1st Edition

Regimes of Mobility Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power

Edited By Noel B. Salazar, Nina Glick Schiller Copyright 2014
    166 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This book builds on, as well as critiques, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, it challenges conceptual orientations built on binaries of difference that have impeded analyses of the interrelationship between mobility and stasis. These include methodological nationalism, which counterpoises concepts of internal and international movement and native and foreigner, and consequently normalises stasis. Instead, the book proposes a ‘regimes of mobility’ framework that addresses the relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and transnational connection, experiences and imaginaries of migration, and rootedness and cosmopolitan openness. Within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the various contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although they examine nation-state building processes, the anthropological analysis is not confined by national boundaries.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

    1. Introduction: Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe Nina Glick Schiller and Noel B. Salazar

    2. The Great Departure: Rethinking National(ist) Common Sense Dace Dzenovska

    3. Tibetan Peregri-nations: Mobility, Incommensurable Nationalisms and (Un)belonging Athwart the Himalayas Chris Vasantkumar

    4. International Migration: Virtue or Vice? Perspectives from Cameroon Michaela Pelican

    5. Cultivating Hustlers: The Agrarian Ethos of Soninke Migration Paolo Gaibazzi

    6. Development Mobilities: Identity and Authority in an Angolan Development Programme Rebecca Warne Peters

    7. Jembe Hero: West African Drummers, Global Mobility and Cosmopolitanism as Status Pascal Gaudette

    8. Moving Subjects, Stagnant Paradigms: Can the ‘Mobilities Paradigm’ Transcend Methodological Nationalism? Barak Kalir

    Biography

    Noel B. Salazar is Research Professor of Anthropology and Founding Director of Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

    Nina Glick Schiller is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Culture at the University of Manchester, UK.