Still ‘migrants’ after all those years: foundational mobilities, temporal frames and emplacement of migrants

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article concentrates on the ‘post migrant’ perspective formulated by migration scholars and cultural producers in to analyse migrant subjectivities, and practices beyond the culturalising and ethnicising logics of migration scholarship and public debates. I put the spatial and temporal frameworks informing this approach to migrant dynamics under scrutiny and argue that this concept remains of limited analytical value as it denies migrants coevalness with ‘non-migrants’. I suggest an alternative perspective deploying concepts of displacement, disposession and emplacement, which might allow us to avoid the spatial and temporal impediments of the post migrant perspective and would instead facilitate us to approach migrants and non-migrants from within a common analytical lens. In the last part of the article, I situate the strategic success of the post migrant intervention in Vienna, despite its analytical fault lines, within the scalar dynamics of city making at a particular conjuncture in time.