Chronotopes of Migration Scholarship: Challenges of Contemporaneity and Historical Conjuncture

Abstract

This chapter argues that temporal regimes of migration and migrants are rather neglected in migration scholarship, and even if they are scrutinized, the focus is usually on the different ways migrants experience time and/or the disjunctive temporalities shaping their agency. The temporality of value regimes that shape the location and the value of migration and migrants in a particular space and time are hardly addressed. This chapter focuses first on the temporal frameworks of migration scholarship (particularly of integration and post-migrant approaches) as chronotopes to scrutinize their culturalizing and ethnicizing logics in analyzing, migrant practices and emplacement in areas of settlement. It argues that these perspectives are of limited analytical value as they deny migrants and non-migrants contemporaneity. The chapter suggests an alternative perspective that brings migrants and non-migrants into a common analytical lens, and it approaches the study of migrancy and migrants’ cultural production in relation to the revaluation processes of capital accumulation and urban restructuring taking place at a particular conjuncture in time. Relatedly, the chapter situates the strategic success of the post-migrant intervention and of cultural producers within the broader dynamics of city-making and wealth generation in Vienna at a particular historical conjuncture.