Doris Bachmann-Medick and Jens Kugele
Introduction
Migration – Frames, Regimes, Concepts
How do people think about migration? What patterns of perception – collective memories, images, and historical experiences – does such thinking activate? And how might scholars in the study of culture analyze the shifting social and political aspects of migration that are of such heightened concern today? Recent debates have demonstrated the deleterious effects of stereotypes on how migration is imagined, framed, and analyzed. Such preconceptions are often unconscious, unspoken, and unexplored, but they nonetheless exert a powerful effect in social life, in academic and political statements, in policies and decisions, and in the lives of migrants themselves. On the one hand, these framings determine the changing conditions, complex realities, and transnational entanglements of migration in the 21st century. On the other hand, these changing conditions are themselves a challenge in the discursive and scholarly fields, demanding a reconsideration of the dominant migration-related concepts and their powerful work in academic analyses as well as in public and political discourses.
The explicitly conceptual perspective of this volume is not entirely new: set in motion already in the field of migration studies (among others, see Schittenhelm 2007; Bartram, Poros, and Monforte 2014), it still demands further elaboration. In a constantly changing world of global migration we must develop new frameworks that allow reflection more specifically upon conditions, laws, borders, and cultural and political encounters, and on exclusions, inclusions, and unequal power relationships in transnational migration processes. We need to theorize these issues and explore them in their constructedness and changeability. And on a smaller scale, we also need to develop modified concepts suitable to and adequate for these changing situations of migration/immigration in contemporary societies: today, “earlier conceptions of immigrant and migrant no longer suffice […] Now, a new kind of migrating population is emerging, composed of those whose networks, activities and patterns of life encompass both their host and home societies” (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992, 1).
In the study of migration as “cross-border-studies” (Amelina, Nergiz, Faist, and Glick Schiller 2012, 1–9) it is no longer sufficient to work with framings and concepts based on naturalizing and essentializing assumptions (such as ‘ethnicity’) or on the presumption of a linear migration process. Conceptual frameworks that correspond with the approach criticized as ‘methodological nationalism’ no longer seem appropriate either. Today, we face emerging global and interconnected conditions of migration entangled with lives in transnational communities that are infused by insecurities and persecution. We are confronted with numerous manifestations of refuge: ranging from violent conflicts and wars, displacements to multiple places, and economic asymmetries, all of which are influenced and increasingly dependent upon new telecommunication technologies and transnational and social media. These new entanglements have given rise to conceptual frameworks that demand a methodological transnationalism with multiple references to multilayered network structures. They have elicited “a global power perspective,” as Nina Glick Schiller suggests, that explores “structures and processes of unequal capital flow which influence the experience of people who reside in particular localities” (Glick Schiller 2007, 63).
Transnational approaches beyond methodological nationalism are certainly better equipped to capture broader links and connectivities of migration processes in their cross-cultural global relations – not least with regard to family bonds, digital communication, and network formation, as Heike Greschke discusses in her contribution to this volume. Addressing such new contexts and their changing practices in the contemporary field of migration in any case seems crucial. A simple step from ‘methodological nationalism’ to ‘methodo logical transnationalism’ is not sufficient, however; remaining under the umbrella term of ‘methodological transnationalism’ will not allow the full picture to emerge. If we seek to include perspectives on concrete migratory encounters, even more specific and more suitable frames demand our attention, including boundary-making, biographical analysis, group formation, mobility, medialization, network-building, impact of collective memory, Orientalization, and visualization.
Rather than concentrating on specific historical or contemporary case studies, this volume seeks to critically address migration’s pressing social and political engagements by reflecting upon the overarching norms, policies, governance practices, and experiences of migration that provide basic dimensions for analy zing migration processes. By taking a distancing analytical standpoint – following the perspective of a second-order observation – this approach enables a stronger contextualized analysis of actual migration phenomena and individual experience. This proves to be methodologically productive when reconsidering recent migration issues: for instance, the enforced migration of academics from Turkey that Kader Konuk discusses in these pages, or the enormous impact of collective memory on public perception of the refugee situation in today’s Germany, which Wulf Kansteiner examines in his contribution herein. We must seek such critical analytical standpoints that are not directly involved in actual political processes to avoid the danger of reifying scholarly concepts according to propagated concepts current in our societies – e.g., the notion of ‘identity.’
