Migrant Subjects Research Articles

‘Now they move you, now they don’t’: transferability, territory and (im)mobilities at the Spanish peripheries

ABSTRACT The analytical emphasis on migration control and external borders has overlooked the mechanisms of state regulation of internal mobility in the peripheral territories of the countries of the European Union. Based on an analysis focused on the Spanish case, and more specifically on the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and the Canary Islands, this article introduces the concept of transferability to show the logics and dynamics of intraterritorial migrant (im)mobility between the peripheral enclaves and mainland Spain. The analysis shows the construction – and evolution – of (in)transferable migrant subjects and the complex and changing puzzle of (im)mobility at these peripheral geographies.

Migration narratives on social media: Digital racism and subversive migrant subjectivities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the role of social media in shaping narratives on migrants and refugees. The issue is organised into two parts. The first part offers analytical and empirical reflections on the dynamics of digital racism, xenophobia and polarisation on discourses by non-migrants, on migrants and refugees. The second part turns to the narratives promoted by migrants themselves through digital platforms as ways of both counteracting dominant narratives but also performing their own migrant subjectivity and creating a public digital identity for themselves. This introductory paper starts by offering a set of analytical considerations on the role of narratives in the communicative sphere in general and on the role of social media in particular with a view to framing the six paper contributions that follow.

The Contribution of Women from the Organized Colombian Diaspora in Catalonia to the Generation of Transnational Human Rights Defense Practices

Objective/context: To learn about the contributions of women of the organized Colombian diaspora in Catalonia to creating transnational practices in favor of peace and denunciation of human rights violations in Colombia. Specifically, we seek to identify the main actors, organizational spaces, and collective action repertoires developed by Colombian women in Catalonia. Therefore, we approach the literature on the political participation of migrant and exiled women from the perspective of political transnationalism. Methodology: This qualitative and participatory research study examines bibliographic and documentary sources, semi-structured interviews with Colombian women participating in the organized diaspora, and participant observation of mobilizations. Conclusions: The analysis and discussion of the results show that for some women, their participation is based on their exile and previous political involvement. For others, it is driven by the recognition of their condition as migrant subjects, as well as the different axes of inequality that cross them, which allows them to connect their individual discomfort with the collective discomfort of their country of origin and develop new interpretative frameworks and new repertoires of action aimed at sensitizing and influencing the Colombian socio-political reality. Originality: This research contribution allows for further debate on the transnational political role of migrations in a globalized world and what role women can play in it.

Queer mountains: Migrant drag performers reimagining sexual citizenship in Germany

This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and politics in today’s Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of ‘migrant drag’ in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, ‘building queer mountains’ appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, ‘building queer mountains’ shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be ‘crossed’ and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.

Disciplining subjectivity in Australian migrant deterrence campaigns

Abstract This article examines public information campaigns designed to deter asylum seekers from entering Australia via boat. Through analysing the institutional context and content of a graphic novel that was circulated within Afghan Hazara communities in 2014, I show that certain Australian public information campaigns mobilize an ethos of cultural sensitivity rooted in ethnographic data-gathering projects that reinscribe migrants as ignorant and socially deviant subjects. Such campaigns both situate Australia as an impossible destination and render migration a dangerous, futile act that will bring further misfortune to migrants’ families. The Australian case shows that in contexts where cultural sensitivity and externalized border control simultaneously guide migration policy, cultural knowledge becomes weaponized not only to keep migrants immobile but also to discipline migrant subjectivity and ultimately exclude them from pathways to refuge.

Identities and the City: Socialities amongst Migrant Domestic Workers in Kolkata

Migrant subjectivities, experiences and agency have not received the attention needed within development studies discussions on migration, and gender remains to be mainstreamed within understandings of migration. This article attempts to contribute towards bridging these gaps by outlining the findings of a study that explored sociality amongst migrant domestic workers in Kolkata. It outlines experiences of living the migrant identity amongst women migrating from rural West Bengal to Kolkata as well as forms of sociality they engage in at the level of the everyday. Socialities with their employers at the site of paid domestic work allow them to lay claims to the city by drawing on identities based in the Partition of India, 1947. Drawing on the concepts of ‘beings’ from Amartya Sen’s capability approach and of the ‘right to the city’, originally formulated by Henri Lefebvre, the article captures two significant questions emerging from these socialities: those of identity and self, and relationship with the city. It further shows the interrelation between these two frameworks that becomes apparent in the context of what the above socialities imply for the women in the study.

