Migrant Subjects Research Articles

Re/negotiating “suspicion”: exploring the construction of self in Irish migrants' memories of the 1996 Manchester bomb

On 15 June 1996 the Provisional IRA exploded a 3000 lb bomb in the city of Manchester, home to a large Irish community. This article uses oral history to explore the distinct ways in which two male Irish migrants, both of whom settled in the Manchester area during the post-war period, recall and negotiate their experiences of the bomb and its aftermath. Focusing on how memory production is shaped though interactions between different cultural forms and interior psychic processes, the article uses memories of the bomb to explore how the culture of suspicion generated around Irishness in Britain during “The Troubles” could be productive of distinct forms of Irish migrant subjectivity.

Encountering Asia

This article explores the narratives of Filipino medical workers on their encounters with other Asians during their migrant journeys to Singapore. Migrants speak of their encounters with regional cultural diversity and the everyday manifestations of regional political-economic power configurations and inequalities. The narratives show that beyond merely responding to state discourses on how migrants ought to represent the nation-state abroad, migrants attempt, on their own terms, to understand their place in Asia, and the world. Their journeys take place at a moment of social and demographic change as many Filipino medical workers travel across borders to care for aging populations in other Asian countries. The field of care raises complex moral dilemmas for Asians of different ethnic and national backgrounds, and this complicates any simple notion of Asian values. Moments of pan-Asian solidarity, in which friendships are cultivated across national boundaries, are often overridden by experiences of racial and cultural prejudice. Among diverse Asians in Singapore, divisive and hierarchical notions of first world and third world, modern and backward, caring and uncaring are prevalent in everyday judgments of others. Filipino migrants assert their global aspirations and their moral reflections on how to live and care for others; simultaneously they create distance from those who they believe do not share such aspirations and moral views. This article illuminates the transformations in migrant subjectivities as migrants experience and evaluate a range of cultural encounters as medical carers in the region.

Asserting criminality and denying migrant belonging: The production of deportability in US judicial court hearings

Recent interest in the securitization of immigration has highlighted a significant shift in immigration enforcement, from border regulation to the control of territorially present populations. Emphasis has focused on the production of migrant illegality and strategies that criminalize undocumented workers. In this article, we shift the focus of analysis to examine how legal residents convicted of non-immigration-related criminal offences are also actively produced as deportable subjects. Drawing on research examining records of appeal cases involving Jamaican nationals in removal proceedings consequent to a criminal conviction, we illustrate how deportability is produced by the deportation process itself, through legal practices that assert migrant criminality and alienage. We suggest ‘criminality’ not only comes to represent migrant subjectivity, at the expense of other forms of subjectivity based on belonging and territorial presences, but acts as affirmation of alienage.

Becoming a Migrant at Home: Subjectivation Processes in Migrant‐Sending Countries Prior to Departure

ABSTRACTLabour emigration is not merely the business of states and governmental policies, but comes with a range of wider societal practices. This includes the production of – and contestation over – the ‘ideal migrant subject’. This paper examines the complex interplay of actors and practices involved in migrant subject‐making processes paying close attention to the pre‐employment temporary labour migration process step by step from screening, recruitment, pre‐departure training up to employment‐matching. It asks how prospective migrants are transformed into ‘ideal’ migrant subjects. This contribution primarily draws from data from the Philippines and India. It is argued that migrants actually become migrants before they ever leave their home country: Labour‐sending states set the regulatory frameworks and co‐produce ‘ideal migrant subjects’ from which other social actors draw or contest. In contrast to most studies on the governance of labour migration, the authors highlight the role of subject formation as an important element of modern migration management. To the scholarship that actually takes into account subjectivation processes, this paper adds material both on the labour‐sending state as well as on non‐state actors. The paper, moreover, draws out subject‐making from previous studies where it is less central and more implicit. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Weaving Women's Agency into Representations of Marriage Migrants: Narrative Strategies with Reflective Practice

In the growing feminist inquiry regarding international marriage migration from Southeast Asia to the East Asian countries, the ethnic hierarchy between migrant subjects and feminist authors has presented a methodological challenge relating to the politics of knowledge. Drawing on the postcolonial critique of feminist representations of Third World women and the idea of reflective practice in ethnographic representation, this paper explores narrative strategies to overcome the victim-agent dichotomy when telling the stories of “bound’ migrant wives. Following a review of the literature regarding the agency question in feminist and marriage migration discourses, I outline strategies involving terminology, methodology, and reflective practice in order to circumvent the trap of cultural colonization or discursive domination. Finally, I present nuanced portrayals of two Filipina marriage migrants and analyze their narratives.

