Migrant Struggles Research Articles

WANG, Simeng (edited by), Chinese in France amid the Covid-19 Pandemic. Daily Lives, Racial Struggles and Transnational Citizenship of Migrants and Descendants , Leiden : Brill, 2024, 375 p.

WANG, Simeng (edited by), Chinese in France amid the Covid-19 Pandemic. Daily Lives, Racial Struggles and Transnational Citizenship of Migrants and Descendants , Leiden : Brill, 2024, 375 p.

Forging a Lineage: Kinship, Mobility, and the Zildjian Cymbal

Abstract Renowned for its 400-year-old Ottoman/Turkish/Armenian past and produced by “America's oldest family-run business,” the Zildjian cymbal is paradoxically rendered an unremarkable “humble object” in its assumed inclusion in orchestras and bands around the world. Tracing the lineages of the Zildjians and their cymbals through historical documentation, ethnography, and the materiality of the instruments themselves, I first discuss the cymbal's shifting musical contexts and functions in Ottoman Janissary mehter bands, European orchestras, American jazz bands, and many other ensembles over the past four centuries, as well as the role of the Zildjians in this musical expansion. Then, I examine how twentieth-century negotiations of Zildjian kinship emerged in contentions over the authenticity and ownership of cymbal production. Finally, I consider how the assimilatory pressures of nation-states shaped narratives of cymbal production as well as the Zildjians’ mobilities, particularly in the context of the ethnoracialization of minority populations in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic as well as the struggle of Armenian migrants to the United States to be recognized as valid U.S. American citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. By approaching the cymbal itself as the main interlocutor of this exploration, I aim to foreground the ways in which cymbals have sounded and resounded the mobility and kinships of its human creators. In doing so, I regard musical instruments as essential mediators of histories of cultural and musicological development as well as constructions of human identity and relationship, glimpsing how such objects may both reify and unsettle our epistemologies and the institutions of modern life.

Translocation and migrants’ live-in experiences: A literary discourse on select novels

With the huge surge of African migrants in the West, especially in the post Covid-19 era, it becomes important to investigate these migrants’ experiences as portrayed in literary texts by writers. Hence, this research examines the representation of migrant challenges in African literature through a critical discourse on two contemporary novels: Abdulrazak Gurnah's Gravel Heart and Helon Habila's Travelers. Adopting Homi Bhabha’s theory, hybridity, the study focuses on how these literary works depict the struggles of African Migrants as they navigate and interpret both cultures– West/African while in the diaspora in order to survive. The discourse highlights the issues of displacement, dislocation, alignment, cultural identity, and the struggle for survival in a foreign land. By exploring the similarities and differences between the two novels, the paper reveals the complexity and diversity of African migrant experiences as it provides insights into the broader issues of globalization, colonialism, and migration. Ultimately, the research argues that African literature plays a crucial role in shaping our understanding of the migrant experiences and in promoting social justice and human rights.

Challenging Migration Narratives in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People

In examining Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017), this article employs a materialist framework to develop a broader critical perspective that addresses the impact of global power on emerging narratives of labor migration. In engaging both aesthetic and material elements, it examines how Unnikrishnan offers an alternative to what is described as the “mythology of migrancy” narrative. As such, the article challenges the dominant paradigm of migration in postcolonial studies, which tends to celebrate hybridity and fluidity of identity. Unnikrishnan responds aesthetically to dominant migration discourse through his deliberate narrative strategy of building his short stories around different experiences of exploited and estranged individuals who are often positioned outside the narrative itself. The article establishes two focuses: one historical, the other literary. First, it addresses the relationships among global capitalism, oil, and immigration in the Arabian Gulf. Second, it explores how Temporary People creates a new aesthetic mode to narrate the struggle of temporary migrants.

Simeng Wang (dir.), Chinese in France Amid the Covid-19 Pandemic: Daily Lives, Racial Struggles and Transnational Citizenship of Migrants and Descendants

Simeng Wang (dir.), Chinese in France Amid the Covid-19 Pandemic: Daily Lives, Racial Struggles and Transnational Citizenship of Migrants and Descendants

Autonomy and Struggle in Times of Viral Borders: Venezuelans Across the South American Andes During Covid-19

ABSTRACT This article takes a close look at Venezuelan migrants' experiences throughout the Andean corridor of cross-border mobility during the COVID-19 emergency. It focuses on the differentiated characteristics of their fragmented journeys to trace the potential of struggles in reclaiming autonomy in contemporary migration. Conceptually, it expands on Nicholas De Genova’s ‘viral borders’ to explore the ways migrants rechannelled, reimagined, and remade their trajectories amid the recent wave of violent, nationalist border controls, expanded in the name of public health. The article argues that, to cope with the consequences of COVID-19 management, Venezuelan migrants made mobility choices related to their differentiated access to social and material resources, enmeshed in prevailing racialised, classed, and gendered social structures. Meanwhile, migrant struggles enabled autonomy amid fragmented journeys opposite Covid-19-related attempts of nationalist (re)bordering. It is suggested that, as legacies of viral borders become more evident, autonomy and struggle remain key in shaping mobility amid the exclusionary post-pandemical border regime.