“A child isn’t born bitter”: (In)human Relations and Monstrous Affects in Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child

This article presents an intersectional reading of Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child (2001) through the lens of Affect Theory. Particularly, I draw from Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism to analyze the role these notions play in the novel. I focus on the economy of affects that circulates among the characters and the affective significance of their interactions as well as the novel’s engagement with Ahmed’s notion of the promise of happiness and Berlant’s cruel optimism, specifically in relation to female, racialized, and migrant subjects both at a personal level and in the context of the settler colonial nation. My main argument is that the affects and expectations presented in the novel are monstrous. I defend that the protagonist’s affective monstrosity is a direct consequence of her abusive childhood as a racialized migrant in the Canadian Prairies and that choosing to let go of her expectations leads to emotional healing and opens new possibilities towards happiness.

Inhabiting the Hyphen: (Re)Negotiating Arab-American Identity in Poems by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Laila Halaby and Suheir Hammad

Like the many “ethnic” literatures in the United States, Arab-American literature is often caught up in attempts to define the “migrant subjectivities” of its authors. Focusing on a selection of poems by Arab-American women writers, this article looks into how such writers negotiate their hyphenated being, and how they view identity not as a fixed category, but rather as an interplay between its performance and its perception. This essay analyses how these writers express their own sense of being in order to highlight, destabilize, and/or reconcile the often “assumed” paradox inherent within their double identity, especially after the rise of anti-Arab sentiment following the events of 9/11. This article, thus, focuses on a reading of a selection of poems by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Laila Halaby, and Suheir Hammad in search of the poetics of subjectivity their work performs.

The Datafication of Migrant Bodies and the Enactment of Migrant Subjectivities: Biometric Data, Power and Resistance at the Borders of Europe

The article engages with biometric data gathering technologies as part of migration infrastructures for the monitoring and control of migration. It explores power and agency by paying attention to the complexity of readings, interpretations, and storytelling of illegalised migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps, in the Island of Lesvos in Greece, as they received their bureaucratic legal papers and discussed developments in their ‘cases’. Borrowing from feminist and feminist security studies scholarship, the article argues for an understanding of data gathering and sharing infrastructures as material. It suggests that the datafication of migrants’ bodies constitutes a manifestation of power that ‘enacts’ the migrant body as a subject of power but also produces counter self-subjectifications. The article also suggests an understanding of subject agency as the ‘capacity to act’ within contexts of power. Such a position on the agency of illegalised migrants allows us to examine the emergence of solidarities and alliances and to understand and contextualise not only actions that seem to be questioning and rejecting power, but also those that accept it and internalise it as a strategy of survival and of bettering one’s life chances.

The Making of “Passengers”: The Pre-Departure Subjectivation of Sri Lanka’s Aspiring Migrant Domestic Workers Heading to the Arabian Gulf

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the process of migrant subject-making prior to departure based on the experiences of Sri Lankan women aspiring to become migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in the Arabian Gulf. Within a context of commodified, privatized and foreignized care migration regimes, women from developing countries have become “ideal” maids: cheap, docile and hardworking, they satisfy the growing social reproductive needs of more affluent countries. This image of the “ideal” MDW is re/produced, maintained and challenged through technologies of subject-making across the circuits of migration. In a combined public–private, local–transnational, and formal–informal thrust towards subject-making, different actors—including MDWs themselves—use different pre-departure technologies in a sociology of markets. Thus, passengers are carved out even before potential MDWs leave their home country; these passengers reflect different constructions, embodiments and connotations of “ideal” migrant subjects, where labour power is re/produced and exploited in the most intimate sphere.

The Politics of space in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Jamal Mahjoub’s A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory

The preoccupation with architecture, geography, and borders in the work of Anglo-Sudanese writers Leila Aboulela and Jamal Mahjoub is to a large extent tied to the postcolonial mindset the two authors share and the minority status of the Anglophone Arab literary tradition. This tradition aims, among other things, at rewriting space to negotiate questions of identity, power, and resistance. Drawing on recent research on the intersections between the postcolonial field and the field of space studies, this paper argues that, although Aboulela and Mahjoub both seek to expose the spatial organization of social reality, that is to say the ways in which space is both conceived and shaped to reinforce existing power differentials, they diverge on the esthetic and political strategies to challenge this power configuration. Therefore, by comparing Aboulela’s Minaret (2006) and Mahjoub’s A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory (2018), it will be argued that, while Aboulela displaces the larger geographies of the nation and the city in favor of urban microstructures that become the site of dissent and empowerment for the alienated migrant subject, Mahjoub embraces the geography of the nation as holding the key both to the collective project of nation-building and the more personal task of coming to terms with the plurality of postcolonial identity.

