Immigrant Bodies Research Articles

Journey of Errors: Finding Home in Academia

In this autoethnographic exploration, I question the notion of academic home. I argue that as postcolonial academic bodies who are educated in the Western societies, our voices are often questioned or silenced, and our bodies and writing are often surveilled. Hence, the idea of home and belonging is often questioned. I offer decolonizing autoethnography as both a method and academic space to speak from and decolonize the ways in which our diasporic and immigrant bodies can challenge the power structures around us.

Promiscuous Signification

This essay assesses clinical photographs of leprosy patients created by the Hawai‘i Board of Health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or what may be the most extensive visual cataloging of indigenous, Asian, and immigrant bodies in America’s Pacific empire. Building on theoretical and methodological approaches to archives as a process rather than a source, I follow the trail of these clinical images through time and space, from their emergence within a photographic practice of medical management and segregation in Hawai‘i to their prolific circulation in transnational political and medical arenas. Offering spectacular evidence of the racialized and sexualized pathology of colonial peoples, these photographs were tightly regulated but increasingly viewed as clinical erotica after the United States incorporated Hawai‘i as a territory in 1900. The essay further suggests the “affective excess” that can disrupt the photograph’s medical surveillance, as social intimacies and care between Hawaiian patients bloom within the frame.

Who Tells Our Story: Intersectional Temporalities in Hamilton: An American Musical

This article examines the ways in which Hamilton: An American Musical can be read less as a historical account and more as a prediction of a future immigrant, who is called upon to (re)define US nationhood. Keeping with the tempo of the musical as well as the broader issues of time, space and identity it attempts to address, this article is presented as a dialogical rap. The co-authors’ discussion frames Hamilton as an example of the power of unplottable, time-arresting immigrant bodies, to whom the colonial imposition of linear history does not apply. From this framework, the authors’ conversation shifts to critiques of racialised tropes running through the production as well as the inaccessibility of theatre tickets. The goal of this dialogical analysis is to invite further debate about the kinds of immigrant time/space travel that make visible questions of agency, representation and access.

Late 19th and Early 20th Century Native and Immigrant Body Mass Index Values

When traditional measures for health and economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, height and the body mass index (BMI) are now well-accepted measures that reflect net nutrition during economic development. To date, there is no study that compares 19th century BMIs of immigrants and US natives. Individuals in the New South and West had high BMIs, while those in the upper South and Northeast had lower BMIs. Immigrants from Europe had the highest BMIs, while immigrants from Asia were the lowest. African-Americans and mixed-race individuals had greater BMIs than fairer complexioned whites. After accounting for occupational selection, workers in agricultural occupations had greater BMIs. Close proximity to rural agriculture decreased the relative price of food, increased net nutrition, and was associated with higher BMIs.

ASFS Presidential Address 2015, Chatham University

Productive new openings can be found in food studies through provincializing European and American conceptualizations of the aesthetics of good taste and the ethics of foodwork. The liberal arts can be reinvigorated for the twenty-first century by drawing on feminism and everyday Hinduism of care-work and devotion, in part by using the immigrant body not merely as an object of analysis but as a tool kit to open up the epistemological discussion on how we know what to do.

“Immigrants Can Be Deadly”: Critical Discourse Analysis of Racialization of Immigrant Health in the Canadian Press and Public Health Policies

By examining the role of the Canadian press in framing health and social issues of immigrants, the authors highlight the issues of power and social injustice in which immigrant health is constructed and handled by Canada’s health policies. Critical discourse analysis of 273 articles from 10 major Canadian dailies over one decade showed that pre-existing racializing discourses, which treat the immigrant body both as a disease breeder and an irresponsible health fraudster, continue to materialize in contemporary Canadian press coverage. A more balanced and fair media coverage of immigrant health will require deracialization of immigrant health issues as well as the transformation of the Canadian press toward greater inclusivity.

