Migratory Dissemblance

Abstract

Darlene Clark Hine’s “Rape and Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West” has been essential to black feminist theorizing of African American women’s history, respectability politics, and sexuality. However, it has not been understood as offering a political theory that has implications for understanding gendered migration. The global history of migration is shaped by both continuity and rupture. Slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism have shaped the modern world, and their impact on communities continues today. And yet the specificity of certain moments of immigration and migration history should not be elided. But what happens if Hine’s theoretical framing of African American women’s migration and the idea of the culture of dissemblance are placed at the center of our understandings of the workings of citizenship and power in the United States, or practices of agency among migrant women? This essay argues that Hine’s essay should be placed in conversation with histories of migration and immigration, as African American migration and shifts in immigration policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped labor in the United States. Her idea of a “culture of dissemblance” leads us to the idea of migratory dissemblance—a response by migrating women to the disclosure requirements of communities, employers, and the state, which demand honesty but often punish a person for revealing victimization when attempting to cross geographic borders for greater freedom or survival.