Transnational Flows Of People Research Articles

Outsiders within: examining Ethiopian adoptee experiences through a diasporic lens

ABSTRACT The term ‘diaspora’ continues to have purchase, as public and scholarly communities grapple with a world increasingly characterized by transnational flows of people, ideas, and capital. The concept has played a critical role in making these messy constellations of social, political, and economic ties both visible and legible. However, transnational adoptees are often positioned just outside this analytical purview, and their migrations, identity processes, and political projects are rarely examined through a ‘diasporic’ conceptual lens. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with adult Ethiopian adoptees residing in the US, this paper discusses the points of dis/connection between Ethiopian adoptees and the larger Ethiopian diaspora. We focus on how Ethiopian adoptees navigate their inclusion/exclusion as peripheral actors across social groups, as well as the active work they engage in to negotiate their diasporic identities, belongings and personal politic. This analysis draws our attention to new actors at the edges of diasporic communities, which complicates and enriches mainstream conceptions of diaspora.

Reinvesting in Havana: Housing Commodification and Gentrification in the Central Neighbourhoods of a Socialist City in the Global South

This article addresses the commodification of housing in Havana from 2011 onwards. It argues that the theories of gentrification and rent-gap can illuminate aspects of the transformation of the Cuban capital, even though these theories originated in capitalist urban contexts and that in Cuba the state is responsible for determining the value and ownership of land. The analysis of digital real estate ads on four platforms between 2012 and 2020 allows us to estimate the price and location of properties sold, their relationship to economic reinvestment in the central areas of the city, and how the geographic factors that define centrality are increasingly compromised by touristification and more generally by the commodification of housing. The urban transformations studied in this initial article on the real estate market and gentrification in the Cuban capital allow us to highlight that, on one hand, the transformation of housing into a commodity demonstrates the erosion of socialist values in urban production and, on the other, the creation of a real estate market in Havana has reinforced the connection of the Cuban city with transnational capitalist circulation. The article considers the economic and political context in which the market develops, then explains the methodology of big-small data in a context of limited access to information, followed by an analysis characterising Havana's market that examines the importance of spatial centrality and transnational flows of people and capital.

Revisiting White Labourism: New Debates on Working-Class Whiteness in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa

AbstractThis article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.

“A glorious future” for Africa: development, higher education and the making of African elites in the United States (1961–1971)

ABSTRACT At the time of African independence, the concept of higher education for development took hold in the programmes of the new African governments and in the aid projects of the former colonial powers, the United States, the USSR, and international organisations. All agreed on the need to place higher education at the service of Africa’s development and, to that end, to train the elites capable of carrying out the continent’s modernisation. It was for this purpose that the African Scholarship Program of American Universities (ASPAU) was created, which enabled nearly 1,600 Africans to study in the United States between 1961 and 1971. The objective of this article is to show, through the example of ASPAU, that beyond the almost unanimous support for the developmentalist project at the time of decolonisation, its conceptualisation and implementation have actually been shaped by differing expectations and relationships of domination. Governments, university officials, philanthropic foundations, and African students were all acting according to particular agendas that they tried to impose through different strategies. The training of African elites thus proved to be a much more tortuous process than was theoretically expected, fashioned as much by ideological concepts as by political interests, personal strategies and transnational flows of people and knowledge. In this sense, the history of ASPAU also highlights the deeply experimental dimension of decolonisation.

President Trump’s Moving Targets

President Trump’s Moving Targets

Blue sky thinking: the effects of Aoi Sola in a Sino-Japanese context

In a climate of tense diplomatic relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Japan, there are also transnational flows of people, media and commodities that signify increased connect...

Migration, Health and Inequality in Asia

ABSTRACTFocusing on health, migration and inequality, this contribution examines the role of citizenship in shaping migrants’ experiences of health. The idea of national citizenship has frequently dominated the framing of debates about whether states or markets should play the dominant role in health. Yet, health inequalities are embedded in transnational flows of people, capital and ideas, which are themselves a product of history. Migration is thus essential to understanding the transnational production and reinforcement, or mitigation, of health inequalities. Adopting a focus on migration in Asia, past and present, this article argues that the health risks and vulnerabilities that migrants face are a result of both state and market failures. Migrants’ exclusion from various forms of care and protection, and their political disenfranchisement, expose a fraught relationship between health and citizenship for those who move within and across borders. At the same time, both historical and contemporary experience demonstrates how migrants might contest these inequalities and allow us to reimagine alternative forms of citizenship. Efforts to ensure the health and well‐being of migrants demonstrate diverse alliances at work, even if such alliances remain limited when confronted with the logic of the nation, borders and security.

Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Simon Wendt, and: At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 by Andrae M. Marak, Laura Tuennerman

Reviewed by: Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Simon Wendt, and: At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 by Andrae M. Marak, Laura Tuennerman Benjamin H. Johnson Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World. Edited by Brian D. Behnken and Simon Wendt. New York: Lexington Books, 2013. 330pp. $85 (cloth). At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934. By Andrae M. Marak and Laura Tuennerman. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. 232pp. $55 (cloth). Contemporary maps divide the world into territories controlled by discrete nation-states, the very entities that have structured the modern discipline of history. Yet social and political reality is also characterized by transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas. Paradoxically, these exchanges—the raison d’être of the burgeoning field of transnational history—include nationalist ideas and mobilizations. “Transnationalized concepts of national belonging” are the focus of the wide-ranging and provocative anthology Crossing Boundaries. Its editors endeavor to show how such concepts have been “forced and adopted, borrowed and compelled, adapted and coopted, and, ultimately how they can be accepted and rejected by local people” (p. 2). The volume consists of fourteen brief essays, of about twenty pages each, which range over the twentieth century. Half of the essays examine transnational dynamics in the Americas; four are set primarily in Asia; and the rest describe transnational relationships rooted primarily in Africa and Europe. The center of gravity lies in the study of political movements, but transnational cultural history is a strong secondary theme, particularly in Brian Behnken’s discussion of music and hair-style in his essay on connections between the U.S. Chicano movement and Mexican student unrest and in Pablo Dominguez Andersen’s examination of Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong and her fame in Weimar Germany. The last essay, Kevin Amidon’s superb and wonderfully theorized “Beyond the Straight State: On the Borderlands of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Nation in the United States and Europe,” is more comparative than explicitly transnational. The individual essays have their particular ambitions and historiographic interventions, but the editors conclude that the volume’s most fundamental revelation is that “transnational and transcultural processes impeded political elites’ efforts to create ethnically and racially homogenous national communities, while they also produced a hybrid sense of national belonging that frequently transcended traditional forms of ethnic nationalism as well as national boundaries” (p. 6). This revelation is pursued in a particularly compelling fashion in several of the essays. [End Page 414] Charles Reed makes a convincing case for the importance of “imperial citizenship,” which allowed early twentieth-century South African activists to struggle for dignity and autonomy within the British Empire and to thereby escape the distinctions that later scholars often drew between civic and ethnic nationalisms. His subjects, Reed observes, “imagined themselves as British citizen-subjects (civic) and ‘natives’ (ethnic) without contradiction and without such distinctions in mind” (p. 104). Similarly, Charlton Yingling’s recreation of Dominican exile networks from the 1930s to 1950s traces the joining of notions of pan– Latin Americanism with Dominican nationalism, concluding with a forceful articulation of the importance of exile “as a decisive site of nation-building” (p. 54). Karen Morris points to debates over Ivoirité in the Cote d’Ivoire in recent decades as illustrative of the wider tensions “inherent in equations of post–World War II national citizenship with ancestry-based pre-colonial territoriality” in postcolonial Africa and beyond (p. 173). The similarities in themes link together essays that are diverse in empirical terms. Examining different national projects on five continents over the course of a century necessarily draws on an enormous range of historical developments and historiographies. The fact that the essays speak so well to one another reflects a strong editorial hand and the sweeping importance of the questions about ethnicity, race, and nationalism that lie at the heart of the volume. The anthology’s success in terms of thematic unity, however, raises questions that it does not answer or even substantially address. Taken as a whole, Crossing Boundaries offers very little sense...

The Borderless Archipelago: Toward a Transnational History of Japanese Environmentalism

Abstract This article reconsiders the contemporary history of Japanese environmentalism through the lens of transnationalism. From as early as the antipollution struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese activists looked beyond the boundaries of their archipelago in search of allies and environmental knowledge. In the process they became involved in the nascent global environmental movement and helped support victims of industrial pollution and natural degradation in Asia, Europe and North America. Crossing borders empowered Japanese activists to challenge the developmentalist agenda of their country, to address the environmental impact of Japan's economic expansion into East Asia and to advocate a globalist agenda often at odds with the logic of the nation-state. Rather than a simple evolution in which global consciousness replaced commitment to the local and the regional, the article suggests an increased spatialisation of activists' environmental consciousness derived from mutual recognition within an ever-expanding web of transnationally networked movements. The article argues that our understanding of Japanese environmentalism is enriched by attention to the multifarious and multidirectional transnational flows of people and ideas over the past half century.