Humanitarian Bodies

On 2006, a Nigerian woman was arrested in the northeast of the Italy and she was charged with the offense of “female genital mutilation” in compliance with Italian Law 7/2006 entitled “provisions concerning the prevention and prohibition of the practice of female genital mutilation”. On 2008 in Bari, in the south, a two-monthold Nigerian infant died following severe haemorrhaging caused by a circumcision performed at home by a compatriot. These two episodes, notwithstanding their difference in context and time, could seem very distant from each other, but these cases are connected exactly at the point where they divide. From the official documents the anthropological analysis focuses on the messages that can be defined as “humanitarian moral”. So the legal implications of these events constitute important precedents and if read, from a gender perspective, help us to shed light on what might be called “differentialist neo-sexism”, which implies the perception of the Other corporeality in the so-called host society. Still, following the two stories sheds more light on what the idea the nation state has regarding the body of immigrants, in general the Others, and in particular on “culturally relevant” treatment of the woman under the law.

Farming while confronting the other: The production and maintenance of boundaries in the borderlands

The alternative food movement encounters many structural conditions as it strives toward more environmentally sustainable and socially just agrifood systems. One of the greatest challenges the movement faces is not turning its back on migrant farmworkers at the same time it creates and experiments with alternative agricultural models. This article explains why there is a gap between an expressed concern with the inequalities faced by migrant farmworkers and the actual advocacy practices necessary to overcome them. To help tease apart the drivers maintaining this gap, I call attention to the social and symbolic boundaries reproduced by a group of people farming organically in San Diego along the United States/Mexico border. I find that in the course of farming in the context of border politics, food activists internalize a number of structural and ideological conditions producing a racialized agricultural political economy, neoliberalism, and the security state. These include the hegemony of certain stereotypes of migrant farmworkers and inherent notions of difference, the hegemony of militarized borders and monitored immigrant bodies, and race and class privilege that manifests through idealizing nature and farming. At the same time, I find that these boundary maintenance practices are open to change, and call attention to the ambiguity expressed by well-meaning organic farming activists as well as more resistant socioecological imaginaries.

High-Precision Measurements of the Brightness Variation of Nereid

Abstract Nereid, the outer satellite of Neptune, has a highly eccentric prograde orbit with a semimajor axis of larger than 200 in units of Neptune's radius, and is classified as an irregular satellite. Although the capture origin of irregular satellites has been widely accepted, several previous studies suggest that Nereid was formed in the circumplanetary disk of Neptune and ejected outward to the present location by Triton. A series of our photometric observations confirm that Nereid's rotation period, 11.5 hr, is stable and nonchaotic, as indicated by Grav, Holman, and Kavelaars (2003, ApJ, 591, L71). The optical colors of Nereid are indistinguishable from those of trans-Neptunian objects and Centaurs, especially from these objects with neutral colors. We also found the consistency of Nereid's rotation period based on the size–rotation distribution of small outer bodies. It is likely that Nereid originated as an immigrant body captured from the heliocentric orbit that was 4–5 AU away from Neptune's orbit.

Identity, Performativity and Queer Immigrant Bodies: A Dominican Perspective

Identity, Performativity and Queer Immigrant Bodies: A Dominican Perspective

The Sanitized Sensorium

ABSTRACT Based on 24 months of fieldwork in Pakistan and Canada with Pakistani women who migrated for work, this article examines the politics of multiculturalism and the construction of the “sanitized body.” I found two contradictory strains of multicultural practice in Canada: on the one hand, the erasure of “difference” with regard to immigrant bodies, on the other, the simultaneous recognition of that very difference. Public discourse in Canada on multiculturalism describes a relinquishing of cultural imperialism and a celebration of “multiness” as demonstrated by cultural festivals or other public celebrations, yet I found an imposition of a dominant culture through government‐funded settlement services that institute new ideals of bodily comportment on immigrants by teaching them how to dress and act. This dual mode of interpellation puts immigrants in an impossible situation in which they must sometimes suitably display their Otherness, and at other times efface their cultural difference. [multiculturalism, immigration, labor, Toronto]

‘Boots for my Sancho’: structural vulnerability among Latin American day labourers in Berkeley, California

This paper addresses the structural vulnerability of Latin American undocumented day labourers in Northern California, as it is expressed in conversations on street corners where they wait for work. The intimate aspects of migrant experience become exemplified in jokes about the Sancho – a hypothetical character who has moved in on a day labourer's family and who enjoys the money he sends home. Joking turns to more serious topics of nostalgia and tensions with family far away, elements that come together with the fears and threats of labour on the corner and affect the way day labourers see themselves. Sexuality is rearticulated in the absence of women and masculinity becomes enmeshed in the contingencies of unregulated work and long-term separation from the people the men support. Together, these elements result in the articulation of threat to the immigrant body itself, which is exemplified by anxieties over homosexual propositions on the corner.

