Transnational Lives Research Articles

Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion

Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion

From the Editors

From the Editors

The Cosmopolitan Wife: (Self-)erasure and (Self-)empowerment of Isabel Burton and her Neo-Victorian Representations

Isabel Burton, née Arundell, was a model cosmopolitan wife to her famous explorer husband Richard Francis Burton for thirty years. Yet, two pieces of twenty-first-century neo-Victorian Burton-biofiction – The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov and The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder – write her clean out of their core narratives. Having explored these conspicuous absences, my article turns to the historical Lady Burton's life writing, focussing on The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, in which she narrativizes the couple's transnational lives. Two of its stylistic devices are discussed in detail – paratexts and the peculiar use of first-person narration – in order to trace in them a double-gesture by which Isabel Burton combines self-erasure with self-empowerment. The detailed analysis of six paratexts, as theorized by Philippe Lejeune and Gérard Genette, supports the claim that Isabel, from the text's fringe, constructs for herself a role that combines elements of the scribe, editor/curator, narrator and author. Looping back to the neo-Victorian biofictional texts, I propose that, in Life, the historical Isabel Burton fuses self-erasure (which Troyanov picks up) with self-empowerment (which Hodder picks up), to forge a female writerly identity compatible with her self-fashioning as the wife/widow of a Victorian transnational cosmopolitan.

Steven Seegel, Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe

Steven Seegel, Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe

Growing up (un)bounded: globalization, mobility and belonging among Korean third culture kids

ABSTRACT This study speaks to the larger question of how mobile upbringing that spans tensions between multiple communities across the globe influences one’s construction of identity and belonging. In this paper, I examine how young adults who have been living in multiple countries in their formative years- most prominently referred to as Third Culture Kids -reflect upon their transnational life trajectories. With a particular focus on their construction of identity and belonging vis-à-vis language, literacy, and culture, I pair the concept of capital (Bourdieu, 1986) with habitus (Appadurai,1996; Bourdieu,1991). My analyses suggest that Third Culture Kids foregrounded multilingual competence and diversity in articulating their mobile upbringing, and they finally chose to live in the US in addition to maintaining transnational ties with Korea in their adulthood. Their sense of belonging to the US was cultivated as a response to feelings of estrangement from Korean society, where they are privileged in terms of social class but feel excluded due to the high cultural esteem for ethnic solidarity among local Koreans. With the growing number of transnational communities that mobilize funds of knowledge from heterogenic resources across the globe, this study highlights the need for educators to incorporate students’ funds of knowledge into language and literacy curriculum.

Length of stay, acculturation and transnational medical travel among Polish migrants in the Netherlands

An important aspect of the transnational lives of Polish migrants in the Netherlands is their frequent use of healthcare services in Poland. Transnational care use may be detrimental for the continuity and the quality of the care migrants receive. The current study aims to shed light on the antecedents of migrants' doctor visits in Poland. Drawing on a representative population-based sample of Polish migrants in the Netherlands (n = 1,082), logistic regression is used to assess whether length of stay in the Netherlands is negatively associated with the likelihood of doctor visits in Poland. The KHB decomposition method is used to determine the extent to which this potential association is mediated by three specific acculturation factors: ethnic identification, trust in the Dutch healthcare system and Dutch language proficiency. The models show that migrants who stayed in the Netherlands longer were less likely to visit doctors in Poland. Mediation analyses indicated that this effect was largely attributable to their greater Dutch language proficiency compared to their counterparts who arrived in the Netherlands more recently. Strong ethnic self-identification as Polish and lower trust in the Dutch healthcare system were also associated with a higher likelihood of visiting doctors in Poland. However, no significant mediation of the effect of length of stay via ethnic self-identification or Dutch language proficiency was found. The findings suggest that voluntary language programs may foster inclusion of Polish migrants in the Dutch healthcare system and reduce the need migrants perceive to seek care in their country of origin.