Cogiendo en luto

Chavela Vargas is widely known for her unique approach to some of México’s most celebrated musical genres. Though undoubtedly a queer icon within and outside of México, critical scholarship has only recently begun to focus on the way her queer migrant subjectivity and marimacho voice, persona, and performances reinvent Mexican sonic history and interpellate listeners queerly. Importantly, her aching vocals and tragic life story coexist with pulsating sexual energy. In this essay I argue that Chavela inaugurates a postmortem politics in which grief and the erotic are held together, instead of separated or silenced by taboo. Inspired by Chavela, I introduce the practice of cogiendo en luto (fucking in grief), which asks the difficult questions: What happens when Eros and Thanatos go to bed together? How can the erotic help to shape grief, and vice versa? By linking Eros to Thanatos, Chavela makes the grief she experienced throughout her life transformative, intimate, expansive, introspective, chaotic, and at certain privileged moments erotic, orgasmic, and sensual. The essay samples lyrics and performances of some of Chavela’s songs, film cameos, and an obituary written about her by Pedro Almodóvar. Together, these queer performative interventions re-signify the grief of migration, addiction, heartbreak, and death, while forging an affective and fleshy relationship with listeners and spectators. As a queer and grieving listener/spectator/fan of Chavela’s, I also weave my own grief into the essay, reflecting on what Chavela meant to my healing process and further underscoring her unique affective contributions to contemporary queer subjectivities and soundscapes.

Migrant subject of law: equality and discrimination

Resumo Este artigo examina desigualdades injustificadas e discriminações encontráveis no Direito e nas práticas institucionais no que tange os migrantes, solicitantes de refúgio e refugiados, no Brasil. Trata-se de estudo exploratório, alicerçado na análise de bibliografia especializada a respeito da igualdade jurídica e do direito da antidiscriminação. Utiliza dados e documentos normativos como material empírico articulado com o referencial teórico. Problematiza a maneira pela qual o princípio jurídico da igualdade é tratado, de modo amplo e abstrato, para demonstrar que a simples proibição de distinção injusta pela lei é insuficiente no combate à manutenção de desigualdades injustificadas e de formas jurídicas discriminatórias. O artigo procura oferecer uma reflexão crítica do Direito quanto à igualdade e a categoria jurídica sujeito de direito em abstrato, atribuindo-lhe concretude na sociedade brasileira. O parâmetro desta análise se localiza na negação do exercício da cidadania decorrente da privação de direitos políticos e a dificuldade em ter reconhecida sua formação profissional universitária obtida em outro país. A vida do sujeito de direito migrante é, assim, atravessada por discriminações diretas e indiretas pelo Direito e fora dele.

Masculinities and the “colonial unconscious” in Shimmer Chinodya’s Dew in the Morning

This article examines the gendered dynamics surrounding masculinity and the “colonial unconscious” in Shimmer Chinodya’s novel, Dew in the Morning, in the context of its narrated and narrative times. These are situated in, and emanate from, the encounter between colonized black African subjects, namely migrants and indigenes, set apart by different degrees of assimilation of colonial modernity in an unnamed area in Northern Zimbabwe. The article argues that narration in the novel is mediated by a colonial unconscious that results in the discursive construction of binary dichotomies and masculinized hierarchies between these subjects. The empowerment of the migrant subjects mainly involves the appropriation of colonial modernity, and the “big man” model of African Masculinity, to inform their more profitable agrarian activities. The resultant differential economic empowerment between the migrant acculturated subjects and the local conservatives in a colonial setting creates hierarchies of masculinity between the former and the latter. The process of masculinization helps to reinforce patriarchal domination and/or exploitation of women, less powerful men, and the natural environment in this localized context. The narrative thus casts aspersions on the masculinities of both the migrants and the indigenes and their suitability to mediate the post-colonial realities of the novel’s narrative time.

Feminización de trayectorias migratorias pendulares y flotantes en la frontera colombo-venezolana

This article describes and characterizes the floating and pendular migration flows of a group of Venezuelan women in the border city of Arauca, Colombia. Using a qualitative methodological approach, field observations, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and a literature review of updated academic, regulatory, and institutional texts were conducted in an area of study with limited gender-based description. Thus, this study highlights the role of Venezuelan women as active migrant subjects and concludes that the labor, family, and social trajectories of the interviewed women are transversely modified by their migration experience, as they are subjected to various risks that expose their vulnerability as migrant women, in addition to risks derived from xenophobia and discrimination. Paradoxically, the migratory diaspora represents their only hope for having a better quality of life.