The Transnational Frequency of Radio Connectivity in Langston Hughes's 1940s Poetics

The Transnational Frequency of Radio Connectivity in Langston Hughes's 1940s Poetics Janet Neigh (bio) Hello, Jamaica! Hello, Haiti! Hello, Cuba! Hello, Panama! Hello, St. Kitts! Hello, Bahamas!All you islands and all you landsThat rim the sun-warmed Caribbean!Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! I, Harlem, Speak to you! I, Harlem, Island, too. Langston Hughes, "Broadcast to the West Indies" (1943) The sound-scapes of early twentieth-century Harlem are alive in the poetry of Langston Hughes. Their vernacular speech, blues, jazz, and bebop rhythms give his work a distinct sense of place. Hughes's Harlem is typically interpreted as a symbol of U.S. black cultural nationalism. However, examining his later poetry from the 1940s reveals how he approaches the urban community from a transnational perspective. This is demonstrated by the epigraph from "Broadcast to the West Indies," published on August 14, 1943, in the People's Voice, a leftist African American newspaper. In this poem, rather than represent the rhythms and sounds from within the neighborhood, Hughes turns the place [End Page 265] of Harlem into a collective voice that makes a call of solidarity to the West Indies. The poetic persona of Harlem insists that it is an "island, too" and that the Caribbean islands should recognize Harlem as such. Composed in the style of an imaginary radio broadcast, the poem reflects the growth of black diasporic community during World War II, spurred by an increase in the transnational flow of people and ideas often facilitated by the radio. By invoking Harlem as an optimistic voice, Hughes constructs an implicit contrast between this hopeful persona and the harsh realities and racial conflicts in Harlem during the Second World War, culminating in the 1943 riots that broke out on August 1st, just two weeks prior to the publication of this poem. On August 1st, 1943, an African American woman named Margie Polite acted as a catalyst for a massive riot in Harlem. As she was being arrested by a white police officer for disorderly conduct, a black soldier intervened to protect her and was shot by the officer. She is alleged to have run out into the streets screaming that her protector had been murdered. Due to growing resentment over the mistreatment of African American servicemen during WWII, Polite's accusations immediately sparked anger.1 The soldier actually managed to survive, but her screams inspired twelve hours of protesting, rioting, and looting that resulted in six deaths, five-hundred arrests, over four hundred injuries, and approximately five million dollars in property damage, primarily to white owned businesses in Harlem.2 One gets a sense of the magnitude of the riots when confronted with the large number of law enforcement officials it took to restore order, which included eight thousand New York State Guard troops and close to seven thousand city police officers as well as civilian volunteers.3 While the majority of the black middle class frowned on the riots because they felt that the actions of the rioters reflected badly on the race, Hughes admired the collective act of resistance. In fact, Margie Polite's call to her Harlem community and the radical responses that ensued are emblematic of the call to social action that Hughes desired to create through his poetry. In his poem "Ballad of Margie Polite" (1943), published in the black newspaper the Amsterdam News, several months after the riots, he celebrates her rebellious spirit and how her "cry spread over Harlem."4 In his essay "Down Under in Harlem," published a year after the riots in The New Republic, he defends the black working class residents and their struggle to survive despite the "permanent scarcity of quarters in Harlem."5 One must ask how Hughes's idealized transnational call of solidarity in "Broadcast to the West Indies" relates to his perspective on local politics in Harlem during this period. "Broadcast to the West Indies" was not republished after its initial publication in The People's Voice in 1943 until Arnold Rampersad included it in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994).6 Yet this rarely discussed 1940s newspaper poem encapsulates many of the goals of Hughes's socially committed...

Exile media, global news flows and democratization: the role of Democratic Voice of Burma in Burma’s 2010 elections

This article explores the links between transnational media flows and social and political change in authoritarian regimes through a conjunctural study of Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a Burmese exile media organization. Drawing on observation and interviews conducted at DVB’s Oslo studio during the 2010 elections in Burma as well as documentary research, the article explores how diasporic media may contribute to democratization in a military regime where press freedoms and political expression are severely curtailed. The first section draws on Appadurai’s theory of global flows to scrutinize transnational flows of people, capital, media, ideas and technology contributing to DVB’s operations from 1992 to 2010. The next section engages with theories of media and democracy in order to examine DVB’s innovative satellite television coverage of the 2010 elections. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the ongoing relevance of opposition media based outside of Burma amid liberalization measures undertaken by Thein Sein’s nominally civilian government in 2011.