Understanding Latin American diasporic transnationalism and the media in the post-digital era: The interstices of invisibility

Drawing on two-decade long interdisciplinary studies that seek to examine, compare, and contrast population flows, capital flows and media flows/counterflows, this essay examines findings from various research projects on Latin American diasporas and the media. Outcomes of multi-sited fieldwork surveying news media production, distribution, and consumption in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, indicate that these performances are influenced by diverse variables such as the stage of immigration processes, generational and new technologies gaps as well as social environments in contexts of origin and destiny, among others. The study of contemporary Latin American diasporas living transnational lives demands interdisciplinary approaches that help us examine the complexities of these heterogeneous groups that, paradoxically, have been homogenized by public discourse in countries of destiny, driven mainly by political and administrative precepts as well as by commercial and marketing campaigns.

Living in two countries: Transnational living as an alternative to migration

AbstractAfter three decades of scholarship, transnationalism remains understood as connections between people who have migrated and people who remain in the country of origin. Such ties are important and prevalent. But perhaps a radical extension of transnationalism is also warranted: There are people who are neither ‘migrants’ nor ‘non‐migrants’ but lead transnational lives that evade these categories. In such cases, transnationalism is not a consequence of migration, but rather a fundamental challenge to it. This article connects the established literature on transnationalism with this potentially significant perspective. We draw on the phrase ‘living in two countries’, which incorporates the tensions and contradictions that transnational living entails. Drawing upon diverse empirical data, we ask how we might identify lives that span two countries and, how such lives are differentiated, and why they are significant even if they are rare.

Labour market integration and transnational lived citizenship: Aspirations and belonging among refugees in Germany

AbstractTransnational lived citizenship has gained prominence as a means to analyse mobility and foreground activist notions of citizenship over legal status. I argue that lived citizenship and transnational movements are strongly intertwined with aspirations and belonging. I use the material example of labour market integration as the space of enactments of citizenship and analyse the patterns of belonging those create and contest. I develop my argument through the empirical example of labour market integration of refugees in Germany. I demonstrate how such integration transforms social, and more importantly, economic location and in turn creates complex and often contradictory forms of transnational allegiances. I ultimately argue that lived citizenship can in important ways advance aspirations of refugees and migrants. At the same time, transnational lives and multiple allegiances are often hindered by state‐based citizenship and the rights this confers. Legal status thus remains an important marker of citizenship.

Steven Seegel. Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. 320.

Steven Seegel. Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. 320.

Non-state Diplomacies and Norm-making during the Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement: Hong Kong’s Canadian Residents

ABSTRACT The article advances understanding of the relationships between diplomacies and governance and the role of non-state actors in them, through a case study of migrant norm-making. Drawing from 50 interviews, the analysis examines how Canadian residents of Hong Kong during the 2014 Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement protests enacted through their diplomatic practices what Wiener calls the “meanings-in-use” of norms—specifically, respect for democracy and human rights, as well as foreign non-interference. These NSA diplomatic practices made visible world order's contested multi-level normative frames within a local democratization struggle. The analysis provides starting points for research on how transnational lives, liminal identifications, class, denizenship, and state power shape NSA diplomacies. It advances the theorizing of norm-making within diplomacy, using insights from critical diplomacy studies, including the “other diplomacies” approach.

Relational Spirituality and Transgenerational Obligations: The Role of Family in Lay Explanatory Models of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in Male Cameroonian Asylum Seekers and Undocumented Migrants in Europe.

Context: Diasporic Cameroonians are increasingly leading a transnational life in which family members are sustained through networks of relations and obligations. However, before arriving in Europe, the vast majority of African migrants who take the Mediterranean route are exposed to trauma and hardship. Moreover, the joint occurrence of forced displacement, trauma, and extended separation from families has a significant impact on mental health.Objectives: This study explores the role of culture-specific conceptualizations of family structures and transnationalism in explanatory models of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among male Cameroonian asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants in Europe.Methods: An in-depth study of two samples of Cameroonian migrants with a precarious residency status in Europe was conducted. Focus group discussions and interviews were carried out with asylum seekers in Germany (n = 8) and undocumented migrants and failed asylum seekers in France (n = 9). The verbatim transcripts of these interviews served as the data for interpretative phenomenological analyses.Results, Analysis, and Discussion: Family was conceptualized in religious and spiritual terms, and relational spirituality appeared to be a crucial element of family cohesion. Explanatory models of PTSD were mainly based on an intersection of family and spirituality. The disrespect of transgenerational, traditional, and spiritual obligations toward parents and ancestral spirits represented a crucial causal attribution for post-traumatic symptoms.Conclusions: Conceptualizations of post-traumatic stress were based on a collective family and spiritual level instead of an individualized illness-centered perception. The Western psychological and psychiatric perspective on post-traumatic stress might conflict with traditional, religious, and spiritual practices in the context of family conceptualizations of Cameroonian forced migrants with a precarious residency status.

