Transnational Forms Research Articles

Double Decolonization

Following the outbreak of COVID-19, there emerged a popular narrative that East Asians are submissively complying control measures because they have been conditioned by Confucianism. Taking this narrative as a point of departure, this article reflects on why and how East Asia has been essentialized as a historical and distant other and left out of post-decolonial conversations from a religious studies perspective. Proposing a framework of “double decolonization,” the article historicizes the co-production of such orientalist narrative by both global and regional hegemonies for nationalistic, imperialistic, or other ideological reasons, hence the need to double-decolonize such essentialization. Furthermore, this article emphasizes the diffused and socially engaged nature of East Asia religions against acontextual imaginations underlying the World Religions Paradigm (WRP) and introduces the notion of “transnationally Asian” to highlight the transnational nature of local hegemonies and the transnational formation of agency against such hegemonies.

Famine and ‘hongersnood’ as transnational memory: Literary legacies of the 1840s food crises in Ireland and the Netherlands

The potato blight in Ireland (1845–1849) and the dire effects of the Phytophthora infestans in the Netherlands (1845–1847) have been investigated primarily through a socioeconomical lens. The cultural practices that have shaped and transmitted the memories of these famine pasts, however, require further examination, especially in connection to the Dutch potato hunger. This article investigates the cultural legacies of these two concurrent famines as both transgenerational and transnational forms of famine memory. Focusing on literary texts, and in particular children’s and young adult novels, as carriers of famine recollections, this study demonstrates recurrent narrative scripts which go back to earliest cultural representations of these hunger crises. While tropes, plotlines and characterisations are thus a form of transgenerational prosthetic memory, the cultural repertoires used to convey famine memory also appear to be transnational, in that Dutch and Irish famine literatures are structured around similar narrative templates.

Can Spatial Proximity to Another Country Drive Short-distance Transnationalism? Evidence from Social Ties in Three European Border Regions

ABSTRACT This article draws inspiration from social network analysis (SNA) to investigate the impact of spatial proximity on the geography of strong social ties in three European border regions. We consider cross-border friendship and kinship as a measure of short-distance transnationalism, examine the conditions under which the latter is likely to emerge, and systematically compares our findings with “traditional” forms of transnationalism. The study is based on a large-scale and representative quantitative survey (N = 3,215) conducted in the Geneva, Lille, and Basque border regions in order to assess the impact of cross-border integration intensity on the inter-personal relationships of all residents, regardless of their migration experiences. The results indicate that only 11.9% of the residents reported having at least one strong cross-border tie. Binomial regression models are used to demonstrate that cross-border ties are not solely shaped by proximity, but also depend on individuals’ socioeconomics, on their mobility experiences, and on contextual factors. This article shows that cross-border integration primarily fosters cross-border friendships rather than kinships, and that cross-border ties are not evenly distributed among the population. Individuals born in the studied border regions do not have the highest levels of short-distance transnationalism, raising a discussion about the importance of promoting cross-border rootedness.

A relational and genealogical approach to populism: The cases of Russia, Turkey and the United States

ABSTRACT Studies on religious populism are on the rise. They are located within the three main theoretical approaches of populism: ideational, performative, and strategic. Building on these three components, this paper proposes a comprehensive analysis by creating an ideal type of the relations between religion and populism. To that effect, it utilizes the relational paradigm of populism from Pierre Ostiguy in conjunction with Ernest Laclau's concept of sedimented practices and applies a genealogical method to analyse why and how religion plays a role in populist politics. This combination emphasises the fluidity of the interactions between religion and populism, their contingency on contextualised political cultures as well as on the often neglected transnational forms of religion. It focuses on two aspects of this role that have been less discussed: 1) the religious actions toward the political establishment 2) the transnational dimension of the populist politics based on religion.