Rethinking the Boundaries of the Nation: Histories of Cross Border Mobility and Zimbabwe's New 'Diaspora'

This article explores the role of cross-border mobility in the history of Zimbabwean nationalism. It does so with the purpose of raising the following question. If modern territorial nationalist ideas in Zimbabwe and elsewhere have developed partly through transnational flows of people, ideas and connections, is it possible to write a national history that is sensitive to context, plurality and contestation through a narrative that is restricted by state borders? By confining the narrative to the space within state borders, does one inadvertently reinforce the idea of a natural and singular national unity and belonging? To think through this question, the article briefly revisits the historiography of labour migrancy and approaches to the politics of exile and solidarity during Zimbabwe's liberation war before exploring the implications of the growth of an international 'diaspora' during the recent crisis.

Transnational Flows of People and International Exchanges: Phenomena and Activities

Transnational Flows of People and International Exchanges: Phenomena and Activities

Globalization and the American South

In 1955 the Forbes magazine list of America's largest corporations included just 18 with headquarters in the Southeast. By 2002 the number had grown to 123. In fact, the South attracted over half of the foreign businesses drawn to the United States in the 1990s. The eight original essays collected here consider this stunning dynamism in ways that help us see anew the region's place in that ever-accelerating, transnational flow of people, capital, and technology known collectively as globalization. Moving between local and global perspectives, the essays discuss how once faraway places like Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent are now having an impact on the South. One essay, for example, looks at a range of issues behind the explosive growth of North Carolina's Latino population, which increased by almost 400 percent during the 1990s - miles ahead of the national growth percentage of 61. In another essay we learn why BMW workers in Germany, frustrated with the migration of jobs to South Carolina, refer to the American South as our Mexico. Showing that global forces are often on both sides of the matchup - reshaping the South but also adapting to and exploiting its peculiarities - many of the essays make the point that, although the new ethnic food section at the local Winn-Dixie is one manifestation of globalization, so is the wide-ranging export of such originally southern phenomena as NASCAR and Kentucky Fried Chicken. If a single message emerges from the book, it is this: Beware of tidy accounts of worldwide integration. On one hand, globalization can play to southern shortcomings (think of the region's repute as a source of cheap labor); on the other, the influx of new peoples, customs, and ideas is poised to alter forever the South's historic black-white racial divide.

Mediated Cosmopolitanism: Global Disasters and the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Solidarity

Theories of globalisation focusing on the intensification of transnational flows of people, capital and ideas appear to challenge the hitherto local forms of solidarity. At the same time, international crises, ethnic conflicts and an emerging interest in multiculturalism have rendered cosmopolitanism as a form of global solidarity an appealing ideal and social project. This promise of cosmopolitanism as a claim about global belonging and solidarity has attracted as many critics as it has advocates. This paper will attempt to defend cosmopolitanism as an emerging reality and will suggest its exploration in relation to global media and communications. It will argue that cosmopolitanism should be thought about and explored as a process “from below” rather than a project “from above”. In this process, media constitute a significant force in forging relations of connectivity and responsibility towards distant others. This is especially the case in the coverage of disasters at a global scale, when audiences are faced with the vulnerability of distant others. The paper will be empirically grounded on a study of Greek audiences in relation to media coverage of distant disasters. It will draw upon material from focus group discussions on the ways people relate to different instances of distant suffering and their victims. Cosmopolitanism as a form of global solidarity, it will be argued, is a rather elusive and vulnerable condition, heavily dependent on media representational practices and conditioned by cultural biases and interpretations. It is, however, an emergent possibility, expressed in terms of responsibility for distant others and of imagining the globe as a terrain of potential action.

Migrant Civil Society: New Voices in the Struggle Over Community Development

ABSTRACT:Port-of-entry immigrant neighborhoods have long been a feature of the American city. Dense cross-border networks are reshaping port-of-entry immigrant neighborhoods and creating “transnational communities” where forces of global economic restructuring and practices of everyday life combine into a distinctive form of urbanization. Yet immigration has also created tensions and conflicts. Lack of affordable housing, inadequate access to quality schools, substandard employment, and unmet basic needs are among the problems facing large segments of society. Their resolution has been rendered more problematic by questions concerning the immigration status of many residents. The lack of recourse for undocumented immigrants to the state has meant that the task of resolving these social problems has been displaced onto civil society. This article considers the role of nonprofit, community organizations and social movement organizations—part of an emergent migrant civil society—in responding to a variety of social and economic concerns affecting residents of Albany Park. The community area of Albany Park on Chicago’s north side has for decades served as a first destination for immigrants. In 2000 the foreign-born population in Albany Park climbed to 52%, making it one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Chicago. Through an examination of neighborhood social struggles we consider the ways in which transnational flows of people, commerce, culture, and social practices come to ground in neighborhoods like Albany Park. Then we present two case studies of social activism by segments of migrant civil society. The first examines the antigentrification movement launched by the Balanced Development Coalition, while the second considers workers’ rights activism in support of day laborers. Finally, we reflect on the implications of the Albany Park cases for the study of migrant civil society more broadly.

