Uprootings/Regroundings

Questions of Home and Migration

Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castada, Anne-Marie Fortier, Mimi Sheller, Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castada, Anne-Marie Fortier, Mimi Sheller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000181937
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

New forms of transnational mobility and diasporic belonging have become emblematic of a supposed 'global' condition of uprootedness. Yet much recent theorizing of our so-called 'postmodern' life emphasizes movement and fluidity without interrogating who and what is 'on the move'. This original and timely book examines the interdependence of mobility and belonging by considering how homes are formed in relationship to movement. It suggests that movement does not only happen when one leaves home, and that homes are not always fixed in a single location. Home and belonging may involve attachment and movement, fixation and loss, and the transgression and enforcement of boundaries. What is the relationship between leaving home and the imagining of home itself? And having left home, what might it mean to return? How can we re-think what it means to be grounded, or to stay put? Who moves and who stays? What interaction is there between those who stay and those who arrive and leave? Focusing on differences of race, gender, class and sexuality, the contributors reveal how the movements of bodies and communities are intrinsic to the making of homes, nations, identities and boundaries. They reflect on the different experiences of being at home, leaving home, and going home. They also explore ways in which attachment to place and locality can be secured - as well as challenged - through the movements that make up our dwelling places.Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration is a groundbreaking exploration of the parallel and entwined meanings of home and migration. Contributors draw on feminist and postcolonial theory to explore topics including Irish, Palestinian, and indigenous attachments to 'soils of significance'; the making of and trafficking across European borders; the female body as a symbol of home or nation; and the shifting grounds of 'queer' migrations and 'creole' identities.This innovative analysis will open up avenues of research an

Introduction: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration

Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, Mimi Sheller

Uprootings/Regroundings is concerned with the ways in which different bodies and communities inhabit and move across familial, national and diasporic locations. The chapters in this collection examine both how migration is experienced in relation to home and belonging, and how home and belonging are formed in relationship to individual and collective migration. We begin from the premise that the forms and conditions of movement are not only highly divergent – consider the difference between tourism and exile – but also necessarily exist in relation to similarly divergent configurations of placement, or being ‘at home’. Who moves, who stays, under what conditions? What is the relationship between those who stay and those who arrive and leave? What forces entrench migration, or propel staying ‘at home’?

Each contribution to this collection brings to the fore in its own particular way the work of migration and the work of inhabitance, including that which goes into making and unmaking familial, communal, national and transnational borders, kinships and identities. Highlighting the laborious effort that goes into uprooting and regrounding homes, and the energy that is expended in enabling or prohibiting migrations, allows us to challenge the presumptions that movement involves freedom from grounds, or that grounded homes are not sites of change, relocation or uprooting. Being grounded is not necessarily about being fixed; being mobile is not necessarily about being detached. Thus the overall project of this collection is to call into question the naturalization of homes as origins, and the romanticization of mobility as travel, transcendence and transformation.

The concept of ‘uprootings/regroundings’ provides a framework for rethinking home and migration in ways that open out the discussion beyond oppositions such as stasis versus transformation, or presence versus absence. Rather than thinking of home and migration as constituted through processes that neatly map onto ‘migrating’ and ‘homing’, uprootings/regroundings makes it possible to consider home and migration in terms of a plurality of experiences, histories and constituencies, and of the workings of institutional structures. The task is therefore not to categorize ‘home’ as a condition distinct from ‘migration’, or to order them in terms of their relative value or cultural salience, but to ask how uprootings and regroundings are enacted – affectively, materially and symbolically – in relation to one another. It is not possible, from this point of view, to even define or describe the nature of homing and migrating as either separate or combined processes through which homes are made, lost, rejected or revisited, or migrations are undertaken, forced or forbidden. Rather, this volume brings together scholarship on home and migration that pays close attention to specific processes, modes and materialities of uprootings and regroundings, in different contexts and on different scales.

Integrating a diversity of approaches and subject matters (detailed below), this collection elucidates the intricate and variegated processes of uprootings and regroundings, from the micro-politics of embodied inhabitance and migration, to the macro-politics of transnationalism and global capital. The chapters in this volume attend to the histories, geographies, practices, forms of experience and relations of power that mark processes of uprootings and regroundings. They address a range of arenas in which issues of home and migration are negotiated, from art, the law and language to collections of objects, popular culture and the internet. And they consider differential identities, affects, cultural investments and political struggles at work in uprootings and regroundings, at both individual and collective levels. Uprootings and regroundings emerge from this collective work as simultaneously affective, embodied, cultural and political processes whose effects are not simply given. For example, regroundings – of identity, culture, nation, diaspora – can both resist and reproduce hegemonic forms of home and belonging.

