Transnationalism from Below

Comparative Urban and Community Research

Michael Peter Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351301220
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Expansion of transnational capital and mass media to even the remotest of places has provoked a spate of discourse on transnationalism. A core theme hi this debate is the penetration of national cultures and political systems by global and local driving forces. The nation-state is seen as weakened by transnational capital, global media, and emergent supranational political institutions. It also faces the decentering local resistances of the informal economy, ethnic nationalism, and grass-roots activism. Transnationalism From Below brings together a rich combination of theoretical and grounded studies of transnational processes and practices, discussing both their positive and negative aspects.

The editors examine the scope and limits of transnationalism. The volume is divided into four parts: "Theorizing Transnationalism"; "Transnational Economic and Political Agency"; "Constructing Transnational Localities"; and "Transnational Practices and Cultural Reinscription." Contriburtors include Andre C. Drainville, Josephine Smart, Alan Smart, Minna Nyberg S0rensen, George Fouron, Nina Glick Schiller, Luin Goldring, Sarah J. Mahler, Linda Miller Matthei, Louisa Schein, David A. Smith, and Robert C. Smith. Moving easily between micro and macro analyses, this book expands the boundaries of the current scholarship on transnationalism, locates new forms of transnational agency, and poses provocative questions that challenge prevailing interpretations of globalization. Transnationalism From Below is a pioneering collection that will make a significant addition to the libraries of anthropologists, sociologists, international relations specialists, urban planners, political scientists, and policymakers.

I

Theorizing Transnationalism

1

The Locations of Transnationalism¹

Eduardo Guarnizo Luis
Peter Smith Michael

Transnationalism is clearly in the air. Expansion of transnational capital and mass media to even the remotest of hinterlands has provoked a spate of discourses on “globalization,” “transnationalism,” and the “crisis of the nation state.” A core theme in these discourses is the penetration of national cultures and political systems by global and local driving forces. The nation-state is seen as weakened “from above” by transnational capital, global media, and emergent supra-national political institutions. “From below” it faces the decentering “local” resistances of the informal economy, ethnic nationalism, and grassroots activism. These developments are sometimes viewed in celebratory terms. For some they bring market rationality and liberalism to a disorderly world “from above.” For others they generate conditions conducive to the creation of new liberatory practices and spaces “from below” like transnational migration and its attendant cultural hybridity. In more pessimistic readings, these developments are seen as preludes to a new form of capitalist modernization that is bound to convert the entire planet to “global consumerism.” This volume of Comparative Urban and Community Research brings together a rich combination of theoretical reflections and grounded studies of transnational processes and practices that offer a more nuanced reading of “transnationalism from below” that is neither celebratory nor dystopian.

Meanings and Metaphors of Transnationalism

In the past decade the concept of transnationalism has swiftly migrated across disciplinary boundaries. It has been rapidly “assimilated,” indeed appropriated and consumed by anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, geographers and other scholars. The concept’s sudden prominence has been accompanied by its increasing ambiguity. Transnationalism thus runs the risk of becoming an empty conceptual vessel. The articles in this volume should temper such skepticism. They show that transnationalism is a useful concept that represents phenomena which, although not entirely new, have reached particular intensity at a global scale at the end of the 20th century. This volume centers on the development and consequences of transnational practices linked to the processes of mass migration, economic expansion, and political organization across national spaces. Moving deftly between micro- and macro-analyses, the studies in this volume expand the boundaries of the current scholarship on transnationalism, locate new forms of transnational agency, and pose provocative questions that challenge prevailing interpretations of globalization.

The convergence of several historically specific factors all help explain the complexity of transnationalism. This is a new complexity not only in terms of scale, but also because of the scope of effects that contemporary transnational flows have upon the societies involved. These include:

• the globalization of capitalism with its destabilizing effects on less industrialized countries;

• the technological revolution in the means of transportation and communication;

• global political transformations such as decolonization and the universalization of human rights; and

• the expansion of social networks that facilitate the reproduction of transnational migration, economic organization, and politics.

Cultural studies scholars have been at the forefront in the analysis of transnational practices and processes (Appadurai 1990, 1996; Buell 1994; Clifford 1992; Bhabha 1990; Hannerz 1996). Their leadership has imprinted the field with a peculiar cultural bent and a distinctive normative, postmodern discursive flavor. A variety of alternative visions of transnationalism, often specifically linked to transmigration, have also emerged in the social sciences (Glick Schiller and associates 1994, 1995; Kearney 1991; Rouse 1992; Portes 1996; M.P. Smith 1994; and authors in this volume). However different in their theoretical starting points, a sense of convergence between approaches in cultural studies and the social sciences is arising. One sign of this convergence is the tendency to conceive of transnationalism as something to celebrate, as an expression of a subversive popular resistance “from below.” Cultural hybridity, multi-positional identities, border-crossing by marginal “others,” and transnational business practices by migrant entrepreneurs are depicted as conscious and successful efforts by ordinary people to escape control and domination “from above” by capital and the state.

