence and overt appropriation/dispossession. In general, conflicts in the zone of non-being are managed through perpetual violence and only in exceptional moments are methods of emancipation and regulation used. This is the inversion of the way conflicts are managed in the zone of being.

Since the humanity of those classified in the zone of non-being is not recognised, and given that they are treated as non-human or subhuman, namely without norms of rights or civility, acts of violence, rape and appropriation are permitted that would otherwise be unacceptable in the zone of being. For de Sousa Santos, both zones are mutually constitutive and form part of the colonial modernity project. On the other hand, for Fanon, the dialectic of mutual recognition of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ that exists in the zone of being collapses in the zone of non-being where there is no recognition of the humanity of the other. The latter has important implications such as those described by de Sousa Santos.

To summarise, conflicts in the zone of being are administered through perpetual peace with exceptional moments of war, while in the zone of non-being we have perpetual war with exceptional moments of peace.

Intersectionality and stratification in the zones marked by the abyssal line

Class, gender and sexual oppressions lived within the zone of being and within the zone of non-being are not the same. Since conflicts with the dominant elites and ruling classes within the zone of being are non-racial, within the conflicts of class, gender and sexuality the ‘Other Being’ shares in the privileges of imperial codes of law and rights, the emancipation discourses of the enlightenment and their peaceful processes of negotiation and resolution of conflicts. In contrast, since in the zone of non-being conflicts of class, gender and sexuality are articulated simultaneously with racial oppression, conflicts are managed and administered through violent methods and constant appropriation/dispossession. Class, gender and sexual oppression as lived by the ‘Non-Being Other’ are aggravated due to the joint articulation of such oppressions with racial oppression. The same principles apply to gender and sexual oppression. Western women and gays/lesbians disproportionately enjoy greater access to resources, wealth, rights and power than do oppressed non-Westernised women or gays/lesbians in the zone of non-being. In fact, despite gender oppression in the zone of being, and as a demographic minority in the world, Western women have more power, resources and wealth than the majority of non-Western men of the world that live in the zone of non-being in the present system. Yet, this contrast is not merely a North/South divide, it is also a division that exists inside metropolitan centres between Western populations and non-Western immigrants/minorities.

In the Western-centric imperial order of things, being an ‘Other human’ in the zone of being is not the same thing as being a ‘non-human Other’ in the zone of non-being. For Fanon and de Sousa Santos, the zone of being is the imperial world that includes populations oppressed by the imperial elites, while the zone of non-being is the colonial world with its non-Western oppressed subjects. The latter could be manifested in North/South conflicts as well as inside the metropolitan centres of the Global North with racialised populations classified in the zone of non-being (immigrants from the Global South, racial minorities, etc.). The question here goes beyond the issue of having or not having legal citizenship. People inside the zone of non-being are racially inferiorised populations with or without citizenship and resident permits.

Similarly, for both Fanon and de Sousa Santos, the zone of non-being is heterogeneous and stratified. What this means is that in the zone of non-being, in addition to the oppression colonial/racial subjects experience on the part of Western subjects in the zone of being, there are also oppressions exercised within the zone of non-being between colonial/racial subjects who are also stratified. A non-Western heterosexual man in the zone of non-being exercises some privileges oppressing non-Western heterosexual women and/or non-Western gays/lesbians withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. ‘Racism’, intersectionality and migration studies: framing some theoretical reflections
• 2. The insertion of Roma in Sénart Project (2000–2007): a local minority-targeted affirmative action following in the footsteps of the French republican citizenship model
• 3. Control over female ‘Muslim’ bodies: culture, politics and dress code laws in some Muslim and non-Muslim countries
• 4. Can stigma become a resource? The mobilisation of aesthetic–corporal capital by female immigrant entrepreneurs from Brazil
• 5. ‘That unit of civilisation’ and ‘the talent peculiar to women’: British employers and their servants in the nineteenth-century Indian empire
• 6. Migrant women, place and identity in contemporary women’s writing
• 7. Practices and rhetoric of migrants’ social exclusion in Italy: intermarriage, work and citizenship as devices for the production of social inequalities
• Index