Im/Mobile Commons and Trans/National Claims-Making: The Phenomenon of Swedish Afghans in Paris

Responding to asylum seekers’ relocation from Sweden to France, migrant solidarity groups have started to share resources and information relevant to the process of deciding about and going through with the journey, and, on arrival in Paris, providing advice on how to make it through sleeping rough and the asylum process in France. The relocation of Afghan asylum seekers to France, has gained a specific form of visibility and presence, in media and in migration rights networks, that we claim has placed the route on the Swedish landscape of migration and border debate. The purpose of this article is to develop the conceptual discussions of mobile commons through an analysis of the networks of and around ‘Swedish Afghans in Paris’. The article explores the ways in which national bordering scapes are both reinscribed, expanded and destabilized by migrant networks and claims. Further, we analyze the phenomenon of ‘Swedish Afghans in Paris’ with attention to the tensions and contradictions in regard to the politics of belonging and mobile commons. The phenomenon of Swedish Afghans in Paris forms a productive starting point for analyzing the conditions of commoning in the context of the Swedish bordering scape; of the ways in which belonging and nationality are claimed in complex and shifting ways; and of the ways in which these commons bridge different places transnationally. The article contributes to scholarly discussions on migrant struggles by developing a nuanced understanding of mobile commons as contestations and entanglements of bordering and claims to national belonging. Thus, we emphasize the ambivalent elements of mobile commoning.

Narrative productions of memory: reflections on collective memories as knowledge about the past

ABSTRACT This article proposes the Narrative Production Methodology (NPM) as a suitable methodology in the field of critical collective memory studies. Firstly, we discuss the narrative dimension of collective memory, exploring possible articulations between the critical perspective of the Social Psychology of Memory and NPM. We call this articulation Narrative Productions of Memory and we develop its potential through an example of research on the memories of migrant struggles for rights in Barcelona. We argue that Narratives of Memory produce knowledge by linking remembered experiences with present repertoires of interpretation, elaborating an understanding of current contexts and power relations that need to be challenged, and promoting alternatives. The strength of NPM in collective memory studies, we argue, lies in the production of horizontal and legitimate knowledge about the past, blurring the distance between researcher and participant, data and interpretation, memory and history.

Pedagogies of Defiance

ABSTRACT Beginning from Paulo Freire's insistence that ‘Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom,' we can begin to unpack the political function of Higher Education in the UK. This essay uses auto-ethnographic fragments alongside examples of marketisation and securitisation in universities, in order to consider the dissonance between the university's role in authoritarian nationalism and its embrace of the language of ‘decolonisation.' Turning to the educational power of protest as a means to develop institutional disloyalty, this essay suggests that we can draw on the lessons of anticolonial and migrant struggles to construct a pedagogy of defiance beyond the university’s limits.

We don't remember the O‐Platz protest camp for the sake of it. Collective memories and visibility of migrant activism in Berlin

AbstractThe activists opposing border regimes in Berlin still vividly remember the migrant protest camp on Oranienplatz (O‐Platz), a square in the neighborhood of Kreuzberg, a decade after its establishment in 2012. For them, the protest camp is the ideal type of mobilization against border regimes; the opportunity for racialized migrants to engage in politics and formulate grievances based on their own experiences of border regimes. O‐Platz is remembered as a visible migrant grassroots protest in the backdrop of a history of invisibility of migrant struggles in Germany. In contrast, activists frame their mobilization after O‐Platz as invisible and fragmented, despite the emergence of new networks and alliances, which, however, are not led by migrant activists. Collective memory bridges different movement phases and emphasizes the importance of visibility achieved by collective action centered around the experiences of subaltern groups, specifically racialized migrants with precarious legal status. I argue that memory work is crucial for countering the invisibility and erasure of grassroots migrant struggles in Germany. Memory work has an aspirational function as it transforms characteristics of past mobilization into aspirations for the present, especially in a phase where new players emerge, and the role of grassroots migrant activism seems fading.