Authors celebrating the liberatory character of transnational practices often represent transnationals as engaged in a dialectic of opposition and resistance to the hegemonic logic of multinational capital. Given the declining political influence of working-class movements in the face of the global reorganization of capitalism, all sorts of new social actors on the transnational stage are now being invested with oppositional possibilities, despite the fact that their practices are neither self-consciously resistant nor even loosely political in character. For example, recent work inscribes the activities of transnational immigrant entrepreneurs with a series of attributes which socially construct small capitalists as common people whose entrepreneurial practices amount to an expression of popular resistance (Portes 1996). In a similar vein, Bhabha (1990: 300) characterizes the practices and identities of transmigrants as “counter-narratives of the nation” which continually evoke and erase their totalizing boundaries and “disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities” (see also Anderson 1983). An example of this use of transnationalism as a counter-hegemonic political space is found in the work of Michael Kearney (1991) who represents Mixtec migrant farm workers, despite their poverty, as having created autonomous spaces in southern California and Oregon in which, he claims, neither the United States nor the Mexican state have access or control.

The totalizing emancipatory character of transnationalism in these discourses is questionable. While transnational practices and hybrid identities are indeed potentially counter-hegemonic, they are by no means always resistant. As Katharyne Mitchell (1993, 1996) and Aihwa Ong (1996) have demonstrated in their studies of the Chinese diaspora in Canada and the United States, respectively, the liminal sites of transnational practices and discourses can be used for the purposes of capital accumulation quite as effectively as for the purpose of contesting hegemonic narratives of race, ethnicity, class, and nation. The dialectic of domination and resistance needs a more nuanced analysis than the celebratory vision allows. At the risk of disrupting these hopeful, albeit utopian, visions, this volume attempts to bring back into focus the enduring asymmetries of domination, inequality, racism, sexism, class conflict, and uneven development in which transnational practices are embedded and which they sometimes even perpetuate.

Transnationalism is a multifaceted, multi-local process. A main concern guiding Transnationalism from Below is to discern how this process affects power relations, cultural constructions, economic interactions, and, more generally, social organization at the level of the locality. We try to unpack the deceptive local-global binary that dominates a significant segment of current academic discourse. This task requires us to construct an analytical optic for viewing transnationalism and for exploring the most useful methods for investigating transnational practices and processes from below. Five main analytical themes weave together the nine essays that form this volume: the political organization of transnational space; the centrality of “locality” in a historicized sense; the constitution and reproduction of transnational networks through material and symbolic exchange; transnationalism and identity politics; and the development of viable approaches for studying transnationalism.

Political Organization of Transnational Spaces

Transnational political organization and mobilization take place at multiple levels (M.P. Smith 1994). Constructing transnational political spaces should be treated as the resultant of separate, sometimes parallel, sometimes competing projects at all levels of the global system—from the “global governance” agenda of international organizations and multinational corporations to the most local “survival strategies,” by which transnational migrant networks are socially constructed. At the most global level, specific multilateral collectivities—such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the global capitalist class—seek to construct a global neoliberal contextual space, a “new world order,” to regulate transnational flows of capital, trade, people, and culture. In the process, they supplant the disintegrating nationally-managed regimes of Keynesianism and Fordism (Drainville, this volume). Again, at the most local level, it is specific collectivities—local households, kin networks, elite fractions, and other emergent local formations—which actively pursue transnational migration to create and reproduce another kind of transnational social space, the “trans-locality,” to sustain material and cultural resources in the face of the neo-liberal storm.

Does this mean, as some (e.g., Appadurai 1996: Part III) have claimed, that transnationalism “from above” and “from below” are ushering in a new period of weakened nationalism, a “postnational” global cultural economy? There are several reasons to doubt this claim. First, historically, states and nations seeking statehood have often kept the transnational connections of their overseas diasporas alive, as in the classical examples of the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian social formations (Tölölyan 1996). Second, and relatedly, contributors to this volume underline the continuing significance of nationalist projects and identities and their articulation with competing identities and projects, such as feminism, environmentalism and globalism in the formation of “transnational grassroots movements” (M.P. Smith 1994). These issues are thoughtfully explored in Sarah Mahler’s analysis of alternative modes of political mobilization of “deterritorialized” migrants as well as in André Drainville’s discussion of the implications of enduring national and local political identities in the new transnational political coalitions that have sprung up to resist the hegemonic ideology and austerity policies imposed “from above” by the global neo-liberal regime.