1‘Frames’ of Migration
The conceptual approach chosen in this volume, however, by no means shies away from migratory realities, but instead directly references these realities throughout. At the same time, it seeks to dig deeper into contemporary frames and framings of discourses on migration and their cultural perceptions by considering the analytical terms and conceptual assumptions of cultural engagements with migration. These can be described, in short, as “schemata of interpretation,” as in Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1986, 21). ‘Frames’ constitute methodologically and epistemologically self-reflexive approaches to the complex field of migration, but they are also effective in shaping the field of socio-political experience and behavior that directly impacts the lives of migrants. As frames render events, issues, and situations meaningful, they become effective as tools for the organization of experience (Goffman 1986, 11); in the field of migration, this certainly holds true. The United Nations’ World Migration Report 2018 specifically addresses the power of ‘framing migration’ in public discourse through media coverage: “Migration coverage […] presents a variety of different issues, narratives and viewpoints […] Identifying how matters are framed is important because […] media frames affect how people think about migration” (World Migration Report 2018, 194). Identifying how matters of migration are framed – and in this way, how such matters are shaped and changed through narratives, images, prejudices, preconceptions and false conceptions, collective memories, political predeterminations, and policy-making – should thus be a primary endeavor in the study of culture in general and in the study of migration in particular. For this reason, the present volume focuses on framings in an effort to open them up and deconstruct them into more operative concepts, considering their uses, functions, and changes. In concord with Mieke Bal’s assertion, this approach strives to keep frames and their concepts dynamic, actively conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing them as an outcome of critical self-reflection (see Bal 2009, 17).
The notion of ‘frames’ expounded by Judith Butler in her book Frames of War also proved inspiring in our attempt to examine the bedrock of migration discourses by shedding light on framing concepts that determine and shape these discourses. This broader endeavor of a critical attention towards framing, however, also implies the danger of certain epistemological pitfalls. Frames, Butler contends, “are themselves operations of power” (Butler 2009, 1). The framing of migration, too, is necessarily entangled within its own operations of power. By examining concepts of person, citizenship, violence, race, and sexuality in this context, we can explore and analyze the powerful “normative schemes” (4) that shape our understanding of migration. The framing of migration is never innocent. In the context of precarious existential conditions of war – analogous to Butler’s fundamental question “What is a life?” – we should search for a reflective and self-reflective frame that provides new answers to the old question “What is migration?” We might also look for frames as ‘operative’ dimensions in the research process, as they determine our perceptions of migration with respect to imprisonment, torture, and war, but also to the politics of immigration (24). Here, too, it makes a difference if “certain lives are perceived as lives, while others, though apparently living, fail to assume perceptual form as such” (24). Butler’s position encourages us to consider frames of migration in an extended sense – seeing elements of war at work even in immigration processes through a “framing of immigration issues as a ‘war at home’” (26). This tendency can be observed, for instance, in the mobilization of feminist sexual politics not only “to rationalize war against predominantly Muslim populations, but also to argue for limits to immigration to Europe from predominantly Muslim countries” (26).
