1st Edition
Migration, Identity, and Belonging Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland
This volume responds to the question: How do you know when you belong to a country? In other words, when is the nation-state a homeland? The boundaries and borders defining who belongs and who does not proliferate in the age of globalization, although they may not coincide with national jurisdictions. Contributors to this collection engage with how these boundaries are made and sustained, examining how belonging is mediated by material relations of power, capital, and circuits of communication technology on the one side and representations of identity, nation, and homeland on the other. The authors’ diverse methodologies, ranging from archival research, oral histories, literary criticism, and ethnography attend to these contradictions by studying how the practices of migration and identification, procured and produced through global exchanges of bodies and goods that cross borders, foreclose those borders to (re)produce, and (re)imagine the homeland and its boundaries.
Introduction: Theorizing Belonging against and beyond
Imagined Communities
MARGARET FRANZ AND KUMARINI SILVA
PART I
Territories, Sovereignties, and Legal Geographies
1. Migration Law as a State (Re)producing Mechanism
MAGDALENA KMAK
2. Migration: A Threat to the European Identity? A Legal Analysis of the Borders and Boundaries of the European Homeland
CAROLA LINGAAS
3. "Entitlement" Warfare: Indigenous and Immigrant
Welfare and Remapping Neoliberal National (B)orders
LEAH PERRY
4. "When Is a Migrant a Refugee?": Hierarchizing Migrant Life
CHINA MEDEL AND YURIDIA RAMIREZ
5. El pais-de-en-medio, or the Plural Stories of Legalities in the US-Mexican Borderland
LUIS GOMEZ ROMERO AND MARIA DE LA MACARENA IRIBARNE GONZALEZ
PART II
Narrating the Homeland, Mediating Belonging
6. And Europe Said, Let There Be Borders:
Autoethnographic Reflections on Border Crossings and Violence
KALEMBA KIZITO
7. Departures and Arrivals in a Columbian World
MARJORIE FLORESTAL
8. "Dreaming of Addis Ababa": In the Afterlives of Inter-War Christian Internationalism
SNEHA KRISHNAN
9. "Politics Are Not for Small People": Expectations for Tibetan Youth, and the Question of Deviancy in Exile
ALANA VEHABA
10. "Never Come Back, You Hear Me!": Negotiating "Bulgarian-ness" and "Homeland" in Public Discourses on Emigration
NADEZHDA SOTIROVA
11. DREAMer Narratives: Redefining Immigration, Redefining Belonging
SVILEN V. TRIFONOV
12. Indigenous Sovereignty and Nationhood: The Standing Rock Movement
MAHUYA PAL AND RYAN A. D'SOUZA
Biography
Margaret Franz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Tampa. She researches legal communication as it relates to race, coloniality, and national belonging. Her current project investigates the evolution of citizenship status in the United States by analyzing how official methods of interpretation coevolve with and respond to vernacular legal cultures that challenge state authority to define and enforce citizenship status. Her work on the cultural politics of birthright citizenship has appeared in Social Identities, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.
Kumarini Silva is Associate Professor of Communication the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and co-editor of Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture (Palgrave UK, 2015). She current research extends the exploration of racialized identification in Brown Threat to understand how affective relationships, especially calls to and of love, animate regulatory practices that are deeply cruel and alienating.