The missing link: The significance of institutional interdependencies and dynamics of action for transnational labour regulation in multinational companies

AbstractIn recent decades, both academic research and industrial relations practice have been increasingly concerned with whether, and to what extent, transnational forms of labour regulation might constitute a countervailing power to globally operating companies. And although numerous studies have analysed the various instruments and institutions of transnational labour regulation – such as Global Framework Agreements, trade union networks and European or World Works Councils – as yet there has been little in the way of exploration of their dynamics or interconnections. Against this backdrop and based on a comparison of three case studies of multinational companies, we focus on what we consider to be the ‘missing link’ between the dynamics of social action and the interdependencies of institutions in order to explain how transnational institution building can contribute to the development of transnational labour regulation. Specifically, we investigate how different pathways to transnational labour regulation have been the outcomes of actions taken by actors in a multinational corporation and how, in turn, these developments shaped the dynamics of subsequent action. The study underlines that those pathways can only be properly understood when seen in terms of social actors, their power resources and their willingness and capacities to deploy them.

The financial character of policing in Tunisia: collusions, extraversion and the criminalization of informality

This article attempts to shed light on the development of a financial/security assemblages in Tunisia, from an international political sociology perspective that looks at the development of practices of security and policing from a transnational and postcolonial vantage point. Financial policing in the Global South nowadays takes largely shape through the combination of anti-money laundering (AML) and counter financing of terrorism (CFT) agendas, which are systematically and racially coupled to target Asian or African contexts and, as such, largely exclude money and profits benefitting high capital concentration contexts and actors that is usually laundered for tax evasion. To advance the argument, the article first aligns with theoretical sociological accounts that deconstruct and overcome methodological nationalism and exceptionalism of analyses of coercive power in Tunisia and the region. It contributes to these perspectives by mobilizing together concepts of entanglement, assembled and collusion for understanding the practices and effects of the AML/CFT agenda. These concepts serve to illuminate the co-constitutive (entangled) character of these practices, while bearing their negotiated dependent extraverted configurations, but also their complex and networked (assembled) character. Finally, they serve to identify relations of legitimation (collusions) that follow horizontal lines while enabling, in particular critical junctures, discursive and material manipulations used to recentralize power vertically, ultimately repositioning the ‘security custodians’ around central presidential power: an effect rendered particularly sharp by the self-coup of 2021 and its unfolding consequences. The article then attempts to give empirical salience to the theoretical argument by tracing the processual developments of financial and pre-emptive intelligence from transnational forms of blacklisting (which affected Tunisia in 2018) to profiling, tracking, fund freezing practices that unfold contextually. This process generates three visible effects in the Tunisian context. Firstly, it generates a legal expansion of the financial policing assemblage, including in its repressive outcomes, and the making of exception that has to be understood in its performative, experimental and relational character, and not as ontologically absolute. Secondly, the related creation of new institutions that, although having little power on their own and being substantially controlled by the presidential power and that of the Ministry of Interior, are embedded in transnational networks and serve to channel extraverted strategies vis à vis donors and external partners. The Commission National de Lutte Contre le Terrorisme (CNLCT) and especially the Commission Tunisienne d’Analyse Financière (CTFA), this latter receiving the bulk of attention here, with all their different functional and political significances, are a case in point. Experiments with new technologies, such as blockchain, come into play here (and in line with a broader trend visible in the whole African continent) not only as extraversion practices to reassure investors in European countries and international economic institutions, and consequently exit sanctioning lists, but as they strengthen the contemporary experimental and infrastructural character of 'security' which maintains and reproduces its regimes. Finally, the third effect considered is the disqualification and criminalisation of the informal economy, considered here through the observation of how hawala channels and exchange networks for money, good and people circulation acquire centrality to legitimize these attempts at control, whose effectiveness must be relativized, but which nevertheless have violent and disqualifying consequences for vulnerable economies at the Tunisian border and beyond. This process is accelerated by the progressive conflation of informal money circulation channels with mobility and migrant transit, and of money couriers (passeurs de fonds) with smugglers.