This reflection on mobility and placement as interdependent is timely, given that much recent theorizing privileges movement as the dominant form of social life and individual experience of the contemporary ‘global’ world of ‘flows’ and ‘liquidity’ (e.g. Castells 1996; Bauman 2000; Robertson et al. 1994; Urry 2000). Much of this research suggests that mobility and migrancy destabilize identities and communities precisely insofar as they detach identity from place (Chambers 1994), enable the creation of new ‘nomadic’ identities (Braidotti 1994), or lead to the ‘creolization’ of ‘global culture’ (Hannerz 1996; Featherstone 1995). While recognizing that the transnational movements of bodies, objects and images have transformed concepts and experiences of home and belonging (defined as locality and community as well as nation), we question the presumptions that rootless mobility is the defining feature of contemporary experience and that it stands against any form of ‘rooted belonging’. With others across a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary locations who call these universalizing and over-generalized characterizations of ‘the global’ into question (Brah 1996; Cresswell 1996; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kaplan 1996; Massey 1999; Pels 1999), we seek to address the variegated texture of habitation and migration in transnational circuits of exchange and power.

We take as a model those feminist studies that have been concerned with the intersectionality of race, class, gender and sexuality in the making and theorizing of transnational domains (Ahmed 2000; Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Castañeda 2002; Enloe 1989; Franklin et al. 2000; Kaplan et al. 1999; Mohanty et al. 1991; Ong 1999). These approaches have laid the groundwork for our own thinking about feminist and post-colonial interventions in the realm of the transnational and global, suggesting both that the nature of uprootings and regroundings are linked to such differences and that a focus on these differences requires new ways of theorizing home and migration. Uprootings/Regroundings therefore contributes to rethinking what home and migration mean – and how these meanings are being reimagined – by reconsidering long-standing categories of difference addressed in feminism through the framework of uprootings and regroundings.

Uprootings/Regroundings also converses with the recently established field of investigation around transnationalism, widely understood as referring to the multiple activities – economic, political, cultural, personal – that require sustained contacts and travel across national borders (Portes et al. 1999; Basch et al. 1994). Studies in transnationalism problematize conventional understandings of homes and communities as stable, spatially fixed locations, from which migrants depart and in which they relocate ‘new’ homes, even while attending to the continuing importance of the nation-state in migrants’ lives, thus questioning the assumption that we live in a post-national world (Westwood and Phizacklea 2000; Rouse 1991; Basch et al. 1994). Ethnographies of ‘transnational migrant circuits’ and of ‘the conjunctural and situated character of globalization’ (Inda and Rosaldo 2002: 27) suggest some of the ways in which bodies, families, communities and nations are together reprocessed within transnational connections. They reveal the fluidity and diversity of these exchanges, and complicate the unilateral relationship between belonging and location by investigating the ways in which new forms of political and cultural belonging are anchored in multi-local ties (Levitt 2001) and in deterritorialized notions of a person’s rights and responsibilities (Soysal 1994). Cosmopolitanism, crucially, is theorized as a set of predispositions and practices predicated on extensive mobility, including corporeal, imaginative and virtual travel, which allow for a comprehension of local specificity while fostering an openness to the ‘globalising world’ (Szerszynski and Urry 2002: 470–1, cf. Tomlinson 1999). However, the emergence of seemingly open and flexible cosmopolitan cultures or civil societies still depends on the constraints of particular articulations of power, hierarchy, inequality and positioning. Aihwa Ong, for example, has shown how the border-crossing activities and ‘flexible citizenship’ of Chinese transnational subjects depend on ‘different modalities of governmentality – as practiced by the nation-state, by the family, by capital – that intersect and have effects on each other, variously encoding and constraining flexibility in global (re)positioning’ (Ong 1999: 113). Thus a Chinese-diasporan (post)colonial habitus based on guanxi (interpersonal relations) entails particular family regimes, biopolitics, and post-nationalist cosmopolitan affiliations. It is precisely these collisions of the corporeal, the familial and the (post)national that create the densely conjoined (and often traumatic) struggles over identity, belonging and longing within uprootings and regroundings.