Narrating Cross-Border Migration, Writing Subjects without History: On Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River

Abstract After the techno-militarization of the US-Mexico border, the criminalization of undocumented migration, and the subsequent human rights violations against migrants, writers have been narrating the journeys of migrants across the US-Mexico borderlands as a form of state violence that hinges on notions of rightlessness. Founded on humanitarian discourses, contemporary nonfictional accounts about cross-border migration center their narrative approach on the struggles of migrants from a perspective of economic injustice. Through a reading of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004) and Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (2018), I argue that, in framing the migrant struggle as a problem of economic injustice, these texts obscure the ongoing dispossession, exploitation, and forcible displacement of historically subordinated populations in the region. In so doing, I urge an alternative approach to think cross-border migration by centering how dispossession, exploitation, and forced displacement are key to understanding longer histories of violence in Latin America and its connections to contemporary undocumented migration to the United States.

Hybridized Surviving: The Diaspora Narratives of Joseph, Esther, and Daniel

There are a number of challenges faced by diasporic people, yet they all seem to be connected to one major issue: “identity”. Their narratives are built on questions surrounding who they are, when they are no longer living in/on their home/land. As they migrate to foreign lands, their notions of identity become clouded, and quite often they struggle to “belong”. Second-generation people could be heard asking: “Where do we belong?” “The lands our parents came from?” “Or the lands we now live?” “Is it both? Or is it neither?” “Do we even know who we are? How do we fit in? How do we survive?” The aim of this essay is to highlight the issue of diasporic identity in the narratives of three biblical migrants: Joseph, Esther, and Daniel. The purposes of these biblical accounts seem to reflect the ambivalence of diasporic existence, where they can achieve success but also experience adversity. Yet these narratives also deal with how identity is problematized in diasporic contexts. I will be engaging these narratives in conversation with my own story, in a bid to view alternative understandings and constructs of diasporic existence, particularly for second-generation migrants within religious communities. Furthermore, the hope is that a re-reading of these narratives may generate alternative theological considerations in light of the struggles of second-generation migrants.

The Linguistic Coping Strategies of Three Netherlanders in England

Thousands of migrants left the Low Countries in the second half of the sixteenth century for religious, political, or economic reasons. They faced many difficulties as they attempted to rebuild their lives abroad, including linguistic obstacles. Many of them moved to England, but proficiency in English was rare among the Netherlandish community. Nevertheless, as this article argues, the language differences did not only pose problems, they also offered opportunities, especially to members of the higher echelons of the Dutch diasporic community. The inhabitants of the Low Countries were widely reputed to have excellent knowledge of languages, and for good reason. This article concentrates on the linguistic strategies of three multilingual individuals who moved across the North Sea: the nobleman Jan van der Noot, the painter Lucas d’Heere, and the merchant Johannes Radermacher. It studies the ways in which they used their proficiency in multiple languages as starting capital to build new social and professional lives for themselves. For example, they used their linguistic skills to appeal to the local aristocracy in order to ensure patronage, to expand social and professional networks by frequenting particular religious language communities, and to offer language instruction. This article therefore contributes to our understanding of linguistic encounters in the everyday lives and struggles of migrants in the sixteenth century.

Worker centres and coming out politics in migrant struggles

ABSTRACT Through an ethnographic account of an immigrant worker centre in San Francisco, this paper examines their role in brokering the practice of citizenship among undocumented workers through strategies of visibility and recognition. Positioned as critical brokers in migrant struggles, worker centres aim to build the collective ‘political muscle’ of those denied formal rights. Unlike previous research that documents the evolution and scope of worker centre activities, and their contribution to a worker-centred moral economy, this article focuses on how these representational brokers contribute to migration governance, particularly of precaritized workers who rely on them for their livelihoods. Drawing on critical citizenship and migration perspectives, it considers migrant activisms that are neither entirely voluntaristic nor particularly emancipatory. Instead, these mediated enactments are situated alongside a broader, increasingly normative (and assimilationist) process of ‘coming out of the shadows’ – a process that is widely celebrated and encouraged as it is assumed to mark an ontological shift from anonymity, nonbeing, and shame to defiant resistance. Here, the concept of ‘coming out’ emphasizes the highly laborious, selective, and normalizing nature of coming out politics. In the context of the worker centre movement, ‘coming out of the shadows’ entails heightened exposure and risk-taking among those with precarious immigration statuses and labour prospects, thereby contributing to an institutional culture of compulsive (and compulsory) self-disclosure.