Mexican Migrant Elite Empresarios: Transnational Entrepreneurship and Elite Formation

This essay analyzes an emerging transnational Mexican migrant elite – a new social and economic group that has emerged not from established elites or privileged backgrounds, but from poor campesino families. Most of these (male) entrepreneur migrants entered the United States without documents and worked in unskilled jobs for extended periods. Eventually, they began to establish their businesses in New York and New Jersey and, within 20 years, accumulated unprecedented wealth. The entrepreneurs are successful in the US and Mexico, distinct from other transnational migrant groups. They have constructed transnational forms of class mobility and citizenship and innovative socio-economic, political, and solidarity networks shaped by neoliberalism. The essay examines how these transnational entrepreneurs became part of such a recent emerging elite in the US and Mexico. Furthermore, these entrepreneur migrants have established political relations with local politicians on both sides of the border. They have gone from being undocumented workers to becoming “Tortilla Kings” or millionaire importers of Mexican goods.

Reproductive geopolitics: Governing in/fertile bodies in Mexico’s past and present

Building on work in feminist geopolitics, we discuss how the governance of in/fertility affects the value assigned to different bodies and the question whose bodies and lives are considered as worthy of reproducing in Mexico. To reveal the geopolitical entanglements of past and present forms of reproductive governance, we investigate the transnational connections of Mexico’s fertility network with Spain and the United States of America. We juxtapose visual materials from political campaigns of the past with advertisements for present-day fertility clinics to trace the reproductive geopolitics of (post)colonialism that shape current developments, practices, and discourses in this transnational fertility network. Each pair of visuals exemplifies particular times and spaces of reproductive geopolitics. The paper reveals how the contemporary Mexican fertility market is shaped by transnational forms of reproductive governance. We employ visual juxtaposition to provoke readers to think about the entanglement of present-day fertility markets with past reproductive geopolitics.

The Arts of Antifascist Black Transnationalism during the Spanish Civil War

This article asserts the critical role of art and literature in the resistance against fascism by situating the aesthetic work of African Americans as central to the transnational phenomenon of the Spanish Civil War. This article highlights the prehistory to the African American support of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 when news of Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia galvanized members of the Harlem Renaissance. These two conflicts triangulated the imaginaries of the United States, Spain, and Ethiopia, producing a distinct form of antifascist Black transnationalism that extends work by Brent Hayes Edwards, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, and Nadia Nurhussein. To manifest this argument, this article examines Paul Robeson’s speeches at rallies in London that he later reprinted in his autobiography Here I Stand (1958) and Claude McKay’s posthumously published novel Amiable with Big Teeth about 1936 Harlem. Using archival research, this article analyzes the collage aesthetic of the scrapbook that the activist Thyra J. Edwards compiled in 1937 to record the actions of the Negro People’s Committee to Aid Spain. In sum, this article demonstrates the integral role of African American visual culture and literature to the development of twentieth-century antifascist ideology within a transnational perspective.

Formalised transnationalism in the informal Nigerian video film industry: streaming, audience re-imaginations and production reconfigurations

ABSTRACT This article examines the implications of the transnational dynamics of streaming for the Nigerian video film industry (Nollywood) considering its historical predominance of informality in cross-border circulation. Right from its emergence in 1992 as a straight-to-video film industry, Nollywood has been significantly transnational in distribution albeit through the complex web of transnational piracy and other informal networks. This mode of informal transnationalism orchestrated wide visibility for the industry, but it brought minimal revenues for producers who were desirous of much formalised distribution system to connect to transnational capital and audiences. Since 2010, streaming has become progressively integrated into Nollywood’s distribution eco-system and is introducing much formalised transnational consumption practices. Adopting the critical transnationalism approach (Higbee & Lim, 2010; Shaw, 2018), this paper draws from semi-structured interviews with 35 stakeholders in Nollywood and critical analysis of trade press. It argues that streaming has opened formal pathways to transnational capital and audiences hitherto unseen in Nollywood and is orchestrating audience fragmentations and reconfigurations of production practices in the industry. The paper extends existing debates on critical analysis of how specific forms of transnationalism impacts the quotidian practices in a media industry as well as the cultural implications.

