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We Are All Migrants: Political Action and the Ubiquitous Condition of Migrant-hood

Autor Gregory Feldman
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 26 mai 2015
Now more than ever, questions of citizenship, migration, and political action dominate public debate. In this powerful and polemical book, Gregory Feldman argues that We Are All Migrants. By challenging the division between those considered "citizens" and "migrants," Feldman shows that both subjects confront disempowerment, uncertainty, and atomization inseparable from the rise of mass society, the isolation of the laboring individual, and the global proliferation of rationalized practices of security and production. Yet, this very atomization—the ubiquitous condition of migrant-hood—pushes the individual to ask an existential and profoundly political question: "do I matter in this world?" Feldman argues that for particular individuals to answer this question affirmatively, they must be empowered to jointly constitute the places they inhabit with others.

Feldman ultimately argues that to overcome the condition of migrant-hood, people must be empowered to constitute their own sovereign spaces from their particular standpoints. Rather than base these spaces on categorical types of people, these spaces emerge only as particular people present themselves to each other while questioning how they should inhabit it.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780804789332
ISBN-10: 0804789339
Pagini: 136
Dimensiuni: 127 x 203 x 13 mm
Greutate: 0.16 kg
Editura: Stanford University Press
Colecția Stanford Briefs

Recenzii

"In seeking the consequences of calling specific groups of people 'migrants,' Feldman turns a straightforwardly anthropological question about identity into a searchlight on contemporary politics. His compelling book asks us to pay close attention to what smug politicians perpetrate in the name of high principles and, yes, of good intentions. After reading We Are All Migrants</>, no one will have an excuse for letting them get away with it."—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

"We Are All Migrants is an important statement that is both provocative and sensible, a rare combination. Feldman offers a handsome critique of efforts to speak for others, and his work finds good company alongside boundary-crossing essays by Giorgio Agamben and Julia Kristeva."—Mark Maguire, Maynooth University

"Feldman's book makes an important contribution to theorizing and advancing what a truly universal and solidaristic (rather than hegemonic) revolutionary politics might look like, by drawing important conceptual and political connections between phenomena that are all too frequently treated in isolation: global migration and growing disillusionment with liberal party politics We Are All Migrants offers an important counter-narrative to the endlessly proliferating positivist policy responses to 'the problem of migration'."—Edward Wilcox, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

"Gregory Feldman's We Are All Migrants offers an insightful and pressing polemic examining the uncertainty and atomisation which, he argues, characterise the precarious position of both citizens and migrants in neoliberal capitalismFor a book of 117 pages, the text is incredibly rich, drawing widely on critical philosophers and literary figures."—Hamish Reid, Political Studies Review

Notă biografică

Gregory Feldman teaches at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union (2011).

Cuprins

Contents and Abstracts
Preface: Migrations without Migrants and Migrants without Migrations
chapter abstract

Introduction: The Presence of Migrant-hood and the Absence of Politics
chapter abstract

The book argues 1) that the line between the "citizen" and the "migrant" dissipates under close inspection as both subjects are effectively atomized and consequently disempowered, regardless of their relationship to the state; and 2) that to end the "condition of migrant-hood", people must constitute themselves in sovereign spaces where they appear as particular speaking subjects rather than as abstract citizens or animalized laborers. Along with scholarly literature, We are All Migrants examines this issue in reference to "foundational texts": i.e. books that have been continually re-read and that underpin the shifting foci of cutting edge research. In particular, it draws on the works of Homer, Aristotle, Marx, Tocqueville, Beckett, Coetzee, Levi, Agamben, Foucault, and Arendt.

Part I: Atomization: The Ubiquitous Condition of Migrant-hood
chapter abstract

The first of the book's three sections examines the modern condition of migrant-hood with respect to politics, economics, and society. It argues that this condition emerges because entry into modern mass society requires the denial of the particular speaking subject, regardless of whether one inhabits the status of "migrant" and "citizen".

Part II: Activity: Atomization through Connection
chapter abstract

The second section argues that the emphasis on "connections" in today's neoliberal world does not overcome the condition of migrant-hood, but rather exacerbates it. This situation has arisen because the modes in which we are connected ¿ and seen most fully in educated laboring practices supported by large-scale IT systems ¿ still deny the particular speaking subject because they draw upon the laborer's faculty of cognition as opposed to the faculty of thinking. The former reaches certainty through abstract logic, while the latter searches for meaning in the messy, empirical world. People do not distinguish themselves as particular subjects through their cognitive capacities and so atomization persists. Instead, they can only appear as particular speaking subjects when they try to persuade others of what they think ethically about the world around them.

Part III: Action: The Presence of Politics and the Absence of Migrant-hood
chapter abstract

The third section argues that to overcome the condition of migrant-hood people must be empowered to constitute their own sovereign spaces in which they both disclose themselves as particular speaking subjects to each other while deliberating on how they should inhabit the same space. It is through thinking, judging, and persuading that people appear as their particular selves in the very act of constituting sovereign space between them.