Transnational Ties

Cities, Migrations, and Identities

Michael Peter Smith, John Eade, Richard K. Brail

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351301268
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities are key sites of the transnational ties that increasingly connect people, places, and projects across the globe. They provide opportunities and constraints within which transnational actors and networks operate and nodes linking wider social formations traverse national borders. This book brings together a series of richly textured ethnographic studies that suggest new ways to situate and historicize transnationalism, identify new pathways to transnational urbanism, and map the contours of translocal, interregional, and diasporic connections not previously studied. The transnational ties treated in this book truly span the globe, giving concrete meaning to the phrase "globalization from below."

How have the contributors to this book conceptualized the wider context informing the conduct of their ethnographically grounded, multi-sited research on the relationship between cities, migration, and transnationalism? Several interrelated contextual dimensions have been singled out as affecting the opportunities and constraints experienced by transnational migrant subjects. Socio-spatially, in several of these chapters, the political economic context now called neoliberal globalization is shown to be a key driving force creating conditions that necessitate, facilitate, or impede migration, foster trans-local economic ties, and create new inter-regional interdependencies--e.g., new South-South and East-East transnational ties.

The changing historical context of both migrating groups and the cities and regions they move across are central to the study of the interplay of urban change and migrant transnationalism. The historical particularities of migrant recruitment, migration histories, migratory narratives, and changing gender and class relations all affect the character and geography of transnational migration with an impact on the social structures of community formation. This is a pioneering effort in the Comparative Urban and Community Research series.

PART I

HISTORICIZING TRANSNATIONAL TIES

1

Transnational Ties: Cities, Migrations, and Identities

Michael Peter Smith and John Eade

Cities are key sites of the transnational ties that increasingly connect people, places, and projects across the globe. They are at once contexts of opportunities and constraints within which transnational actors and networks operate and nodes linking wider social formations that traverse national borders. This book brings together a series of richly textured ethnographic case studies that suggest new ways to situate and historicize transnationalism, identify new pathways to transnational urbanism, and map the contours of translocal, interregional, and diasporic connections not previously studied. The transnational ties treated in this book truly span the globe, giving concrete meaning to the phrase “globalization from below.”

How have the contributors to this book conceptualized the wider context informing the conduct of their ethnographically grounded, multi-sited research on the relationship between cities, migration, and transnationalism? Several interrelated contextual dimensions have been singled out as affecting the opportunities and constraints experienced by transnational migrant subjects, mediating their transnational practices, and situating their changing subjectivities and identities in the multiple, interconnected places in which they are orchestrating their lives. Socio-spatially, in several of our studies the political economic context now called neoliberal globalization is shown to be a key driving force creating conditions that necessitate, facilitate, or impede migration, foster trans-local economic ties, and create new inter-regional interdependencies—e.g., new South-South and East-East transnational ties.

In this volume, the changing historical context of both migrating groups and the cities and regions they move across are shown to be central to the study of the interplay of urban change and migrant transnationalism. Changing local political contexts of reception and exit at different historical periods are crucial dimensions of historical context, as are the changing state policy frameworks that affect the practices of transnational migration and migrant inclusion and/or exclusion in new destinations. As Smith and Bakker (2008: 5; see also Smith 2005a and 2005b) have shown, socio-cultural factors are also key elements in the formation and continuity of international migration trajectories in particular locales. As they point out, “the historical particularities of migrant recruitment, migration histories, migratory narratives, and changing gender and class relations all affect the character and geography of transnational migration…, shaping who migrates, where they come from, and where they go.” These historical particularities have impacted the social structures of community formation within which new modes of existence across borders are being enacted and lived.

Historicizing Migrant Transnationalism

Although much attention in the transnationalism literature has been paid to the geographical and spatial dimensions of migrant transnationalism, the historical and temporal implications of cross-national activities have been less thoroughly analyzed. Kathy Burrell’s chapter, “Time Matters,” helps to redress this imbalance by focusing explicitly on the different interactions between time, migration, and transnationalism. Based on ethnographic research undertaken on Polish migration to Britain extending from the Second World War to the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, Burrell offers a nuanced, thoroughly historicized ethnography of the changing temporal contexts of Polish transnationalism in Britain. She identifies and investigates three distinct dimensions of historical context: the nostalgic homeland connections of the post-World War II refugees; the temporal dimensions of Cold War Europe as experienced by subsequent migrant cohorts; and the temporal implications of the increased mobility associated with contemporary migration. Paying close attention to the alternative migration histories experienced by different migrating cohorts from the same country over time, as does Burrell, is one important way to historicize migrant transnationalism.

