Browse

This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and representation in different borderscapes. It provides fresh insight into the ways in which borders, borderscapes and migration are imagined and narrated by offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border. The case studies in the volume contribute to the methodological renewal of border studies and present ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. The case studies address the role of borders in narrative and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, video art and survivor testimonies in a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from northern Europe, via Mediterranean and Mexican–US borderlands to Chinese borderlands. The disciplinary approaches include critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies and political geography. The volume argues that borderlands and border-crossings (such as those by migrants) are present in public discourse and more private, everyday experience. This volume addresses their mediation through various stories, photographs, films and other forms. It suggests that narratives and images are part of the borderscapes in which border-crossings and bordering processes take place, contributing to the negotiation of borders in the public sphere. As the case studies show, narratives and images enable identifying various top-down and bottom-up discourses to be heard and make visible different minority groups and constituencies.

At a time when the world is faced with an unprecedented and growing number of people being displaced around the world, scholars strive to make sense of what appear to be constantly unfolding “crises.” These attempts, however, often operate within niche and increasingly fragmented fields, thus making it difficult to develop a historically nuanced and theoretically informed understanding of how forced displacement is produced, managed, and experienced globally and locally. To advance such an understanding, this book offers an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to thinking about structures, spaces, and lived experiences of displacement. This is a collective effort by sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and migration studies scholars to develop new cross-regional conversations and theoretically innovative vocabularies in the work on forced displacement. We engage in a historical, transnational, interdisciplinary dialogue to offer different ways of theorizing about refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless people, and others that have been forcibly displaced. Our work opens critical discussions of forced displacement, drawing it together with other contemporary issues in different disciplines such as urbanization, securitization, race, and imperialism. The book brings together different regions and countries into dialogue with each other – from Latin America, to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, North America, South and Southeast Asia. The book, while being of particular interest to scholars of forced migration, will be an important text for those interested in studying the intersection between displacement and contemporary political, social, and economic issues.

This is the first social history to explore the experience of British emigrants from the peak years of the 1960s to the emigration resurgence of the turn of the twentieth century. It scrutinises migrant experiences in Australia, Canada and New Zealand alongside other countries. The book challenges the assumption that the ‘British diaspora’ ended in the 1960s, and explores its gradual reinvention from a postwar migration of austerity to a modern migration of prosperity. Building on previous oral histories of British emigration to single countries in postwar years, it offers a different way of writing migration history, based on life histories but exploring mentalities as well as experiences, against a setting of deep social and economic change. The book charts the decade-by-decade shift in the migration landscape, from the 1970s loss of Britons’ privilege in destination countries and the 1980s urgency of ‘Thatcher’s refugees’, to shifting attitudes to cosmopolitanism and global citizenship by the 1990s. Key moments are the rise of expatriate employment, changing dynamics of love and marriage, the visibility of British emigrants of colour, serial migration practices, enhanced independence among women migrants and ‘lifestyle’ change ambitions. These are new patterns of discretionary and nomadic migration, which became more common practice generally from the end of the twentieth century.

This book argues for a cultural, rather than a sociological or economic, approach to understand how immigrants become part of new country. It argues that the language used to talk about immigration determines the kinds of things that can be said about it. In contrast to the language of integration or assimilation which evaluates an immigrant’s success in relation to a static endpoint (e.g. integrated or not), ‘settling’ makes it possible to see how immigrants and their descendants engage in an ongoing process of adaptation. In order to understand this process of settling, it is important to pay particular attention to immigrants not only as consumers, but also as producers of culture, since artistic production provides a unique and nuanced perspective on immigrants’ sense of home and belonging, especially within the multi-generational process of settling. In order to anchor these larger theoretical questions in actual experience, this book looks at music, theatre and literature by artists of Turkish immigrant origin in France.