2‘Regimes’ of Migration
This admittedly broad analytical perspective reveals that attention to ‘framings’ cannot do the analytical work alone. It must connect to an entire cluster of concepts and regulations to capture the complex institutional arrangements, laws, conventions, and restrictions that determine and govern the broader field of migration. It is not by accident that we often speak of ‘regimes’ (border regime, regime of the gaze, mobility regime, etc.) when we want to address determining factors of migration processes. Not confined to specific models or types of migration, such ‘regimes’ are tools for conceiving, forming, and developing complex phenomena using an explicitly constructivist approach (see Casas-Cortes et al. 2014, 15). A multidimensional ensemble and complex interweaving of practices, patterns, and regulations of governmentality and control, of power and inequality, security, and transnational collaboration come into view, not least as regards human rights issues. A ‘regime’ approach could be useful for linking a micro- or actor-oriented perspective on migration to overarching regional or transnational relations, hierarchies, and other framings that conduct the local and individual behavior of migrants. As a matter of fact, migrants themselves are often caught in this web of interwoven migration factors (Tamas and Palme 2016, 3–19). Thus, the ‘regime’ lens encompasses analytical approaches as well as actual patterns of behavior and social norms, and can therefore be used for an actor-oriented analysis while remaining close to the field of political dynamics. An approach like this can be developed from a clustering or intersection of concepts of migration such as border control, discourses on human rights, and securitization. This goes along with a widened conception of migration research that reaches beyond the scholarly sphere, connecting to the realm of politics and focusing on the complexities of the effective norms, discourses, and regulations:
[U]sing a ‘regime’ perspective might […] add sociological and ethnographic stances to the analysis of political dynamics, hence bridging a long-standing divide in migration research between those focusing on the politics of migration and those dealing with the practices of mobility and settlement. (Horvath, Amelina, and Peters 2017)
This volume and its contributions aim to differentiate and specify the all-too-general notion of ‘regime’ that has characterized various recent approaches in migration studies by paying more attention to implicit or explicit concepts that constitute such regimes in the first place. Even more, the articles herein show that a regime approach is especially relevant when it not only synthesizes different migration factors but tries to identify them through actor-related concepts as a differentiated scenario of negotiations between various actors, as in contributions to this volume by Sabine Hess and Christine Bischoff. They highlight the importance of conceptual nuance in dealing with questions of migration, not least with critical reference to the dynamics and politics of contemporary discourses on migration and the latest developments in transnational migration.
3‘Concepts’ of Migration
This volume’s concern with nuance is introduced in a discussion of migration from the perspective of a concept-based study of culture, which claims that working with ‘concepts’ is a reciprocal endeavor. On one hand, the conceptual approach to migration influences the dynamic development of concepts themselves; on the other hand, a fundamental conceptual practice in the study of culture aims at fostering continued reflection upon the field’s analytical tools as central elements of our knowledge construction. Still, our conceptual apparatus provides more than merely a collection of key concepts (as, for example, in Bartram, Poros, and Monforte 2014) or an address of some analytical concepts on the level of discursivity. Meditating upon concepts in order to transform or change them can be an effective way to involve the study of culture in the work of important conceptual developments that act as determining forces for shaping cultural perceptions in the social world. As Mieke Bal reflects about “working with concepts,” concepts are never harmless, never purely descriptive, but normative and programmatic. They unfurl a power of their own by operating as tools that trigger debates about their meaning, impacting common language use as well as cultural perceptions (Bal 2007, 35, 38):
Even those concepts that are tenuously established, suspended between questioning and certainty, hovering between ordinary word and theoretical tool, constitute the backbone of the interdisciplinary study of culture – primarily because of their potential intersubjectivity. Not because they mean the same thing for everyone, but because they do not. (Bal 2009, 17)
Concepts, in Mieke Bal’s sense, thus “help us see” (Bal 2009, 22) and “focus interest” (Bal 2007, 40), making them effective as a critical cultural force even prior to any direct societal activism. Social change, however, does not result from mere analytical concepts, but rather from disputes about concepts, disagreements in interpretations and practices, or stronger political issues. As an example from the concept of climate migration indicates: “Climate migration is a weak analytical concept, but it has a particularly strong political currency” (Mayer 2016, 37).