A second way to approach historical context is to focus upon questions of change and continuity in the politics and society of particular cities that are sites facilitating or impeding the formation of transnational networks. Peter Geoghegan’s chapter, “Transnationalism in the Ethno-National City,” provides just such a move. Geoghegan offers a careful analysis of the local context of reception for transnational migration to Belfast, Northern Ireland during the past decade. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Belfast has experienced a growing urban political economy that has become an increasingly attractive site for transnational migration. Accompanying this influx of new migrants, the problem of racism in the city began to receive increased attention. Geoghegan’s case study focuses on competing political discourses produced by grassroots anti-racist groups in Belfast. His analysis of the texts produced by these groups shows how anti-racism rhetoric seeks to position migrants in relation to the dominant Protestant-Catholic sectarian division. Drawing on qualitative interview data, his chapter also shows, however, that the new international migrants to Belfast often reject this interpellation and voluntarily exclude themselves from these partisan anti-racist discourses. In sum, the persistent Protestant-Catholic political cleavage in Belfast is shown to be a key political context of reception for transnational migrants that they must accommodate to or resist as they orchestrate new cross border living arrangements.

Translocalities: The Local Pathways to Transnational Urbanism

A substantial literature has emerged over the past decade on the operation of historically specific translocal networks, spaces, and connections and the ensuing formation of “translocalities” as central elements in grounding the study of transnationalism (for key debates on the meaning and impact of translocality, see Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996, 1998; and Smith 2001, 2005a, 2005b). Smith’s (2001, 2005b) theorization of the relationship between transnationalism and cities, which he terms transnational urbanism, stresses the central role played by cities as key social spaces grounding transnational practices and processes, as arenas for studying the effects of transnational networks on place and vice versa (Smith 2001: 183), and as interconnected sites for the emplacement of the mobile subjects forging transnational ties (Smith 2005b).

Much of the case study literature informed by this perspective has focused on the ties forged and projects pursued by migrants from localities in the global South that closely connect their places of origin to receiving cities in the global North. The chapter of this book by Giulia Sinatti adds another insightful case study to this growing literature on South-North urban translocalities. In her chapter, “The Making of Urban Translocalities,” Sinatti demonstrates the usefulness of the concept of translocality for understanding the role played by cities in emerging forms of contemporary migrations. Using the case of Senegalese migration connecting Dakar, Senegal to Zingonia, Italy, Sinatti shows that transnational migratory practices are characterized by the establishment of translocalities, namely cities that are recognized by migrant networks as meaningful sites for collective reference. Through her multi-sited study of processes of place-making initiated in Dakar in the home country and in Zingonia in northern Italy, she reveals how these two cities are socially constructed by the Senegalese as central poles for sustaining transnational relations.

Two other authors in this volume move the study of translocality beyond the South-North migratory trajectory. In Chapter 5 Katrin Hansing assesses a mode of transnational place-making that is now adding an important new spatial dimension to transnational studies, namely the social construction of South-South transnational ties. Hansing’s historically and ethnographically grounded case study, “South-South Migration and Transnational Ties between Cuba and Mozambique,” examines the well established transnational connections between Havana, Cuba and Maputo, Mozambique forged as the result of the migration of Cuban medical personnel to the previously socialist country of Mozambique, which continued and indeed expanded as the latter’s political economy moved in a neo-liberal direction. Her study details key dimensions of Cuba’s large-scale state-sponsored aid programs, through which highly skilled Cuban professionals have temporarily migrated to work in other developing countries such a Mozambique. In particular, her chapter focuses on the lives, realities, and changing identities of Cuban doctors, who are based in Maputo, Mozambique, as well as how their experiences feed back into their relations and lives in Havana and Cuba. In so doing she carefully considers the question of whether this particular case of South-South migration differs from more typical South-North and East-West migratory dynamics, motivations and experiences typically found in transnational studies.

Svetlana Milutinovic’s chapter, “Chinese Transnational Entrepreneurs in Budapest and Belgrade,” focuses on two cities in Eastern Europe that have witnessed a new phenomenon in the last two decades—Chinese entrepreneurial migration, which joins economic processes taking place in sending places with those in receiving places, thereby establishing new East-East translocal and transnational economic ties. The aim of her essay is to show how this phenomenon has played out in these two cities and to shed light on the spread of a Chinese transnational enterprise that links several receiving places across two regions, thereby forging multiple translocalities, linked by their relationships to the enterprise. Her findings reveal that contemporary Chinese entrepreneurs are new transnational actors capable of merging several localities, not typically thought of as global metropoles, into favorable market relations in the global political economy.