From Global to Local: Examining the Localization Strategies of Transnational Format Reality TV The Voice of China

From Global to Local: Examining the Localization Strategies of Transnational Format Reality TV The Voice of China

Place and transmemory in California Italian American literary narratives: Dorothy Bryant's Miss Giardino

In this article, I propose to think of spaces as sites of production and manifestation of memory, which, in turn, constitutes a transnational formation, one that can hardly be discursively fixed. In particular, my analysis of Dorothy Bryant's 1978 novel Miss Giardino uncovers how transmemory, or the intergenerational transmission of memory from diasporic to ethnic subjects, complicates ideas of Italian belonging. I turn to the study of space, with an emphasis on the multiethnic neighborhood of The Mission, in the east-central part of San Francisco, to address the mediation between Italian diasporic past and interethnic present. While acknowledging that forms of inherited memory (or postmemory), such as class memory, affect the social practice of place intergenerationally, I also aim to show that in transmemory spaces are made differently meaningful. Ultimately, reframing spaces of Italian migrations through the lens of transmemory offers a way to move us forward from impasses in Transnational Italian Studies and diaspora debates that assign to memory an overly static and national paradigm.

Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianisms

ABSTRACT Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms in the last two decades have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. This introduction examines how different states, laws and communities have engaged with queer rights discourse with a range of outcomes. It argues that despite a spate of recent progressive legislations, there is no direct correlation between LGBTQI+ rights and liberal governance in South Asia. Framing contributions that take up different iterations of queer rights and authoritarianism in South Asia and its diaspora, the article outlines how LGBTQI+ actors’ negotiation of authoritarian regimes has produced fragile coalitions and new transnational formations.

Introduction: Against citizenship: Visual belongings and transnational affects

This special issue “Against Citizenship: Visual belongings and transnational affects” gathers contributions that address the affective and transnational networks that position themselves against or confront the “fantasy” of an egalitarian citizenship, understanding that this notion is not only intrinsically segregating, but aleatory and artificial, in the same way that the creation and existence of states are. The framework of the issue is the possibility given by cultural practices to articulate and perform post-national, denationalized or transnational forms of citizenship in a world characterized by globalization, post-colonial societies and migratory movements. Through these cultural practices a variety of political communities try to solve the restrictions that the State imposes to differentiated types of citizenship or even to cross its limits, be them geographical or juridical, and a create a different sense of belonging and recognition. The struggles for the rights around intersections, such as race, gender or disability, that are fundamental to the internal exclusion of the “citizens” of a state, are key in questioning the political debt that citizenship has with its supposed cultural homogeneity, as post-colonial countries have experienced in the last years. In this sense, notions such as identity, belonging and affect motivate the needs and roadmaps of communities excluded from citizenship, but seeking precisely to provide radically opposite definitions and possibilities which guarantee the attenuation of vulnerability and, above all, the right to be, live and exist.

Beyond Rape Culture? Toward A Theory of the Work of Rape

Beyond Rape Culture? Toward A Theory of the Work of Rape

Brokering immigrant transnationalism: Remittances, family reunification, and private refugee sponsorship in neoliberal Canada

Using the case study of Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program, we show how neoliberalization heightens the power of non-immigrant civilians to broker immigrants’ transnationalism. Private sponsors respond differently to two common and interrelated forms of refugee transnationalism in which they are structurally empowered to intervene. They encourage family reunification while discouraging remittances, although the former often depends on the fulfillment of the latter. Reflecting on these power imbalances, we classify private refugee sponsorship as part of a North American trend to devolve the management of noncitizens from state actors to ordinary citizens. We conclude by encouraging scholars of transnationalism to look down and investigate how non-immigrant private civilians in receiving countries increasingly shape newcomers’ cross-border linkages. We also urge them to look up and attend to the broader neoliberal context empowering and structuring the behavior of citizen brokers.