The operative role of concepts, though, seems uncontested, as historical anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler highlights and historically reconsiders in her recent book, Duress. In a subchapter called “What is Concept Work?” Stoler points to the necessity of concept transformation in the humanities. Stoler argues against the assumed stability and security of conventional concepts in the study of imperial history (Stoler 2016, 17–23), and contends that keeping concepts “provisional, active, and subject to change” (19) would allow access to “occluded histories” (10). Critical concept work that explores “occluded histories” and unspoken assumptions could perhaps be fruitful for the field of migration studies. For this purpose, we accept the challenge to “better look to the unmarked space between their (the concepts’ [the editors]) porous and policed peripheries, to that which hovers as not quite ‘covered’ by a concept […] that which cannot be quite encompassed by its received attributes” (9).
What is required for exploring such “peripheries” is a creative and reflective work with concepts in migration studies that exposes familiar concepts, and revisits and reframes them to uncover the hidden dimensions, “backstage discourses,” and “hidden transcripts” (Scott 1990, xii) of this complex field.1 But this endeavor is not sufficient in itself. It is also necessary to expand the realm of concepts by connecting it to social practices, experiences, and mobilizing concepts operative in society and among migrants themselves. Indeed, a critical reconsideration of common concepts such as family, knowledge, mobility, and religion also could benefit from the perspective of migratory experiences, as various contributions to this volume demonstrate. In the case of family, for instance, one can observe a change from the Western concept of ‘nuclear family’ to the transnational concept of family as an institution of ‘care circulation’ kept alive by digital communication technologies in deterritorialized migration contexts (see Heike Greschke’s contribution to this volume and Baldassar and Merla 2014). Such a conceptual approach to migration explores the dynamics and changing potentials of concepts through an expansion of traditional (Western) concepts and a continued reconceptualization for which Nina Glick Schiller and others have argued (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992). Such reconceptualizations seem of particular importance as the heuristic instruments that we employ in our analyses fundamentally shape the outcome of our research. Our conceptions of religion might serve as a case in point here. When we use, for instance, Western-centric conceptions of religion, we not only categorically narrow the spectrum of possible insights but we also run the risk of implicitly universalizing these Western-centric conceptions. As Peggy Levitt suggests in her critique of contemporary migration studies, it would be far more fruitful to try to think outside the conventional boxes and to avoid universalizing conceptions of religion since “the traditions that immigrants bring with them do not fit into one, closed, Christian-like container” (Levitt 2012, 495).
The intention to develop or reimagine concepts, however, can be quite precarious, as exemplified by the conceptual shift from ‘identity’ to ‘belonging’ (see Pfaff-Czarnecka 2013). Even if we used a concept of multiple ‘belongings’ as a starting point seemingly closer to the actors’ experiences, additional nuanced conceptual work would still be necessary to explore the conceptual peripheries and contact zones between ‘belonging’ and ‘identification,’ ‘affiliation,’ or ‘origin.’ As analysis of migration depends on such concepts to provide the framework of perception, the continuous reflection upon and rethinking of concepts constitutes a challenging yet fundamentally necessary task. It impacts not only the analysis of migration and migrants, but our cultural self-perception and self-interpretation in general.
As forms and types of migration in a globalized world have become ever more differentiated throughout recent decades, conceptions of migration must also be readjusted to reach beyond the standard typologies of migration (refugees, labor migration, forced migration, etc.). Rather, switching back and forth between the scales of analysis, between an actor-oriented micro-perspective and a more structural macro-perspective seems indispensable. As both dimensions are central to exploring deeper structures within the migration process, a concept-based study should definitely be complemented by an actor-based approach. Aiming at such dynamic concept work, we also need to discuss and expand the scope of our very patterns of interpretation. As Saskia Sassen reminds us, it does not suffice to conceive of people on the move merely as “migrants in search of a better life who hope to send money and perhaps return to the family left behind,” if we take seriously the fact that some of these migrants “are people in search of bare life, with no home to return to” (Sassen 2016, 205).