With the focus on migration and its effects on accepted understandings of what constitutes communities (local and national), ‘location’ often remains a primary concern in studies of transnationalism, where movement is largely conceived as operating between two distinct national formations, ‘here’ and ‘there’ (one notable exception is Castañeda 2002). Though we recognize the importance of the task of specifying experiences of migration themselves, we also seek to escape the immediacy of location as a discrete entity, and to blur the distinction between here and there. Where or what is ‘there’? Is it necessarily not ‘here’? How long is ‘there’ a significant site of connection? And for whom? How far away is ‘there’? Such questions have been raised in the literature on borderlands, perhaps most notably in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa (1987). Conceived against the homogenizing tendencies of the (US) nation-state, the concept of borderlands has largely contributed to opening up discussions of belonging and identity to new mappings of space. Anzaldúa shows how Chicano/a culture is constituted in and through the border between Mexico and the United States, whose exact location is itself a matter of debate. Who inhabits whose land? Which culture borrows from which other? As cultural and spatial boundaries are reconfigured in this contested borderzone, new ‘homes’ and ‘migrations’ also become intelligible in the form of hybridized cultures without ‘pure’ origins. Anzaldúa’s regrounding of Chicano/a in the borderzone simultaneously uproots the apparently fixed boundaries of the US nation-state. As Laura Perez puts it, ‘Chicana/o cultural practices have operated in disordering, profoundly disturbing ways with respect to dominant social and cultural, spatial and ideological topographies of the “proper” in the United States’ (Perez 1999: 19).

As this work on borderzones suggests, uprootings and regroundings are constituted through the reconfiguration of space, just as the redrawing of boundaries can generate new processes of uprooting and regrounding. Postcolonial feminist theorists have led the way in theorizing ‘border-zones’ and mestizo identities in relation to the work of migration and inhabitance (Anzaldúa 1987; Ifekwunigwe 1999; Kaplan et al. 1999; Lorde 1982; Moraga 1983). They have made us aware that the greatest movements often occur within the self, within the home or within the family, while the phantasm of limitless mobility often rests on the power of border controls and policing of who does and does not belong. And they have shown us that long-standing categories of difference addressed in feminist work become important in new ways when addressed in relation to uprootings/regroundings.

We can also draw from critical geography the insight that both staying put and moving can take place out of necessity or force as well as ‘choice’, and thus depend on specific enabling or disenabling relations of power (Cresswell 1996; Massey 1999; Miles 1999; May 2000). How are the materialities, affects and politics of diverse uprootings and regroundings simultaneously played out upon bodies, families and nations, within the constraints imposed by violences and disciplines of many kinds? More specifically, feminist geographers have taught us that it is crucial to pay attention not only to the gendering of spaces of domesticity and movements in public space (Wolff 1993; Massey 1994), but also to the domesticated gender, racial, sexual and class dynamics of both national and transnational relations and borders (Enloe 1989; Parker et al. 1992). For example, much work goes into the making of homes, national and otherwise, and the labour of re-producing them is often designated as ‘women’s work’ (see Gedalof, Chapter 4 in this volume). From this point of view, how women negotiate such genderings of space and labour become part of the story of home and migration. Processes of homing and migration take shape through the imbrication of affective and bodily experience in broader social processes and institutions where unequal differences of race, class, gender and sexuality, among many other relevant categories, are generated. We can ask: how are uprootings and regroundings embodied and imagined in relation to immigration laws, border police, socioeconomic inequalities and prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and so on)? How can movement or staying put be a form of privilege that ‘extends’ the reach of some bodies, for example when the movement of some takes place through ‘fixing the bodies of others’ (Ahmed 2000), or when staying put takes place through displacing others?

Home and migration cannot be adequately theorized outside of these spatialized relations of power. Mobility can be foisted upon bodies through homelessness, exile and forced migration just as the purported comforts of the familial ‘home’ may be sites of alienation and violence (for women, children, queers). The founding of homelands and places of belonging can entail the displacement of others from their homes. It can also involve the spoliation of the homes of those who nevertheless remain ‘in place’, as is so evident in the migration of European settlers that has historically entailed the desecration of indigenous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration
• Index