Migrant Bodies Research Articles

Coding Intensive Movement with Technologies of Visibility: Alien Affects

This is an essay about how alienhood is made. Alienhood is a material, affective, and political condition of that is manufactured by the State’s technologies of visibility. Immigration control in the US relies on enhanced technologies of perception to surveil the intensive movement differences (alien affects) of migrants to control their extensive movements—their flow. Alien affects are the micro-flows of intensity that when cast upon the surface of the State, glimmer with difference, augmenting the ways alien migrant bodies move into and across the surfaces of US statehood. This makes the process of alienation a political process that involves governance of migrating bodies through a multitude of technologies aimed at surveilling and controlling both citizen communities and non-citizen communities. This essay explores the relationship between extensive movement and intensive movement and what this relationship means in the context of affect studies. It also describes how State power is expressed through layers of articulable and visible expression that is distributed across landscapes of US statehood to control the flows of the bodies. Lastly, the essay invites those invested in affect studies to find more links between the fields of rhetoric and affect studies, to study the technological production of alienhood in our societies of control, and to consider what adopting a movement politics can offer that ascribing to an identity politics may not.

Reframing sociologies of ethnicity and migration in encounters with Chinese London.

In this paper I argue that the intersecting sociologies of ethnicity and migration work from a series of interconnected blind spots hindering effective analysis of the current UK situation. Both operate analytically within the limitations of an 'immigrant problem' framework; are overinvested in state agendas; privilege a nation state analysis; are narrowly focused on distributions of migrant bodies, and on receiving, at the expense of sending, contexts. Exploring these limitations with data derived from a modest small-scale qualitative study of young Chinese migrants in London, I argue for a reframing along four dimensions. Firstly, in an era of elite migration, sociology could reach beyond its immigrant problem framework and open up to a broader range of UK migrant ethnicities and circumstances. Secondly, a stronger focus on cities as the scale on which lives are lived, and through which diverse streams of translocal activity are routed, would open new avenues of sociological exploration. Thirdly, including translocal activities connected with distributions of ethnic migrant bodies, such as capital transfers, would broaden its focus, taking migration and ethnicity more centrally into the analysis of globalization as one of its constituting practices. Finally, paying attention to sending, as well as arrival cities, reveals migrants' thinking and shapes the ways in which they live, as my data shows. The Chinese are both one of the UK's neglected minorities, and one of its fastest growing populations. They are a good example of new UK migrants and they bring globalization's realignment with the rising significance of China to the UK.

Migration and Identities in Chika Unigwe’s Novels

Monumental dispersals caused by the phenomenon of migration greatly affect the identities of people. Much like the process of globalization, migration is highly sexualized and gendered. To this extent, it is necessary to centralize women and their peculiar experiences in migration discourses and theories. Beyond the usual focus on the economics, politics and sociology of migration, which at any rate do not often adequately address gender-specific migratory experiences; this study takes a literary route that considers the fictional representations of migrant women in two of the novels of Chika Unigwe: The Phoenix (2005) and On Black Sisters’ Street (2008). The focus here is to underscore the validity and significance of gender as an imperative analytical premise in contemporary literary debates particularly by African migrants. In demonstrating how the inflections of gender portend different outcomes for men and women, the study significantly uncovers how the woman’s body is simultaneously the site of physical and symbolic migration. The essay traces the movement in transition and the impact of these and new environment on the bodies of female migrants and how the embodied motifs of migration ultimately alter the identities and realities of migrant African women in particular. In all, the essay hopes to expand some of the current theorizations on the new directions in the development of the fictional representations of Nigerian women as well as to contextualize the role of the emigre author in these developments.

Migrant bodies as targets of security policies: Central Americans crossing Mexico’s vertical border

Migrant bodies as targets of security policies: Central Americans crossing Mexico’s vertical border

Infrastructure Aesthetics and the Crisis of Migrancy

Research Article| March 01 2017 Infrastructure Aesthetics and the Crisis of Migrancy Nicholas Gamso Nicholas Gamso NICHOLAS GAMSO teaches cultural studies and environmental history at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2017) 44 (5): 10–14. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2017.44.5.10 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nicholas Gamso; Infrastructure Aesthetics and the Crisis of Migrancy. Afterimage 1 March 2017; 44 (5): 10–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2017.44.5.10 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Repatriation of human remains following death in international travellers.