In this sense, in the 1980s and 1990s, Abdelmalek Sayad’s work on Algerian immigration to France marked a radical departure from former approaches, categories, and labels in the study of migration. Sayad directed our attention to a non-ethnocentric dimension, that of the migratory experiences of individuals and groups – in their irritations, pain, and suffering – as related to a history of colonization, a topic which Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez takes up in her contribution to this volume. This critical break with established approaches was accompanied by a departure from ‘methodological nationalism’ that relied upon ‘state’ and ‘nation’ as its operating categories, plus a further departure from ‘methodo logical ethnicity’ that concentrated on migrants as bounded collective groups, and has been followed by stereotyping ethnic generalizations. More recently, this conceptual frame has been supplanted by a rather individualistic and biographical approach that puts “individual persons in the forefront” (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2013, abstract) and investigates the “constellations of multiple belonging” (12) of individual migrants. What we can observe in the development of migratory concepts over the course of the last decade is exactly the shift from categorical and systemic top-down concepts to practical concepts of “social relating” (15), and to the dynamic and processual character of concepts (Brockmeyer and Harders 2016, 4).
4Working with Concepts: Critical Contributions
The contributions to this collection engage with this dynamic character of concepts as they revisit established analytical categories in the study of migration such as border regimes, orders of belonging, coloniality, translation, trans/national digital culture, and memory. The perspectives on migration offered by the authors are related to the fields of history, visual studies, pedagogy, literary and cultural studies, and the social sciences. As they open up an interdiscipli nary dialogue and discuss new conceptual notions of migration in light of changed realities, they also demonstrate the powerful work of frames and the relevance of conceptual nuance extending beyond academic discourse. In four main conceptual clusters, the contributions explore various frameworks of migration and reflect on the appropriate language for academic analysis.
Cluster I:The Power of Images and the Imaginary
Imagination, as the interplay of individual and collective ideas, mental images, visualizations, and fantasies, plays a powerful role in the experience and construction of realities. It thus also provides an important framework for conceptualizations of migration. The work of imagination informs subjective perception and collective memory, habits, social belonging, ritual performance, and political action. Imagination presents such a powerful framing of cultural history that French historian Jacques Le Goff famously called for an entire new field of research in historical studies to be dedicated to the complex cultural “imaginary” (Le Goff 1990, 12). In this vein, academic analyses would investigate the collective imagery that has been concocted in changing historical contexts, expressed in words, iconographic production, and material culture, and circulating across times, social strata, and societies. The contributions to this section engage in aspects of this complex cultural imaginary, drawing our attention to visuality, media representation, and imagined community in conceptualizations of migration.
As Christine Bischoff argues in her contribution here, in today’s highly visual culture, our perceptions and interpretations of migration are often determined by images. Bischoff approaches processes of migration through a discussion of visuality that becomes effective in sociocultural representations of individuals, groups, generations, gender, and religions. Focusing on the ‘regime of the gaze,’ she directs attention to the effectiveness of practices of visibility and visualization. Bischoff’s analysis is concerned with both the ‘image of the Other’ and the gaze of the invisible subjects constituted in the definition of the ‘deviating Other.’ Shedding light on ‘visual regimes,’ Bischoff demonstrates their potential for the analysis of ‘images of migration’ as well as the ‘migration of images,’ and points to their interrelations with image discourses understood as everyday media practice.
Focusing on refugee discourse, Heidrun Friese offers a slightly different take on the nexus of imagery and social imagination. Friese lists the numerous artistic representations of refugees at Lampedusa and draws our attention to the production and reproduction of emotion, designed, as she argues, to move the spectator, and to inscribe the migrant’s destiny onto a powerful narration of misery, pity, indignation, and victimhood. Dominant media representations evoke catastrophe and contamination. Her discussion of representations and frames of mobility demonstrates the highly political dimension of this construction of the social imaginary: mobility ultimately challenges democracy as it incessantly points towards the paradox of democracy and to its inclusive-exclusive structure.