Diasporan subjectivity and the dynamics of empowerment in Buchi Emecheta's Head Above Water

The writings of diasporan African women writers capture the struggle for agency and self-definition. Writers write themselves out of confined patriarchal and hegemonic spaces by forging new subjectivities that define their positionality in the metropole. For example, Buchi Emecheta's diasporic encounter in her life writing, Head Above Water, forces her to grapple with multilayered systems of oppression (such as patriarchy, racism, classism, sexism, and nationality) that often complicate the identity of diasporan subjects. Such diasporan identity shows the fluidity and ever shifting subjectivities of subjects who constantly negotiate the myriad forces of domination in the metropole. A migrant subject like Emecheta continually has to negotiate between conflicting social and ideological discourses in order to create a space and place for herself in the metropole. I argue that finding and expressing a sense of subjectivity changes the dialog of the diaspora from one of loss to a new configuration of agency and empowerment that affect individual subjects in the diaspora.

The cultural politics of recognition: Rural migrants and documentary films in China

ABSTRACTThe question of how China's rural migrants are recognized, in a political context that is dominated by the ‘zhu xuanlu’/‘main melody' of social harmony, and in an economic environment that puts profit above social, cultural and morality concerns, is crucial to our understanding of the cultural politics of subalterneity. This article explores the ways in which the camera mediates the unequal relationship between the documentary film-maker and the rural migrant subject, and, in doing so, reveals a diverse politics of recognition. My aim is to understand how a particular politics of recognition has come to inform and shape the film-maker's styles, aesthetics and themes. I situate this analysis within the larger political-economic context of the production and consumption of documentaries. By closely engaging with some of the documentary texts, this article offers examples of a range of perspectives and narrative strategies in configuring the rural migrant figure.

Researching ethnicity, identity, subjectivity: anything but the four-lettered word

This article gives a frank account of how anthropological research on Cape Verdean migrant experiences of parenthood in Portugal developed from avoiding the use of the analytical concept of ‘race’ to encountering ‘race’ as a category of practice in fieldwork and discusses the implications of this for analysing the data. Although the aim of the research was to look beyond categorizations, in order to explore the emotional dimensions of lived experience, the effects of ‘racial automatisms’ upon migrant subjectivities cannot be ignored. Racist effects are nonetheless distinguished from racist intentions. The ethnography elucidates the political potential of ‘race’ to foment critical reflection upon the relationship between an individual's personal and collective identities.

Nanay: Drawing a New Landscape of Diasporic Mothers

Over the last three decades, migration from Asia has been increasingly feminized as women find work abroad, primarily in highly gendered labour markets such as domestic services and health care services, where they are forced to live apart from their own families. This paper examines Nanay (Mother) (2009), a testimonial play, as an example of documentary theatre. The play was written by two geographers, Geraldine Pratt and Caleb Johnston. It explores Filipina domestic workers’ experiences of maternal loss and separation, which constitute what I refer to as their “diasporic motherhood.” I focus not only on the play’s narrative but also on its multimedial and polyphonic form, and discuss how the play invites members of the Canadian public to engage actively with the migrant workers’ life stories, ethically connect with the migrant subjects, and envision an alternative future to the current exploitative condition.

Access denied: the anatomy of silence, immobilization and the gendered migrant

This article argues that the status of migrant subjects is characterized by a loss of communication rights and locates the instances where this loss is most visible. It investigates the process of silencing and immobilization of migrants and the particular forms it takes for female migrants through the disenablement of communicative acts. In this process the detained migrant loses her status as an interlocutor, irrespectively of the instances and processes that allow her–or demand of her–to speak. The state of exceptionality assigned to detained migrants is supported in the criminalization of migration laws and securitization, which together with widespread policies of incarceration in the West have become the antipode of the fundamental principles of free movement and expression. Silence and immobilization constitute the ‘standard’ rather than exceptional conditions of people on the move that shadow them across every step of their way, geographically, politically, culturally, legislatively, socially.

Rethinking detention and deportability: Removal centres as spaces of religious revival

This article investigates the effects of confinement on the religious subjectivities of migrants who have been held in British removal centres, elaborating connections to broader debates and mobilizations over the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. It draws on geographic scholarship on affect and the emotions to shed new light on the embodied experiences of detention, its wider socio-political effects and the complex links between intensified religious identities and politics. I argue that removal centres are acting as spaces of religious revival. African ex-detainees' narratives of their confinement dwelt repeatedly on their experiences of religious renewal, and the article explores how Christianity and the Bible provided bodily, narrative and performative ways of coping with, and countering the fraught ‘affective atmosphere’ within detention centres. Faith was a source of energy, hope and strength, created ‘communities of practice’ within and beyond the removal centres, while religious narratives affirmed detainees' humanity. Some expressions of faith underpinned directly political messages, intersecting with ideas about the self as a rights-bearing subject. By including religious responses in debates over the effects of the restrictive border controls, the discussion not only highlights dimensions of non-citizens’ socio-political agency but also demands a rethinking of the broader socio-political consequences of detention and deportability. The article is based on interviews with ex-detainees, chaplains and members of detainee visitors' groups as well as official inspection reports.