Multimodality: D(I)aspora, Identity construction and the speaking of Migrant Subjects in the New Media

Multimodality: D(I)aspora, Identity construction and the speaking of Migrant Subjects in the New Media

BORDER AND ILLEGAL MIGRATION IN LUIS ALBERTO URREA’S THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY: A TRUE STORY

In the last two decades, literature concerning Latin American undocumented migration to the United States has emerged as a significant resource for comprehending the evolving landscape of state authority. The article considers techno-militaristic and the discursive production of the migrant figure in Luis Alberto Urrea’s Devil’s Highway. The author considers how Urrea’s text constructs a notion of migrant subjectivity and how the text participates in the reproduction of the material and discursive conditions by which the undocumented migration is rendered to readers. Undocumented migration is the focus of cross-border migration story described by Luis Urrea. It emphasizes the pervasive impact of global capitalism on migration processes. The undocumented migrants are perceived by the dominant power as a sub-human category. Urrea’s Devil’s Highway describing contemporary undocumented migration allows for a more nuanced comprehension of migrant subjectivity, extending beyond economic injustice. Urrea interweaves the migrant’s journey with the intricate tales of the border. Nevertheless, the physical encounter of crossing the border constantly interrupts their journey. The desert's autonomous power inscribes the men's experiences instead of the men defining the land. Urrea directs the readers' attention to the tangible reality of the human bodies and the vast desert landscapes, crafting a multi-dimensional narrative that immerses the readers in the story. Urrea vividly portrays the brutal impact of the desert on the bodies of the walkers, urging the readers to empathize with their physical ordeal. The article argues that the subjectivity of undocumented migrants needs to be reconsidered in the context of such discourses as negative globalization, human rights, and economic dispossession.

Transnational boundaries of distinction: the social locations and subjectivities of Italian migrants in London

ABSTRACT By using notions from race, class, migration and decolonial literature, this article explores the discursive strategies adopted by post-recession Italian migrants in London when trying to overcome the socioeconomic and cultural divides that separate them from the dominant British society, namely transnational boundaries of distinction. In doing so, it reflects on the nature of these boundaries, shedding light on how migrants’ subjectivities become connected to wider cultural and historical processes of coloniality, Europeans’ racialization and the contingent hierarchies of whiteness. The analysis suggests that to increase their proximity to the British majority, Italian migrants disclose strong beliefs in meritocracy and cosmopolitanism, perceived as inner features of Britain’s more “modern” value system. These findings contribute to new thinking about migrants’ social locations in host societies and support the development of theoretical tools, which are apt for making sense of migrants’ subjectivities in relation to nuanced forms of racialization and intersecting inequalities.

(Re) Constructing ‘Subservient’ Filipino Migrant Subjectivities

In the 1970s, the Philippine state implemented a labour-export policy to alleviate the country’s economic crisis. This policy centres the needs of employers at the expense of the rights and lives of Filipino migrants. As a consequence, many Filipino migrants find themselves in low-paying, precarious, and exploitative working conditions. However, as foreign employment of Filipino labour is tied to the state’s economic agenda, the Philippine state is caught between protecting the rights of its citizens and economic profits. In this essay, I argue that the Philippine state constructs ‘docile’ and ‘subservient’ migrant subjectivities to serve the state’s neoliberal interests. Although, as migrants learn to become acutely aware of their exploitation, they re-construct a subjectivity premised on challenging the Philippine state’s neoliberal interests through the help of transnational migrant activist groups. This essay employs a qualitative case study analysis of the Philippines’ foremost institution serving migrants, the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) and the largest transnational Filipino migrant activist group, Migrante International. I use a Critical Filipino Studies (FilCrit) framework to analyze these case studies. FilCrit recognizes that the institutionalization of migration under US colonization largely influences how Filipinos are incorporated into the global economy to this day. This essay finds that the goals of the Philippine state and migrant activist groups stems from their opposing values. The Philippine state is concerned about its neoliberal agenda, while migrant activist groups are concerned with Filipino migrants’ everyday lives.

Seeing the Future Through the Socialist Past: the Works of the Radical Imaginary Through Migration

This article contours the collective imaginary horizons of post-socialist subjects as they emerge within and around the ‘routinised’ practice of labour migration and its pressing materialities. Taking the case of Bulgarian-origin migrants in the UK, the article problematises the common conceptualisation of (semi-)peripheral imaginations as medium for enacting the hegemonic project of Western modernity-coloniality. Rather than passive subscribers to powerful but deceitful political utopias, ‘peripheral’ migrant subjects emerge as autonomous agents, articulating radically different visions of the desirable and possible. The politicisation of the socialist past as a historical context of shared social meaning and experience, as well as a symbolic resource of forgotten ideals, opens up a space for critical engagement with the capitalist mechanisms producing despair in the present. Invoking meaning and value from previously existing ideals of solidarity, justice and egalitarianism as they relate to the realms of work, self-hood and socio-political organisation, my interlocutors countermap the trauma of the present to the stability and fullness of what was before, in the process hinting at a possible moment of ‘rupture’ and ‘re-institution’. Respectful engagement with the ‘lay’ socialisms of today, I suggest it is vital for exploring further the political capacity of the post-socialist imaginary and its possibilities for carving out self-affirming agendas for equality, collectiveness and working-class dignity.