Death during international travel and the repatriation of human remains to one's home country is a distressing and expensive process. Much organization is required involving close liaison between various agencies. A review of the literature was conducted using the PubMed database. Search terms included: 'repatriation of remains', 'death', 'abroad', 'tourism', 'travel', 'travellers', 'travelling' and 'repatriation'. Additional articles were obtained from grey literature sources and reference lists. The local national embassy, travel insurance broker and tour operator are important sources of information to facilitate the repatriation of the deceased traveller. Formal identification of the deceased's remains is required and a funeral director must be appointed. Following this, the coroner in the country or jurisdiction receiving the repatriated remains will require a number of documents prior to providing clearance for burial. Costs involved in repatriating remains must be borne by the family of the deceased although travel insurance may help defray some of the costs. If the death is secondary to an infectious disease, cremation at the site of death is preferred. No standardized procedure is in place to deal with the remains of a migrant's body at present and these remains are often not repatriated to their country of origin. Repatriation of human remains is a difficult task which is emotionally challenging for the bereaving family and friends. As a travel medicine practitioner, it is prudent to discuss all eventualities, including the risk of death, during the pre-travel consultation. Awareness of the procedures involved in this process may ease the burden on the grieving family at a difficult time.

The Ambivalent Autonomy of Mobile “Pocăiți” between Vicovu de Sus, Romania and Turin, Italy after 1989

AbstractIntra-EU labour migration literature is fairly limited within migration studies and it has seldom considered migrants' embodied experiences and processes of subjectivation as a constitutive element of translocal economic transformations. The present paper focuses on the popular economies enacted by a segment of the migrant working class moving from Vicovu de Sus in Suceava district, Romania to Turin, Italy after 1989 as entangled in the production of “neoliberalism from below” (Gago, 2015). Mobilizing oral histories collected during an ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2012 and 2013, I will present some aspects related to the fields ofproductionandreproductionwithin the movements of migrants belonging to a pentecostal community affiliated to theCultul Penticostal – Biserica lui Dumnezeu Apostolică. Pentecostalism is here understood as a performative regime of truth and practices (Foucault, 1987; Marshall, 2009), through which migrant bodies perform processes of subjectivation to actively “inhabit” the borders of the State and Capital. Bukovinean pentecostal discourse, through an entrepreneurial drive, a cultural shift towards material prosperity and a strict gendered division of labour, seems to have fostered the creation of a self-organized translocal community whose economic practices obey/re-enact rather than escape/re-signify the dynamics of exploitation and dispossession proper of Romania's peripheral incorporation into contemporary global regimes of production, accumulation and division of labour.

Death as the border: Managing missing migrants and unidentified bodies at the EU's Mediterranean frontier

The paper explores how the management of migrant bodies by national and EU authorities reflects particular understandings of contemporary borders and how the failure to address such bodies has implications far from the frontier. The study of the management both of the dead and of the data that can serve to identify missing migrants, can benefit our understanding of the contemporary border, and has to date received only limited scholarly attention. To address this gap we draw on field research carried out on the Greek island of Lesbos, one of the key migrant entry points to the EU, that has seen repeated incidents of deadly shipwrecks. Based on interviews with families of migrants and local stakeholders the paper explores how death at the border introduces novel – and often invisible – borders and categories of inclusion and exclusion. By shedding light on the experiences of the families of the dead we aspire to introduce a critical set of actors who have been marginalized from the study of the border. In exploring the remote effects of deaths on such families in migrant countries of origin, the paper shows that bordering practices have transnational impacts at the human level, thereby broadening our conceptualization of the border.

Low-Intensity Necropolitics: Slow Violence and Migrant Bodies in Latin American Films

This article studies the gradual emergence within Latin American cinema of a necropolitics of migration. This necropolitics identifies the bodies of migrants as the natural receptacles where society may deposit its negative affect. The recurrent representation in film of migrant bodies as heavily policed, wounded, violated, raped, dismembered, and, eventually, as dead corpses constitutes a symbolic form of "slow violence." Through the analysis of a selected group of Latin American films ranging from the classic Espaldas mojadas (Alejandro Galindo, 1955) to the pseudo-documentary ¿Quién es Dayani Cristal? (Marc Silver, 2013), the article chronicles the emergence of the Latin American migrant body as the central motif of the migration-film genre in the Americas. As they set up to denounce the injustices connected to migration, these films end up reducing migrant subjects to the condition of victimized bodies. Through their transnational journeys, migrants bring traditional notions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism to a crisis. With their emphasis on representing them as victims, these films symbolically collaborate in rebuilding the very borders these migrant bodies transgress.

