Disrupting migration stories: reading life histories through the lens of mobility and fixity

Ben Rogaly

doi:10.1068/d13171p

Abstract

It has been argued that the ‘mobility turn’ is overcelebratory regarding human movement across space. Yet, critical studies of mobilities have emerged that refute this, demonstrating how various forms and aspects of mobility are bound up with unequal power relations. This paper engages with debates over migration and mobility through an in-depth analysis of three life history interviews recorded in England in 2011. The subjects of the interviews are all men in their fifties and sixties of South Asian heritage, who moved to England as minors, and who, as adults, worked in factories for at least three years. The stories in all their affectivity and sensuousness disrupt standard tropes regarding migration and contribute to our understanding of the relations between mobility, fixity, ‘race’, and class. The built-in historical perspective shows how, looking back, someone who may once have migrated across inte rnational borders does not necessarily see that as the most significant moment in their life; how someone's past moves within a nation-state may have greater significance to them than their moves into it; how people who move at one point can also be stuck, reluctantly immobile, at another; and how both the representations and materiality of mobility and fixity are imbued with, and reproduce, class inequality and racisms.

Highlights

Bridget Anderson begins her excellent book Us and Them: the Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control with what she calls ‘the migration fairy story’ in which a poor man sets off to find work across the border in a ‘wealthy kingdom’
While the attention to transnationalism in migration studies has enhanced scholarly understanding of the stretched-out lives of international migrants and the people they are connected to, migration studies often shares with the fairy story a focus on international border-crossers and on the significance of cross-border moves and networks in people’s lives
Residence are by implication considered more significant than short-distance ones or moves within national borders. It was in writing on internal migration that Keith Halfacree and Paul Boyle (1993) rightly argued for a biographical approach to understanding the migration of individuals

Summary

Introduction

Bridget Anderson begins her excellent book Us and Them: the Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control with what she calls ‘the migration fairy story’ in which a poor man sets off to find work across the border in a ‘wealthy kingdom’. Manak’s father, a university-educated writer, traded in goods for a living and was mobile across international borders, coming and going from England long before large numbers of Indian Punjabis moved over to England to settle. Manak remembers how his father would arrive on his visits home laden with new things, and how he regularly tried to coax Manak’s mother and grandfather to join him in England. In the meantime his elderly mother’s continued presence in Peterborough, along with other strong relationships, kept him in the city

Discussion

Conclusion