“No more Korean at Home.” Family language policies, language practices, and challenges in Korean immigrant families: Intragroup diversities and intergenerational impacts

This ethnographically informed sociolinguistic study examines family language policies (FLP) for language learning at home. It explores the cases of Korean immigrant families with different transnational life trajectories. Despite the fast-growing research interests in FLP, intragroup diversities of Korean immigrant families and their daily interactions are not yet widely discussed. The goal of this study is to explore intergenerational impacts and intragroup diversities among Korean immigrants. Throughout two years, I conducted interviews with the short-term and long-term stayers of the 1st generation and families of the 1.5 generation. I collected language profiles and background questionnaires besides family interactions. The findings demonstrate the intergenerational impact of intragroup diversity on language use, attitudes toward bilingualism, and future orientation. This study reinforces the understanding of how the linkages between transnational life experiences and language choices at home are interwoven, and how they may or may not conflict with immigrant families’ language practices.

Doing Gender, Class, and Nation in Northern India: Student Aspirations and the New Middle Class

ABSTRACT India’s new middle class is important in establishing a hegemonic culture and structure that legitimizes what it means to be a successful, modern Indian man or woman. This study examines the extent to which, and how, the aspirations of educated, non-cosmopolitan young people in the Garhwali hills of northern India reflect and embody these hegemonic ideals. These questions are important because these ideal constructs, largely based in the realities of elite, transnational middle-class lives, are held up to be the legitimate ones that reflect a vision of India as a modern nation. My findings draw from 38 in-depth interviews conducted with students at five colleges in the Garhwali area of Uttarakhand. The aspirations and expectations of college students in this area largely reflect, and thus reinforce and legitimize, dominant constructs of gender, class, and nation. This is the case even though the chances of obtaining a position in the transnational middle class are relatively low for young people in this area. Moreover, the particular constraints faced by female students make it especially unlikely that they will ever reach new-middle-class status. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Transnational Citizens, Cosmopolitan Outlooks? Migration as a Route to Cosmopolitanism

<p class="TEXT">In this article, we argue that transnational citizens – those international migrants who maintain connections to their country of origin and its diaspora – can be moderate cosmopolitans. We hold the primarily normative idea of cosmopolitanism up against the empirical literature on transnationalism, and show how cosmopolitanism can develop from the migration process itself and the subsequent connection to a diversity of places. We claim that studying migrants who lead transnational lives can increase our knowledge about the compatibility of attachments to particular places or people on the one hand, and cosmopolitan outlooks on the other. It can also correct the narrow focus in European politics as well as in migration studies on ethnic or national values and identities, encouraging a more intersectional approach. We thus aim to contribute to a re-conceptualisation of the relationships between polity, territory, and civic responsibility in culturally and religiously diverse societies in Europe today.

From Going Abroad to Settling Down… While Remaining Mobile? Polish Women in Norway Narrate Their Migration Experiences

<p class="QSAbs">This article analyses mobility of Polish women living transnational lives between Poland and Norway. The emphasis is on the emic (insider’s) versus etic (outsider’s) points of view regarding issues of migrant identity, mobility before arriving in Norway, and temporality, permanence, fluidity and settlement after moving to Norway. The article is based on an online survey of 485 Polish women and 126 ethnographic interviews with Polish women residing in Norway. The study findings suggest that while many Polish women are working and raising families in Norway, they maintain strong links to Poland and continue to be very mobile. The way they narrate their mobility and migration experiences are contrasted with categories devised by policy makers and scholars.