Language, integration, and investment: The regulation of diversity in the context of unemployment

AbstractDrawing on an ethnography in regional employment offices in a French-German canton in Switzerland, it is the aim of this article to articulate the complexities involved in the practices revolving around and geared towards the role of language competences in the process of professional reintegration, particularly so with regards to migrants who speak a different language. When comparing two cases of unemployed migrant job seekers and the variable treatment by their respective consultants, we will discuss the logics, ideologies, and discourses underlying the institutional regulation of the diverse body of unemployed migrants. We argue that in particular two discourses emerged in our fieldwork that seem to frame the variable approaches: the discourse of

Missing Migrants and the Politics of Naming: Names Without Bodies, Bodies Without Names

The essay asks what naming a body does, politically. It begins by examining practices of memory when people are missing after wars, terrorist attacks, or disappearances: when we have names without bodies. It then turns to cases of migrant bodies: bodies displaced from their established location, without documentation or recognition by governments. When those who are already missing in this way meet their deaths, they become unidentified decedents or bodies without names: undocumented dead who are doubly disappeared. The responses to these bodies reveal a tension between the care and concern they arouse and the exclusionary politics they reflect.

El examen de los cuerpos: Hombres saludables, óptimos y productivos durante los procesos de contratación de braceros, 1942–1964

This article argues that in the process of social interactions between men aspiring to be contracted as braceros (natives of Jerez, Zacatecas in Mexico), and politicians, doctors, cotton producers and contractors, both in Mexico and the U.S., notions of optimal, healthy bodies vs. disabled, sick and unproductive bodies were constructed. Such a system of inclusion and exclusion of migrant bodies is analyzed through the process of four evaluations (examinations) experienced by aspiring laborers during the recruitment processes of the Bracero Program.

Migrant bodies and the materialization of belonging in Sweden

Immigration and transnational adoption are both manifestations of the pervasive dislocations that characterize the contemporary era. Each illuminates as well the double movement of assimilation and internal exclusion through which racisms that are a heritage of colonialism are expanded and reactivated in the metropolitan centers of western Europe and North America. In this process, race is spatialized, different forms of migrant bodies are produced, and familiar logics of belonging that link person to place are transformed. The differential politics of adoption and immigration in late twentieth-century Sweden shed light on this process of racialization and the affective economies through which it is realized, as that nation pursues a multicultural project in which ‘Swedishness’ becomes ‘the measure of everything.’

Experiencing exclusion and reacting to stereotypes? Navigating borders of the migrant body

In her seminal work on the body, Robyn Longhurst (1994) outlines that the body can be seen as the ‘geography closest in’. However, in contemporary society, when restrictions are placed upon the body and the body is subjected to boundary making and territorialisation, how does the geography of the body begin to change? The paper investigates the way in which emotional experiences of situated bodies alter over time and how public perceptions of particular (migrant) bodies changes the spaces through which they are materialised. It critically discusses the specific ways in which female migrants' bodies may be bordered in place and how particular stereotypes surrounding the migrant body lead to a very particular sense of territoriality. Territory has been defined as ‘a portion of geographic space which is claimed or occupied by a person or group of persons or by an institution’ (Storey D 2001). This paper looks at how territory is inscribed on, in and through the body, utilising the migrant body as an example that enacts and performs particular aspects of territory as a response to the classificatory stereotypes that challenge it. Drawing on feminist embodied research in Singapore, the paper demonstrates the different ways in which female migrants' bodies operate on the margins of society, creating specific territorial borders around their bodies. Discussions of the experiences of foreign domestic workers and expatriates in Singapore highlight how these bodies are stigmatised and categorised, demonstrating how social and cultural separations lead to a re‐territorialising and renegotiation of bodies.

El otro viaje: muerte y retorno entre los migrantes nahuas de México

Se aborda el retorno de los cuerpos de migrantes muertos y sus implicaciones sociales en comunidades nahuas del Alto Balsas, Guerrero, con el fin de entender los rituales y símbolos que imponen las lógicas migratorias nacionales e internacionales, en las que el control de las fronteras de los regímenes administrativos de los Estados nacionales se hace patente. Documentado con investigación de campo, el tema invita a pensar en el cambio y la tensión en los referentes culturales a partir de la organización colectiva inter y transnacional de un pueblo con valores mesoamericanos en la práctica del ritual funerario.

Economic Crisis and Migration

This article develops a perspective on African migrant integration, reflecting on the ‘visualization’ of migrant experience. It formulates some considerations on how integration of migrants can be captured, drawing on empirical material from street photography in modern-day Greece. The main research question concerns the role of visual images as sites for the construction and depiction of social difference. In that sense, their meaning goes beyond their content and they act as visual representations of discourses. The paper addresses this issue through a focus on local aspects of integration of sub-Saharan African migrants in the city centre of Athens. Specifically it looks at three themes related to discourses on migrant integration in today's economic crisis: (1) the physical and social environment of marginalization, (2) the migrant body and (3) the fear of the migrant. On the basis of the findings a synthesis is attempted of several parallel existing representations in discourses about African migration. The synthesis betrays the ongoing struggle between, on the one hand, the dominant structures that the state creates to deal with their presence and, on the other, the migrant strategies for adaptation and inclusion, which in turn sustain the mechanisms and form integration takes in this context.