Glamour in the Andes: Indigenous Women in Peruvian Cinema

This study analyzes racist cultural representations in two purportedly pro-indigenous Peruvian films directed by non-indigenous filmmakers during and after the Peruvian civil war in which 70,000 people, mostly Quechua-speakers, were killed (1980–2000). I contend that in the films Gregorio (1984, dir. Grupo Chaski) and Madeinusa (2006 , dir. Claudia Llosa), the positive image of indigenous Peruvian women as migrant subjects with agency is weakened by the dominance of a ‘foreign’ and exoticizing gaze over the marginalized ‘other.’ Even though the films of Chaski and Llosa may intend to reject the stereotyped representation of indigenous women, they nevertheless end up by reinforcing a negative image. By denying self-representation or distorting traditional Andean values, these two films participate in the recurrent media practice of cultural violence against the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Transnational Migrants' Negotiations of Formal and Cultural Citizenship

This article highlights the substantial role of Irish state governmentalities in structuring migrants' ‘possible fields of action’ (Foucault 1982: 790), while taking account of the agency of migrant subjects, albeit constrained, in negotiating Irish immigration regulation. It is based on data gathered from eighteen migrant mothers of Irish citizens and argues that it is important to recognise the political agency of migrants in generating new transnational modes of belonging despite the ways in which the state circumscribes their capacities to engage in transnational practices and maintain transnational relationships. This group of migrants simultaneously endeavoured to maintain transnational practices and relationships while cultivating local identifications. Although they had complex and contradictory attitudes to citizenship, the unifying theme was that social and spatial mobility are not inimical to local belonging. However, their local and transnational practices were impeded by prevailing discourses and regulations drawing on exclusionary configurations of citizenship which combined racialised notions of Irishness with neoliberalised concepts of the ideal citizen.

Cinema of social recuperation: Xenophobic violence and migrant subjectivity in contemporary South Africa

It is tempting to read recent xenophobic violence in South Africa as simply symptomatic of the extent to which non-citizens have been reduced to ‘bare life’, a condition characterised by the expulsion of a person from the order of socially valued existence and the subjection of that person to the vagaries of sovereign power. Although the category of homo sacer does shed some light on the condition of statelessness that leaves foreign migrants ‘stripped of their identity as legal beings’, it also risks misrecognising the lived, embodied complexity of migrant subjectivity. Through a reading of Adze Ugah's The Burning Man, a documentary film about the Mozambican man who was burned alive on 17 May 2008 as a result of xenophobic riots in South Africa, this article highlights some of the concrete, everyday social and affective networks that give migrant lives their unique subjective integrity.

P01-451 - Vulnerability and diagnosis of psychosis among migrant patients in modena

IntroductionThe risk of psychotic spectrum disorders in Western countries seems to be higher among immigrants than natives. The higher vulnerability may be related to biological, psychological and social factors while cultural and diagnostic difficulties seem to delay an effective therapeutic intervention, with longer DUP (duration of untreated psychosis).Aim of the study is to analyze the characteristics of psychotic patients of foreign origin with a particular attention to their use of mental health services.MethodsWe studied all migrant patients attended to 3 Community Mental Health Centres (CMHC) and to the Psychiatric Hospital (PH) of Modena over a period of a month.The socio-demographic and clinical data were collected by means of a structured culturally-oriented form.Results63 patients of foreign origin attended to the Services. 46% of all diagnoses is a psychotic disorder (most frequent diagnosis being that of brief psychotic episode: 19.15% in CMHC, 22% in PH).Psychotic disorders are prevalently present among Asian, South American and Eastern European populations.Use of second generation antipsychotics is frequent in the CMHC (23.4% of all psychopharmacological treatments, p = 0.003) while combined therapies dominate in PH (42.86%). The DUP is on average 12 weeks in PH, 8 in CMHC.ConclusionWe would confirm a high incidence of psychosis among migrant subjects, with a tendency to use emergency health services. Often there are difficulties in establishing a continuous and territorial therapeutic relationship, or to intervene in the early stage of onset.