Chinese international secondary school students as flexible citizens: toward cosmopolitan learning

ABSTRACT Guided by the notion of ‘flexible citizenship’, as a strategy to accumulate and exchange different forms of capital across national borders, our ethnographic study followed eleven Chinese international secondary school students’ transnational lives. This paper is focused on how instrumental goals of flexible citizenship cover over the emotional and existential qualities of these youths’ lives. To orient this concern, we turn to Rizvi’s conception of ‘cosmopolitan learning’ highlighting learners’ relational awareness of their ‘situatedness’ in a hyper-connected world. Our analysis shows that student participants’ understandings and practices were laced with emotional and moral sensitivities emerging from the intersecting transnational regimes of family, nation-states, and capital. Governed by home and host cultural logics and power discourses, the students were pushed and pulled into an instrumental flexible citizenship. They lacked dialogical spaces and pedagogical supports from teachers and parents for their cosmopolitan learning; we suggest stakeholders in East–West study abroad take notice.

PROBLEMATIZING HOME, BELONGING AND IDENTITY IN BINA SHARIF’S MY ANCESTOR’S HOUSE: A TRANSNATIONAL APPROACH

Since the 1990s, transnationalism, a as recent field of enquiry, has emerged as another theoretical lens through which we can look into the changing, evolving meanings of home, homeland, and belonging for international migrants. Studies of transnational migrants have focused upon varying aspects of the migrants’ lives: their ties with their kin; laws of naturalization in the host country, involvement in political organizations, the place of cultural iconography such as food, music, tradition in their daily lives. Because these transmigrants neither cut the ties to their countries of origin nor fully assimilate into the new culture of the host country, these immigrants fall under the rubric of transnationals However, transnational studies focusing upon the cross-border lives and activities of transnational subjects ignore the cross-cutting variables of gender, class, age, religion, ideology, period of immigration, citizenship status, different local sending contexts, which play a mediatory role in shaping notions of home, identity, community within even a single transnational community. In order words, it is not possible to talk about the transnationalism of a certain migrant group but of the heterogeneous make-up of transnationalisms, which differ even among the members of a transnational community at any given point in time. To understand the relationship between transnational migrants, and their conceptions of home and belonging, it is of vital importance to explore the specific circumstances of migration and how they influence conceptions of home. Secondly, the celebratory overtones of the transnational conditions of international migrants overlook the negative consequences of transnational lives such as the feelings of loss and dislocation inherent in cross border movements of transmigrants. Reading Pakistani-American Bina Sharif’s play My Ancestor’s House through a transnational lens, I would argue, brings a new insight into the literature on transnationalism by way of highlighting the non-homogenous, non-celebratory, and historically specific aspects of transnationalism in a global age.

The transnational life course: an integrated and unified theoretical concept for migration research

ABSTRACT Migration research developed significantly in the past decades. However, with the life course approach and the concept of transnational migration, there are still two different, as yet largely unconnected conceptual perspectives on migration. Both approaches have their merits but also their shortcomings. This paper tries to overcome these shortcomings by combining the advantages of both perspectives to suggest a unified theoretical concept of transnational life courses (TNLC). TNLC builds on the multidimensional understanding of transnational migration research that (potential) migrants live in multiple social and cultural spaces leading to parallel assimilation and dissimilation processes. This perspective is merged with the life course approach with its chronologically ordered understanding of causality relying on preceding determinants and subsequent outcomes in form of events and periods. Based on data provided by the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) some simple empirical analyses were conducted to illustrate the potential of the TNLC approach.

A shifting yet grounded transnational social field: Interplays of displacement and emplacement in African migrant trajectories across Central America

AbstractIn this article, we draw on the volatile complexity of African migrant trajectories in Central America to broaden the scope of transnational scholarship. These trajectories are characterised by mobilities as well as immobilities, taking shape in particular local contexts. By focusing on the interplays between displacement and emplacement that are part of these trajectories, we aim to increase our understanding of the extent to which migrants still ‘on the move’ experience both temporal embeddedness and cross‐border connectedness, thereby acknowledging and unravelling transnational lives as they ‘touch the ground’ en route. To do so, we build on long‐standing scholarly commitments in Central and South America and recent field research in Costa Rica. We go into selected empirical cases to discuss the dynamics of travelling, dwelling and travelling again as part of African migrant trajectories across Central America. We then explore the value of a ‘shifting’ transnational social field perspective and indicate some challenges for future trajectory research.