Exploring the Mutual Constitution of Racializing and Medicalizing Discourses of Immigrant Tuberculosis in the Canadian Press

Drawing on critical discourse analysis of Canadian press coverage of the immigrant tuberculosis problem, we expose the complex relationship between press-constructed discourses of immigrant health and current tuberculosis control policies in Canada. The focus of these policies is on screening and surveillance of immigrants rather than addressing social inequalities underlying the problem of immigrant tuberculosis. The biomedical focus and racializing character of current policies were reinforced in the Canadian press by depicting tuberculosis as a biomedical (rather than a social) disease imported to Canada by immigrants. The status of the immigrant body as health threat was produced by and through preexisting and mutually constitutive racializing and medicalizing discourses materialized in press coverage and tuberculosis control policies. Deracialization and demedicalization of health information disseminated in the press are potentially important factors to be considered when revising health policies that would address the socioeconomic and political factors that determine the health status of Canadian immigrants.

Spiderman’s Web and the Governmentality of Electronic Immigrant Detention

The article examines the governmentality of noncustodial forms of immigration control over immigrant bodies. It uses the Spiderman cartoon character Venom (Black Spiderman) as a metaphor for expansive and shape-shifting state sovereign power. This plenary power is a machination of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the courts. Like the venom symbiote it takes form from the state having contact with immigrants. Specifically, the article focuses on electronic detention (alternative to detention, or ATD), which limits an immigrant’s freedom, but is technically considered neither detention nor custody. This legal construction leaves almost no accountability. Thus I argue that ATD initiatives create an extra legal space of unchecked power that is deployed on immigrant bodies, and just like Black Spiderman they allow aggression to be amplified to dangerous result.

Conservation and Cleanliness: Racial and Environmental Purity in Ellen Richards and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Conservation and Cleanliness:Racial and Environmental Purity in Ellen Richards and Charlotte Perkins Gilman Kristen R. Egan (bio) Ellen Richards's 1910 scientific treatise titled Euthenics: the Science of Controllable-Environment promotes environmental cleanliness and the purification of American identity. Euthenics interprets race with a biological lens targeting foreign immigrants. "Contaminated" foreigners threaten much more than the physical health of the nation's citizens: in this text immigrants threaten to ruin the home, and synecdochically the nation, by carrying and spreading two dangerous and invisible perpetrators—germs and undesirable bloodlines. Richards depicts the immigrant body as jeopardizing the spaces of America, suggesting an association between environmental and racial purity that can also be found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland ([1915] 1992). Herland establishes a female nation "pure" in race and space, an achievement established by executing the principles of sanitarianism and environmental conservationism, methods employed in response to a natural disaster and used to prevent future ruin. While critics have discussed how Gilman's female utopia promotes eugenics, few have linked how Gilman, like Richards, associates a clean environment with a clean race. Richards and Gilman wrote during the rise of sanitary science and environmentalism, and both participated in an ideological sanitarianism, a method of purification fed by nineteenth-century science. These texts illustrate how American women were called upon to secure the borders of the home, to sanitize and preserve this space for the future citizens of the nation, maintaining the "boundaries" of whiteness and the "purity" of the home. By the early twentieth century, both sanitary science and environmentalism were on the rise. The work of Ellen Swallow Richards bridged [End Page 77] the concepts of ecology and home economics, and while these seem to be two very different fields, they were clearly connected in her work.1 In 1873 she was the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied chemistry and developed her own concept of environmental science (Clarke 1973, 37, 43).2 Richards saw environment as fundamental to one's potential growth or degeneracy. In an effort to enhance the likelihood of the former, she promoted sanitary science, advocating standards for clean air, food, and water. While not a scientist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was part of the same conversation; taking a feminist standpoint, she believed women should be educated and paid to do domestic labor. Both Richards and Gilman lectured and published works in the field of home economics, and both women were well acquainted with Helen Campbell, another leader of the field.3 When Gilman and Campbell created what they called the Chicago Household Economic Society, they based the project on Ellen Richards's Rumford Kitchen, a model kitchen exhibiting how to make affordable, nutritious food through sanitary practices that Richards presented at the World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893.4 Gilman also advocated for education for women when it came to kitchen practices. In Women and Economics, Gilman writes, "The art and science of cooking involve a large and thorough knowledge of nutritive value and of the laws of physiology and hygiene. As a science, it verges on preventive medicine" (1898, 230). Both Gilman and Richards understood not only the nutritional necessity of better cooking but also the need for sanitary practices in the kitchen to prevent the spread of disease. These sanitary practices promoted by the home economics movement as well as the public health movement were heavily influenced by germ theory. In The Gospel of Germs, Nancy Tomes explains, "Between the 1880s and the 1920s Americans of all ages were subjected to aggressive public health campaigns that taught them the new lessons of the laboratory: that microscopic living particles were the agents of contagion, that sick bodies shed germs into the environment, and that disease spread[s] by seemingly innocuous behaviors such as coughing, sneezing, and spitting, sharing common drinking cups, or failing to wash hands before eating" (1998, 7). Before germ theory, miasma theory pointed to the atmosphere as the source of disease. Since germ theory shifted attention from atmosphere to microscopic germs as the source of disease, one may assume that the environment was no longer identified as a source of contagion. [End...