Diasporic Communities, Identity Politics, and Social Integration

When we turn back from these new modes of globalization from below and from the middle, which are signs of widening globalization, to the extensive South-North migration trajectory that has characterized the past two decades, we are able to discern some potentially narrowing trends occasioned by the spread of diaspora communities in the global North because of growing fears of international terrorism. Initially, the migration of workers from South to North since the end of the Second World War had changed national narratives in Europe, as an early period of temporary migration was followed by permanent settlement with the arrival of wives and dependants. While political elites in the United States, in particular, had long interpreted the nation as a country of immigration, their equivalents in Europe had emphasized the social and cultural homogeneity of their nation-states and presented immigration as a minor issue where minorities would be quickly assimilated. However, the rapid influx of migrants from former colonies between the late 1940s and the 1980s into France, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain especially, as well as the far more substantial immigration of guest workers into West Germany, raised the likelihood of permanent settlement by people whose racial and ethnic distinctiveness highlighted the growth of cultural pluralism and hybridity, new ethnicities, imagined communities and diasporic ties with the countries of origin (for key debates on these issues see, for example, Bhabha 1990; Hall 1992; Appadurai 1997; Cohen 1997; Vertovec 2000).

These debates concerning the contribution of immigrants to cultural diversity in Europe were developed before 9/11. The political reaction to 9/11, subsequent terrorist attacks in Spain and Britain, the murder of Pim Fortuyn and the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, and the cartoons saga in Denmark are some of the key elements encouraging a backlash by European nation-states against “multiculturalism” and single-issue identity politics. Minorities, including transnational migrants, are now publicly exhorted to focus on what they share with the dominant majority, rather than what makes them culturally and socially distinct. An earlier emphasis on assimilation has revived as the liberal consensus around pluralistic integration weakened in Britain, The Netherlands, and Denmark, and anti-immigrant political sentiment increased in the United States. Muslims were often the targets of assimilationist rhetoric where “faith communities” were encouraged to contribute to “social cohesion” through the generation of “moderate” leaders and adaptation to the nation’s “core values.”

Transnational Religious Networks

These developments acted as both an encouragement and a constraint to the transnational religious networks, which linked these new ethnic minorities in the West to their religious heartlands. As pilgrimage studies have revealed, European space has been transformed through global migration where diasporic communities have brought their pilgrimage cults with them and established new transnational networks with their countries of origin—a process which has generated vigorous debates within those communities about the changing relationship between these diasporas and their religious and territorial centers (see Coleman and Eade 2004, Badone and Roseman 2004). They have also begun to sacralize local places within Britain itself through the revitalization of established shrines, the founding of new shrines and the sanctification of rivers. This process involves an ideological reinterpretation of the relationship between center and periphery (Eade and Garbin 2007).

The sociological and anthropological analysis of these developments has been heavily circumscribed by nation-state boundaries. This preoccupation reflected a methodological nationalism (see Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003), which informed the sociological tradition and a focus on debates concerning secularization and the supposed decline of religion drawing on the shapers of that tradition (Durkheim, Weber, and Marx). The secularization debate in Britain, for example, focused on empirical data concerning religious beliefs and practices within mainstream British society such as attendance at Church of England services, the numbers being married, baptized and buried, on differences between people’s beliefs and sense of belonging, the development of new age cults and the growth of Christian sects (see Bruce 1995; Davie 1994). Only recently has Davie attempted to broaden the debate by exploring issues of collective memory across Europe but still within the nation-state framework (Davie 1994, 2000).

Research across Europe on ethnic minorities has compensated for the limitations of these debates about mainstream Christian beliefs and practices. They have also alerted us to the global political context outlined above where the rapid growth of Muslim residents, in particular, has been the object of much public concern and suspicion (see Modood and Werbner 1997; Cesari 2004). However, the issues of transnational migration and globalization have been explored through studies of Pentecostal and other charismatic Christian communities (see Coleman 2000), even if developments among Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists have attracted less attention outside Britain (see Vertovec 2000; Nye 2001; Singh and Singh 2006).

The four chapters in sections III and IV of this book reflect this balance within the academic division of labor since two chapters focus on Muslim groups (Bangladeshis in London and Bulgarian Turks in Germany), while the other two discuss African Christians in London and Vietnamese entrepreneurs in Berlin who draw on Buddhist spirit beliefs and practices. Taken together they raise the following issues relevant to the volume—(a) the relationship between different spatial levels (local, regional, national and global) in globalizing urban conditions; (b) the ways in which the spiritual world is related to local places; (c) the impact of political and economic structures in the context of global economic “liberalization”; (d) the contestation of religious and secular identities, beliefs and practices through networks linking diasporic groups to their countries of origin, other nations and imagined global communities; and, (e) the extent to which social actors use ethnicity as a resource or look beyond ethnic boundaries.

In Section III the focus turns towards transnational religious networks in London and Berlin. Krause examines the performative process of local place-making by socially marginalized African migrants in an industrial area of north-east London. Unlike two other key local social actors—gentrifiers and those engaged in urban renewal—these migrants look beyond the locality to their countries of origin and to an imagined global Pentecostal community. The emptiness, functionality and size of the local spac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• I. HISTORICIZING TRANSNATIONAL TIES
• II. PATHWAYS TO TRANSNATIONAL URBANISM
• III. TRANSNATIONAL RELIGIOUS NETWORKS
• IV. TRANSNATIONAL DIASPORAS AND IDENTITIES
• Contributors
• Index