Rethinking Indigenous Place: Igorot Identity and Locality in the Philippines

Spanish and American colonisers ascribed the identity ‘Igorot’ to the peoples of the northern Philippine mountains, positioning them in the ‘tribal slot’, somewhere between ordinary peasants and ‘backward’ primitives. From this marginal position, contemporary Igorot communities have been comparatively successful in formalising their entitlements to land and resources in their dealings with the Philippine State. This success depends on a discourse tying indigenous or ‘tribal’ culture to particular places. Colonial and, now, local anthropology has been recruited to this process through the mapping of community boundaries. This has allowed groups to secure official status as ‘cultural communities' and gain legal recognition of their ancestral domains. Ironically, even as ancestral domains are recognised, the municipalities that hold such domains have ceased to be bounded containers for Igorot localities, if they ever were. Participation in global indigenous networks, circular migration, and ongoing relations with emigrants overseas blur the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of Igorot communities. Transnational flows of people, information, and value are recruited to support the essentialised versions of indigenous identity necessary for negotiations with the state. Here, I show how the specific history of the Igorot ‘tribal slot’ enables communities to perform essentialised indigeneity and simultaneously enact highly translocal modes of cultural reproduction.

Global Transactions: Sudanese Refugees Sending Money Home

This paper draws on ethnographic research in America and Ethiopia to explore the phenomenon of Sudanese (Nuer) refugee remittance from those in the diaspora to those who remain behind in Africa. Specifically it locates the unidirectional flow of cash within transnational flows of people, goods, and information. This multi-sited study explores the impacts of these transfers on both sides of the equation. It documents the importance of remittances as a vital component of survival and investment in the future for Nuer refugees in Ethiopia. Similarly it raises questions about the siphoning off of resources on the social, cultural, and economic integration of Sudanese in the United States. Finally, it situates remitting behaviour within a broader socio-historical context to explain its centrality in maintaining a Nuer community across national borders.

People out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship Gap

People out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship Gap. Edited by Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir. New York: Routledge, 2004. 272p. 24.95 paper.The original essays in this anthology make a significant contribution to the ongoing debates about citizenship, human rights, and the future of the nation-state by exploring the contradictory impacts of globalization on the provision of individual rights. On the one hand, the transnational flows of people, capital, and technology associated with globalization have led to a deflation of citizenship rights, particularly for members of vulnerable groups, and created large noncitizen populations with significantly fewer rights than citizens. Yet on the other hand, the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization, such as the evolution of human rights and the expansion of liberal legal norms, create new levels of membership and new venues in which to claim rights. The book has two related goals. The first is to describe the complicated processes by which globalization is altering the nature of nation-state citizenship and creating a “citizenship gap” among global elites, legal citizens, marginalized citizens, and migrants. The volume's second goal is to determine whether the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization can remedy the citizenship gap. Will existing nation-state citizenship and emerging universal rights regimes be sufficient to protect the rights of marginalized citizens and noncitizens? Or must human rights be embedded in global governance in order to close the citizenship gap?

Regulating Transnational Flows of People: An Institutional Analysis of Passports and Visas as a Regime of Mobility

This article challenges the widely held "mobility thesis" by examining the current regime of mobility in regulating transnational flows of people-namely, passports and visas-from an institutionalist perspective. An institutional device linking individuals to the state, the passport is a manifestation of both citizenship and sovereignty. As such, the passport has to be situated in a broader international context in which "organized hypocrisy" (Krasner 1999) underlies the principle of sovereignty. Furthermore, through the "rite of institutions" (Bourdieu 1991), the passport provides foundations for identification, classification, and trust for individuals. The Taiwan passport provides vivid illustrations of how identification, classification, and trust have been breached by organized hypocrisy and how such a breaching has been experienced by individual citizens. However, it is also shown that some capable individuals, through the leverage of their economic power, are able to circumvent or even take tactical advantage of the current system. The political overtone of the Taiwan passport has exposed the nature of the regime of mobility that has often been depoliticized and undertheorized. Just as passports issued by different states are of different values, there has been an inequality of mobility structured by power asymmetries and economic inequalities in the world system. Such an inequality of mobility may have become enlarged under the impact of globalization but has gone mostly unnoticed. Individuals may try to increase their mobility through various economic means, but differentiated access to mobility may have further reproduced and enhanced unequal social, economic, and political relations.