Migration trajectories of ‘highly skilled’ middling transnationals: Singaporean transmigrants in London

AbstractThe role played by the state in regulating population movements has been the subject of study in migration scholarship. Immigration regimes manage migration through visa restrictions stipulating the type of work migrants perform and their entitlement to rights. However, studying migration only in terms of visas or occupational categories limit a full understanding of the breadth and changing episodes making up migrant experiences. Based on a case study of ‘highly skilled’ Singaporean transmigrants in London, this paper investigates, first, the way such migrants utilise changing visa strategies to incrementally extend their stay in London. Second, the paper contextualises their migrant subjectivities and identities within the immigration and emigration regimes in which they are embedded. In so doing, the paper argues for a trajectory perspective of migration that recognises the changing strategies as well as practical and emotional challenges experienced by ‘highly skilled’ middling transnationals. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

“Not a Real Worker”: Gendering Migrants in Thailand’s Shrimp Farms

AbstractThai shrimp farm‐owners and migrant couple workers from Laos, Myanmar, and Northeast Thailand act in concert to create gendered subjects and a sense of “place” among Surat Thani’s shrimp farms. The creation of place by the migration of workers into Surat Thani is layered by employers’ efficiency goals with migrants’ need for a conjugal residence while earning a living. The conjugal workforce is, however, differentiated by the creation of a female worker subject, publicly defined as “not a real worker.” By paying migrants a couple’s wage, employers recreate and solidify discourses on the work and labour capacities that differentiate women and men on shrimp farms. Women workers themselves reproduce this: they invoke the status of “not a real worker” to achieve certain ends, such as exploring supplementary income sources or creating latitude for child care while still being on the farm’s payroll. It is mostly Thai women who are able to find other income sources, whereas Burmese and Laotian workers are largely tied to their husbands and employers. Women workers’ enactments of “not a real worker” in turn reproduce and differentiate migrant national subjects. This paper therefore demonstrates that labour practices and migration processes produce gender and migrant subjects. This puts in question essentialist and reified assumptions about gender and gender differences. Instead, we place social practices that produce gender subjects at the centre of analysis, thereby being attentive to the production of gender as a dynamic process and the diversity of subject positions available to women in a single context.

Mediated Crossroads: Youthful Digital Diasporas

Mediated Crossroads: Youthful Digital Diasporas

HOMEless: a case study of private/public inversion and the temporal–spatial exclusion faced by migrant domestic workers

This paper is a case study of the shutdown of HOME (the House for Migrant Workers' Empowerment), a cultural and service center for migrant workers. HOME was founded by the Taipei City Labor Bureau (TCLB) and subcontracted to TIWA (the Taiwan International Workers' Association) in 2002, when the Director of the TCLB was the former labor activist Zheng Cun‐qi. For migrant domestic workers, the distinction between sold‐time and free‐time (i.e. the work–rest distinction) is blurred. Most of their supposedly private reproductive activities are temporally squeezed into holidays and spatially forced into public places where they are exposed to the scrutiny of the Taiwanese. This peculiar situation of private/public inversion not only results from, but also serves to reinforce, racial discrimination and class inferiority in their workplace (i.e. the homes of their employers). I use the concept of ‘bracketing’ to describe the spatial‐temporal strategies used by migrant domestic workers against this distorted inversion. I also analyze how employers ‘counter‐bracket’ migrant worker subjects as a counter strategy. HOME once existed as a ‘surrogate home’, providing shelter for migrant workers and allowing them to retain privacy during their days off. TIWA conducted organizing‐oriented cultural and political activities to assist the migrants in forming their own community, and challenged the spatial hegemony of real estate owners in the ChungShan District. However, when Yan Shang‐luan, a well‐known feminist labor research professor, took over the directorship of the TCLB in 2004, she did not appreciate the function of HOME, and decided to close its doors. In analyzing the official rhetoric in the documents of the TCLB, I find that their decision to shut down HOME was a result of their middle‐class temporal‐spatial ‘habitus’. The shutdown became a counter‐bracket measure, which coincided with the real estate interests of the ChungShan local elites.

Virtual borders, data aliens, and bare bodies: Culture, securitization, and the biometric state

This article analyzes the reconfiguration of state power into new immaterial forms such as virtual and biometric borders, and the impact of this reconfiguration in the cultural representation of migrant subjects and transborder communities. It attempts to respond to, and to elucidate what happens when security mutates from an abstract notion to a series of practices that become part of the nationstate's dominant discourse. In the first section, it offers a panoramic vision of virtual borders and its explanatory mechanisms linked to security and biometrics. Drawing from what Muller (2008) calls the ‘dispositif of security,’ it then discusses some interconnections between the biometric state, the culture of securitization and the growing perception that borders are becoming quasi‐permanent states of exception. The third part establishes connecting lines between visual securitization images and other recent representations of the biometric border in popular film and narrative using a detailed discussion of the film Sleep Dealer (2008) as a primary example of these interconnections.