Disobedient Performance in Han Han’s “Babae Ka”

Abstract This article seeks to introduce readers to the artist Han Han, whose identification as a first-generation immigrant woman, nurse, and rapper highlights a unique contribution to Filipino Canadian critique of colonial and racial relations in Canada. I examine the 2019 music video for Han Han’s single, “Babae Ka,” and consider how it reimagines local, global, and transnational forms of queerness and feminist power. How does this audio-visual piece reproduce and respond to conversations around diaspora, Indigeneity, and gendered forms of labour? Moving between the sonic and the visual, I argue that Han Han enacts a critical practice of “disobedient performance” as she plays with a vernacular understanding of Philippine gender and sexuality and explores the nuances of a performative construction of femininity encompassed in the term “babae” (Tagalog for “woman”).

How Far Can Chicken Feet Travel?

Abstract This article analyses Chinese women's e-entrepreneurship of trading nostalgic and/or contested goods in the disputed sovereign borders and virtual marketplace in the borderland between China and Taiwan. Using physical and digital ethnography, and drawing on the case study of the journey of chicken feet and other goods traded through WeChat by Chinese women in Taiwan, this article shows how the online and offline trails of these goods and the virtual marketplace generate new forms of transnationalism and connectedness between the two rivaling societies. Calling attention to Chinese women's emotions and nostalgia embedded in their e-entrepreneurship, their goods’ geographical movements, and their social networks, these findings enrich our understanding of transnational entrepreneurship as well as migrants’ agency-making and digital connectivity. However, highlighting how the worsening Taiwan-China relationship has diminished micro e-entrepreneurship, this article also reveals the vulnerability, instability, and uncertainty of the virtual marketplace, which is threatened by the politics of sovereignty contestation.

Urban surveillance and crime governance in Bogotá

This paper analyses how recent changes on crime governance strategies in Bogotá have carried a modification on how surveillance is put into practice in the city. We argue that the reduction of the violence linked to the armed conflict along with the implementation of transnational forms of governing security led surveillance practices to be focused on public spaces instead of individuals. For public spaces to be surveilled, a classification between secure and insecure spaces has been created, which rests upon an esthetic ideal of how those spaces (should) look like. This shift from biographical surveillance to geographical surveillance implies that individuals stop being the main target of classification and control. In their stead, public space is the main object of surveillance. Yet, the fact that individuals are not the core of this governance technology does not mean that they do not experience the consequences of it. The meanings that are arranged around the esthetics of public spaces indorse practices of self-surveillance in which citizens should watch over the city, and protect themselves from crime. • The concern to reduce crime rates has shaped a form of surveillance that is structured on the theatricalization of public spaces. • Biographical surveillance was replaced by a technology of geographical surveillance . • The line between those who watch and those who are watched in public spaces blurs, and gives rise to a new type of individual. • Social control techniques less visible than biographical surveillance and the punitive system are created. • Individuals stop being the main target of surveillance. Instead, public space is the main object.

Emotions, inequalities and crises: Ecuadorian migrants in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article examines narratives of transnational belonging and transnational practices of care between a group of Ecuadorian migrants in Spain and Italy and their families and friends in Ecuador during the first semester of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Drawing on the concepts of transnational affective economies (Wilding et al., International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020, 23, 639), the circulation of care (Baldassar & Merla, Transnational families, migration and the circulation of care: understanding mobility and absence in family life. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, London, New York, 2014) and transnational forms of belonging (Boccagni & Baldassar, Emotions, Space and Society, 2015, 16, 73), we look at how despite their still precarious social and labour conditions in destination-which were exacerbated during the pandemic-Ecuadorian migrants activated different forms of belonging and transnational care. Findings reveal that emotions had a crucial role in enabling the transnational circulation of care between family members and friends and a revival of migrants' sense of national belonging. We argue that the crisis generated by COVID-19 was the occasion for migrants to revisit their sense of belonging as well as their awareness of south-north inequalities since they experienced the crisis simultaneously in Ecuador, Spain and Italy. At the same time, emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger and concern for their families and communities triggered subjective understandings of local and global inequalities that reaffirmed their migration project.