The Racialization of Islam in American Law

After 9/11, the “Muslim terrorist” trope altered the American understanding of Islam. This article argues that the Muslim terrorist in our popular culture should not be seen as new but within an established tradition of racializing Asian Americans. The article employs three dimensions of racialization: raced body, racial category, and ascribed subordination. The raced body is the “brown” body of immigrants and descendants of immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and Southern Asia. “Muslim” as a racial category has acquired meaning beyond religion and now also describes a racial category: those whose ancestry traces to countries where Islam is significant. Linked to that category are the stereotypes of “terrorist,” “spy,” or “saboteur”—understandings within the tradition of characterizing Asian Americans as permanent, unassimilable foreigners. Inscribing the linked racial category and ascribed subordination of permanent foreignness upon the “brown” raced body is the racialization of Muslims into Muslim terrorists.

The Criminalization of Immigrants as a Racial Project

Contemporary policy responses to unauthorized immigration, we argue, reinforce racialized anxieties by (a) focusing attention on physically distinctive and economically marginalized minorities who are defined as the nation’s immigration“threat,” (b) creating new spaces of enforcement within which racial anxieties flourish and become institutionalized; and thereby (c) racializing immigrant bodies. We examine three federal enforcement policies: (a) the physical border buildup that began in the 1990s, (b) partnerships with local police, and (c) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initiatives to enhance interior enforcement. The result has been the construction of a landscape of institutionalized racial violence embedded in our current immigration regime.

Surgical passports, the EU and Dirty Pretty Things: Rethinking European identity through popular cinema

ABSTRACTIn the last decade and a half, many cultural and social commentators have theorized the reconfiguration of the geopolitical space of the European Union (EU) through the increasing presence of a wide variety of ethnicities and nationalities. This essay takes Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002) as a point of departure in order to analyse how contemporary cinema captures the ambivalent status of illegal immigrants inside the European global cityscape. First, it explains how the film represents the immigrants' subjectivity in terms of their split consciousness between their homeland and their country of adoption. Second, it scrutinizes how the immigrant social body may or may not function as an effective actor in the social field. Third, it studies how Frears utilizes a wide range of generic devices to situate his film into the realm of popular culture. Fourth, it defines the concept of popular cinema and evaluates its role as a form of political agency in the contemporary historical milieu. To conclude, this essay questions European cinema as an all-encompassing concept that fails to capture the cultural and linguistic diversity of the European films that it is supposed to define.