Third, in the present period of mass migration many nationstates that have experienced substantial out-migration are entering into a process of actively promoting “transnational reincorporation” of migrants into their state-centered projects. Why is this so? As suggested above, global economic restructuring and the repositioning of states, especially less industrialized ones, in the world economy, have increased the economic dependency of these countries on foreign investment. Political elites and managerial strata in these societies have found that as emigration to advanced capitalist countries has increased, the monetary transfers provided by transmigrant investors have made crucial contributions to their national economies (Lessinger 1992), and family remittances have promoted social stability (Mahler 1996; M.P. Smith 1994). Thus, their growing dependence on transmigrants’ stable remittances has prompted sending states to try to incorporate their “nationals” abroad into both their national market and their national polity by a variety of measures including: naming “honorary ambassadors” from among transmigrant entrepreneurs in the hope that they will promote “national” interests vis-à-vis receiving countries; subsidizing transnational migrant “home-town” and “home-state” associations (Goldring, R. Smith, and Mahler, this volume); creating formal channels for communicating with these “constituencies” across national borders (Glick Schiller and Fouron, this volume; Guarnizo 1996); passing dual citizenship laws; and even, in the bizarre case of the state apparatus in El Salvador, providing free legal assistance to political refugees so that they may obtain asylum in the United States on the grounds that they have been persecuted by the state that is now paying their legal expenses (Mahler, this volume).

In short, far from withering away in the epoch of transnationalism, sending states once presumed to be “peripheral,” are promoting the reproduction of transnational subjects; and, in the process reinventing their own role in the “new world order” (see Glick Schiller and Fouron, this volume). They are officially incorporating their “nationals” residing abroad into their newly configured trans-territorial nation-state. This political process has been called “deterritorialized” nation-state formation by Nina Glick Schiller and her associates (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994). The role of the sending state and state-centered social movements in the production of transnational social formations is thoughtfully explored below in Glick Schiller and Fouron’s study of the political organization of the Haitian diaspora in New York and other U.S. cities since the restoration of the Aristide regime in Haiti.

This process of trans-territorialization raises intriguing questions concerning human agency. The sending states are insuring their own survival by contributing to the constitution of new bifocal subjects with dual citizenships and multiple political identities. Inadvertently, this very process opens up interstitial social spaces which create multiple possibilities for novel forms of human agency. These spaces provide possibilities for resistance as well as accommodation to power “from above.” For example, by accommodating to their newly-legitimated dual status, bi-national subjects are able to enjoy the benefits of citizenship, the opportunities for household reproduction, as well as the costs these entail in two nation-states. They may be doubly empowered or doubly subordinated, depending on historically-specific local circumstances (compare, for instance the multiple empowerment of Ticuanenses in New York City and Ticuani, Puebla with the multiple subordination of Garifuna in Los Angeles and Belize City in the studies by R. Smith and L. Matthei and D. Smith, this volume).

Fourth, in light of these new interstitial possibilities, it is important to recall that the agents of “receiving states” remain relevant actors. States still monopolize the legitimate means of coercive power within their borders. Thus, it is problematic to conceptualize as a “deterritorialization of the state” the expansion of the reach of “states of origin” beyond their own national territorial jurisdiction into other state formations. Rather, the “foreign” territory in which transmigrants reside and their “state of origin” comes to “visit” has a material force that cannot be ignored. When politicians come to proselitize, officials to promote their programs and plans, or business people to open or maintain markets, their influence is exercised in a particular territorial domain, formally controlled by the “receiving” state. This juridical construction of transnational social formations is one which denies their “globality” and re-territorializes their meaning as a “boundary penetration,” as a “transgression” of its own jurisdiction. The recent political controversy in the United States concerning the “penetration of Asian money” into U.S. national political campaigns suggests that the political elites ruling nationstates do not merely react to, but actually act to constitute the scope and meaning of “transnationalism” within their territories. In terms of racialization, this example could be taken as a gross overgeneralization of the notion of illegitimate border-crossing from the level of the individual to that of entire states and regions of the globe. It does illustrate, however, the key role of state-initiated discourses in the réinscription of nationalist ideologies and national subjects.

Paradoxically, the expansion of transnational practices from above and from below has resulted in outbursts of entrenched, essentialist nationalism in both “sending” and “receiving” countries. In receiving nation-states, movements aimed at recuperating and reifying a mythical national identity are expanding as a way to eliminate the penetration of alien “others.” States of origin, on the other hand, are re-essentializing their national identity and extending it to their nationals abroad as a way to maintain their loyalty and flow of resources “back home.” By granting them dual citizenship, these states are encouraging transmigrants’ instrumental accomodation to “receiving” societies, while simultaneously inhibiting their cultural assimilation and thereby promoting the preservation of their own national culture.

Our effort to differentiate the local from the national and the global political organization of transnational spaces points to the growing interdependence of geographical scales. It suggests a weakness in the prevailing postmodernist metaphors of “deterritorialization” and “unboundedness.” Undoubtedly, the boundaries limiting people cut across the politically instituted boundaries of nation-states. But transnational actions are bounded in two senses—first, by the understandings of “grounded reality” socially constructed within the transnational networks that people form and move through, and second, by the policies and practices of territorially-based sending and receiving local and national states and communities. We now turn to a closer examination of this double-grounding.

Grounding Transnationalism

Transnational practices do not take place in an imaginary “third space” (Bh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I. Theorizing Transnationalism
• II Transnational Economic and Political Agency
• III. Constructing Transnational Localities
• IV. Transnational Practices and Cultural Reinscription