Resonance beyond regimes: Migrant’s alternative infrastructuring practices in Athens

In migration studies, there is an increasing interest in understanding how migration processes are shaped by different forms of brokerage and mediation. We relate these debates to the everyday struggles of migrants in the city of Athens. In so doing, we propose a shift from the all-encompassing view on infrastructures, that is, as systematic entities of facilitation/control to the infrastructuring practices of migrants. This implies a focus on how migrants create dynamic social platforms, and how these platforms relate to formal infrastructures and industries. We analyse these infrastructuring practices through a conceptual lens of resonance that is sensitive to the constitutive (how things, people and processes are brought together) as well as travelling capacities of these practices (how the platforms shift to other places). With an ethnographic approach, we create in-depth insights into the ways in which migrants mediate im/mobility in the urban environment of Athens through infrastructuring practices. The paper concludes by reflecting on the promises and limitations of the infrastructuring practices as sites of solidarity. We thereby argue that there are many links to make within the mobile commons debate. At the same time, our findings highlight that the transformative potential of infrastructuring practices does not always go along with a clear claim on solidarity.

Migrant Struggles in South Korea and Elsewhere

Bidduth, Syed, and Samar were dishonorably deported from South Korea about fifteen years ago while they were protesting for the rights of undocumented migrant workers. Since returning to their home countries, Bangladesh and Nepal, they have been practicing modes of solidarity that they learned during the years of struggle. Still, We Are Migrant Workers is a documentary film made to record their personal history, will, and current political projects. This is an interview about the historical background of labor migration in Korea, the struggles of the characters in the film, and the alternatives they have been pursuing in the wake of their deportations.

Political Subjectivation and the In/Visible Politics of Migrant Youth Organizing in Germany and the United States

Abstract In countries of the Global North, migrant youth with a precarious legal status are not commonly seen as political subjects, but as subjects of politics. Against this background, this paper reflects on how migrant youth nevertheless manage to organize themselves and intervene in the dominant society, thereby emerging as unforeseen political subjects. Discussing acts of citizenship and autonomy of migration approaches, I argue for the use of a multifaceted concept of collective political subjectivation. Doing so sheds light on how migrant struggles exceed categorization as protest, moments of rupture, or imperceptible subversion. While drawing on Jacques Rancière's concept of “political subjectivation,” I go beyond his rather narrow focus by highlighting aspects of democracy, transgression, and in/visibility, as well as creative modes of identity-making, which could be further developed in the literature on political subjectivities and migrant struggles. This theoretical reflection builds on two qualitative case studies on migrant youth organizing in Germany and the United States that show the relevance of visible as well as relatively invisible politics. In both cases, I analyze two events that provide insight into this complex notion of political subjectivation: “Coming Out of the Shadows” in the United States and the counter-conferences in Germany.

Towards a genealogy of migrant struggles and rescue. The memory of solidarity at the Alpine border

ABSTRACT This article advances a genealogy of migrant struggles and citizens solidarity practices, with a focus on the French-Italian migrant passage. It contends that scholarship has mainly mobilised a spatial approach to migrant struggles, while the temporality of solidarity and the collective memory of struggles have remained under-theorised. Then, the article moves on by focusing on the French-Italian Alpine border and it analyses the longstanding history of migrants’ passages there and, jointly, the mobilisations that took place in that area over the last decades exploring how these sedimented a citizen collective memory of solidarity practices. The final section deals with the history of mountain rescue at the French-Italian Alpine border and shows how migrants were saved by volunteers. The piece concludes by arguing that an insight into the memory of migrant struggles and solidarity practices enables foregrounding the transversal alliances which have been built between migrants and citizens and unsettling binary opposition between the former and the latter.

Home-in-migration: Some critical reflections on temporal, spatial and sensorial perspectives

This paper critically reviews some recent scholarly contributions on the topic of home in migration. The recent scholarship on home in migration regards it as a process rather than a status. This process is being understood as situated and intersectional. The paper theoretically draws on two complexities of home in migration literature: A: the contradictions inherent in the concepts of home and migration (one referring to settlements and the other movements); and B: to the struggles of migrants in relation to belonging and recognition (as part of the process of home-making). Three directions that home in migration literature is taking is identified: spatial home-making, temporal, and embodied practices. It is argued that whilst the first is well argued in the scholarship, the latter two need further research and reflection.

Firewalls as a resource for resistance: separating border policing from social service provision in Sweden and the UK

ABSTRACT Firewalls separate rights provision for undocumented migrants from the border policing of migration authorities. In this article, we compare how firewalls have been negotiated during recent years in Sweden and the UK. Firewalls have been partly strengthened in the UK as a result of the ‘Windrush scandal’. Simultaneously, firewalls have been increasingly contested in Sweden after the 2015 ‘long summer of migration’ as a result of continuously more repressive migration policies. On the basis of this detailed comparison, we argue that firewalls are a useful conceptual lens to understand migrant struggles and the development of migration policies. Moreover, we suggest that firewalls can be a useful resource for social service providers using their discretion to resist repressive migration governing at different levels and scales and for organizing political work by and for people at risk of deportation.