Diasporic Feeling and Displaced Nostalgia: A Case Study: <i>Import-eksport</i> and <i>Blodsbåxnd</i>

Diasporic Feeling and Displaced Nostalgia: A Case Study: Import-eksport and Blodsbåxnd Adriana Margareta Dancus In the last two decades, multiculturalism in Norway has provoked a storm of public feelings that hijack the political sphere as a domain of rational argumentation and decision making. The larger the immigrant population grows, the more polarized and emotional the debate on the future of multicultural Norway becomes. Norwegian films are an integral part of this debate in mobilizing affective power either to solidify the divisions along identity lines or to expand our affective abilities to understand others and ourselves. In this article, I claim that the display of the immigrant body on screen allows for affective performances that often betray pre-modernity, authenticity, and intensity. These performances have nothing to do with historical reality and accuracy, but rather are best understood as symbolic acts of difference that introduce a reading of immigrant affect as pre-modern, authentic, and intense as compared to the official, ethnically Norwegian national affect. This idealization prompts the Norwegian audiences to identify nostalgically with the immigrant. The latter come to represent fiery and untamed feelings that have been dulled by the prosperity Norway has enjoyed following the oil boom in the 1970s. Gangsterland and the practice of arranged marriage are favorite contexts that justify the display of the immigrant body. Against the backdrop of socio-political discourses that connect Norway to peace and gender equality, gangsters and patriarchs work not to demonize the ethnic others, but instead contribute to their exoticization. In order to support these claims, I will look closely at two films: Import-eksport (Import-Export, 2005) and Blodsbåxnd (Mirush, [End Page 247] 2007). Both films were generously sponsored by the Norwegian Film Institute (nfi), and Norwegian film bureaucrats and media held great expectations for each production. Import-Export was enthusiastically advertised as Norway's first truly multicultural film directed by the Norwegian-Pakistani Khalid Hussain with a multicultural cast. Mirush was Marius Holst's third feature, a highly anticipated production by an acclaimed young director who had previously introduced the Norwegian public to heartfelt descriptions and sophisticated imagery. Despite the media's excitement and the nfi's expectations, both films had a modest box office opening, of which Import-Export did notably worse. Although neither film sold as well as their producers hoped, they still merit serious consideration in the context of the Norwegian socio-political debates on multiculturalism and the immigrants' role in the future of the Norwegian social democracy. According to Statistics Norway as of November 2010, first and second-generation immigrants accounted for 11.4 percent of the total population of Norway ("Innvandring og innvandrere"). Of these, more than half come from Asia, Africa, or Latin America. The county of Oslo has the highest concentration of immigrants: almost 27 percent of the population. While the influx of immigrants from the Western world has been relatively stable, the numbers of immigrants from eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have almost quadrupled since the 1980s. Anthropologists (Eriksen; Gullestad) and political scientists (Ingebritsen) draw attention to the fact that non-Western immigrants, and Muslims in particular, have had the most difficulty integrating into the Norwegian society. A significant factor at work here is the racist discourses that circulate in the public arena in Norway and that systematically read these non-Western immigrants as potentially threatening to the national project. The media has also helped to reinforce the social, political, economic, and cultural apartheid between the ethnic Norwegians (the taxpayers, "the generous givers," "the adopting parents") and the immigrant groups ("the greedy takers," "the ungrateful adoptees") by obsessively covering stories about immigrant crime and other practices such as arranged marriage and genital mutilation. In response to media debates, some immigrants have turned to literature as a more appropriate site to articulate their own experiences in Norway. Michael Konupek, Khalid Hussain, Nasim Karim, Bertrand Besigye, Kadafi Zaman, Dong He, and Pedro Carmona-Alvarez, to name only [End Page 248] a few, have made important literary contributions to the debate on immigration, multiculturalism, exile, assimilation, and integration (Kongslien). A different situation presents itself in Norwegian feature films produced in the last decade. Despite the fact that...

Citizenship and the Immigrant Body

The question of citizenship and the manifold forms of violence experi enced by the remain important issues for feminist and race studies scholars. In a recent online essay critic Lisa Lowe (2008) observes that there is currently proposed legislation that seeks to criminalize more than twelve million undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States. In the same vein, the emotional and often racially charged 2009 debates regarding Barack Obamas controversial birth certificate? recently revived by Sarah Palin on a right-wing radio show (Gay 2004)? and the movement against health care reform attest to the lingering American fear of the noncitizen who encroaches on American soil and