Abstract
In this article we propose a rethinking of the concepts of center and margin in geography. We review extant literatures from structuralist political geography and science studies and explore alternative theoretical approaches to develop the concept of axes of centrality. Using theories of performativity to understand centers and margins as produced across an array of axes allows for an expansion of the concept. Contemporary experiences of transnational migration offer a useful way of thinking about how bodies produce places differently as global centers and margins. Drawing on material from two studies of transnational communities—one of white, English-speaking South African return migrants and one of British East African Asians—we take a biographical approach, demonstrating how two individuals with extensive migration histories have performed England, South Africa, Uganda, and India as variously central and marginal across the life course. We develop the concept of axes of centrality to demonstrate how centers and margins are most usefully conceptualized not as places in themselves but as located in and between bodies in a variety of ways as they move through and perform space at a variety of scales and over time. We propose an understanding of centrality and marginality that takes into account the embodied conditionalities under which places become imagined and reimagined as central, marginal, or both.
Highlights
There are so many opportunities in Uganda, I would love to come back
Alongside attempts to rethink the contemporary geographies of these recent geopolitical and economic shifts (Sidaway 2012; Raghuram et al 2014), we need a reconsideration not of where centers and margins are in these landscapes of simultaneity and multiplicity, but how they come to be constituted as such
As powerful as contemporary geopolitical discourses of a multi-polar world are in signaling challenges to traditional geographies, these new definitions of centrality and marginality continue to be based on quantifiable measures of economic accumulation expressed at national and global scales (e.g., UNDP 2013; FUNDS 2013)
Summary
There are so many opportunities in Uganda, I would love to come back. It’s a nice pace of life, I could relax. As powerful as contemporary geopolitical discourses of a multi-polar world are in signaling challenges to traditional geographies, these new definitions of centrality and marginality continue to be based on quantifiable measures of economic accumulation expressed at national and global scales (e.g., UNDP 2013; FUNDS 2013). We argue that if we delink centers and margins from places and focus on bodies moving, dwelling in, and travelling through place, we can attend to the ways in which political and economic hierarchies of political space are continually reconfigured, reorganized, and reworked through emotional, affective, and material practices To get at these multiple interdependencies, we turn to the question of performativity and to recent feminist work on transnational migration as a means of understanding the role of the body in the articulation of new geographies of center-margin relations.
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