The biopolitics of 'food insecurity': towards a critical political ecology of the body in studies of women's transnational migration

In this article, I utilize a political ecology of the body (PEB) approach to analyze women's transnational migration and their experiences with 'food insecurity.' I situate this analysis within a tradition of feminist political ecology, seeking to advance a 'postcolonial intersectionality' that is attentive to gender, race, and class as axes of power and difference, and also to markers of citizenship or lack thereof, including 'illegality.' I argue that the ideologies behind these axes of power obscure the very social processes in which power is constituted, those that allow an unevenness to ecological suffering, specifically at the locus of the migrant women's body. I suggest that by applying a PEB framing to analyze the personally necessary activities of eating and feeding, we are able to elucidate material and health disparities characterizing transborder ecologies. Thus, I delineate the biopolitics of 'food insecurity': a contest over nutritional resources in which migrant bodies are subjected to the disciplining techniques of neoliberal capitalism, as migrants also subvert the conditions of this environment through embodied modes of collective resistance.Keywords: political ecology of the body, feminist political ecology, intersectionality, illegal migration, food insecurity, biopolitics

Revisiting Urban Encomia in Fourteenth-Century Paris: Poetics of Translation, Universalism, and the Pilgrim City

The translation of the relics of the Passion of Christ from Constantinople to Paris around 1241 inspired urban encomia of the French Capital. In the fourteenth century, Paris was celebrated as the universal city of election in the West. Meanwhile, the city experienced unprecedented growth, attracting a diverse body of migrants, from pilgrims to scholars, to artists, merchants, and paupers: all of them contributed to modify the topography and culture of the city. This situation generated a wide array of urban images that both challenged and redefined those of translation and universalism as well as the view of the French capital as a pilgrim city. Overall, this study shows how Paris emerged during this period as a potent and complex source of poetic inspiration and a Parisian identity was being shaped.

Affective boundaries in a landscape of shame

Alabama House Bill (HB) 56 passed in 2011 and was written by Kris Kobach. The bill targets migrant groups, pressuring them to “self-deport”. Kobach’s language subjugates migrants in a way that defines their bodies with shame. I am interested in how Goodnight and Natanson conceive of risk in the practice of social argumentation. For that, I employ philosophical perspectives of affect to reconsider language as relational, and demonstrate how affective language moves bodies. I then consider the channeling of affect and the ways negative affects get strategically directed at defined subject-individuals, shifting presumption of not belonging onto those bodies exhibiting migrant characteristics within the state. Affect, modulated through language, creates affective boundaries, and I demonstrate how Kobach obliges citizens of Alabama to participate in both the shaming of the undocumented migrant and the maintenance of the affective boundary keeping the undocumented migrant body from citizenship.

A Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground: Urban Plebeian Society in Late Imperial Russia in Search of a Common Sense

A Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground: Urban Plebeian Society in Late Imperial Russia in Search of a Common Sense This article reconstructs the social dynamics in two Russian urban centers, the two major towns of the Middle Volga region, Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan, as part of a more general attempt to recast the research agenda once formulated as a “lower-class culture in flux” in the context of a new imperial history of Russia. After the revolution of 1905, the structural diversity of Russia’s regions and populations was complemented by an unprecedented upheaval of social mobility, both upward and horizontal (migrations). The most modern loci of Russian empire, its urban centers, became the test - ing grounds for imperial society’s ability to accommodate this dramatic escalation of its diversity. The cases of Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan reveal the situation in the deep heartland of the empire, usually perceived as the embodiment of “Russianness” (in cultural and political sense). As the article suggests, even these loci by no means can be seen as the empire’s normative (homogeneous and dominating) ‘core’, which displaces the traditional perception of the empire as a dual core-periphery system. Multilayered and multifaceted diversity was equally characteristic of the borderlands and of the central regions of the Russian Empire. Specifically, at the center of the author’s inquiry is the question of how the ethno-cultural diver - sity of Russian imperial cities correlated with better-studied socioeconomic stratification. How were these overlapping maps of diversity (ethnic vs. social vs. territorial vs. political, etc.) coordinated, and how did people themselves account for and bridge their differences in order to negotiate a compromise and produce a common social sphere? Last but not least, this article tackles the problem of the very limited applicability of explanatory models developed by historians of the educated middle classes and bourgeois public sphere for the case of a “migrant city” dominated by unprivileged and undereducated social groups. Relying on the array of sources documenting the social experiences of the “lower classes” (comprising the absolute majority of the urban population), the article looks into the social mechanisms and practices at work in the process of forging a common social sphere of the “nontextual” mass society out of the diverse body of recent migrants to the city.