Approaching migration from an anthropological perspective, Werner Schiffauer introduces the concept of ‘imaginary opportunity space’ as a composite that connects (objectively given) opportunities with (subjective) imaginations. Suggesting that imaginations become (emotionally) powerful when they relate to opportunities, Schiffauer’s systematic exploration of the concepts ‘imaginary’ and ‘imaginary opportunity space’ seeks to contribute to a better understanding of three key aspects of migration theory: the migratory decision, transnational communities, and irregular migration. Schiffauer suggests a focus on ‘transnational imagined communities’ and the concept of an ‘imaginary opportunity space’ to shed light on aspects such as emotions of guilt among others in the context of migration networks. As Schiffauer argues, this conceptual focus allows us to take a fresh look at the migration process and its emotional-economic implications.
Cluster II:(Border) Regimes
Constructions of borders and boundaries in their relation to movements have counted among the most central frames for analyzing migration. Recent critical scholarship has suggested exploring “border regimes” to foster an understanding of the complex interplay of various agents, discourses, and practices in this context of mental mapping, politics of migration, and national imagination (Hess 2012). One of the challenges for scholars of migration who study border regimes is finding a way to incorporate migration as a powerful force in the very process of theorizing the border itself and the activity of bordering, rather than regarding migration merely as being an object of the border (Hess 2012).
Analyzing conceptualizations that are customary in international border studies, Sabine Hess, in her contribution to this volume, criticizes the top-down structure underlying their conceptual and theoretical considerations. As Hess argues, conceptual tools in border studies often run the risk of producing a re presentational regime in which migrants appear as the dependent variable, as structurally powerless and as ‘victims,’ which can lead – even in critical research work – to a reification of the controlling power of the border regime. Hess asks how scholars of migration can re-conceptualize the relation between borders and movements, especially the movement that is politically labeled ‘international migration.’ Through her discussion, Hess offers a critical approach to the nexus among the concepts ‘border,’ ‘movement,’ and ‘migration’ that seeks to do justice to the agency of migration, while at the same time being capable of analytically examining the expansion of the border regime without minimizing the border regime’s militarization and brutality. In this context, the concept of ‘the autonomy of migration’ as a prism for academic analysis resituates migration within the history of labor, capitalism, and modern forms of government.
Constructions of boundaries and (national) borders are inextricably connected with politics of documentation. Charlton Payne’s contribution focuses on this connection, exploring the heuristic potential of the concept of ‘documentality.’ Payne investigates the links between the history of migration, displacement, and practices of documentation, and takes up the idea that the ability to leave and record traces supplies the performative basis of social institutions. Payne complements his discussion of the concept of ‘documentality’ by turning to literary and theoretical writings that link the identity document to reductive identity ascriptions as well as to a militarization of society. He calls attention to the mechanisms of exclusion, structures of complicity, and inherent instabilities that this system of reference engenders.
The section concludes with a migration pedagogy perspective on the realm of border regimes. Paul Mecheril highlights the importance of discursive regimes and draws our attention to the political, aesthetic, and educational labeling at work in these regimes. It is on this very discourse level that Mecheril sees the specific point of entry for a migration pedagogy perspective. Migration pedagogy as a critical practice recognizes the power of institutional and discursive orders of belonging and furthermore explores the question of how the capacity to act with dignity might be cultivated under the given conditions without uncritically affirming and accepting these conditions. Critical migration pedagogy thus focuses on the analysis of possibilities for and forms of the changing orders of belonging and hegemonic structures of domination, as well as resistance to and within these orders and structures.
Cluster III:Stories, Histories, and Politics
One of the central frames of migration has been the political realm of the nation-state with its founding myths, narratives, stories, and histories, and its individual and collective memories. Rogers Brubaker, in his book Nationalism Reframed, has prominently discussed the ways in which the term “nation” itself works as a theoretical and practical category but particularly as a cognitive frame. We should not ask: “what is a nation,” but rather: “how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among states? How does nation work as practical category, as classificatory scheme, as cognitive frame?” (Brubaker 1996, 16). All four contributions in this section engage in questions pertinent to this political framing. They critically reflect upon the category of the nation in the study of migration and address it as a realm of practice and politics rather than a unified object of research. Discussing aspects such as cultural memory, colonial history, and exilic displacement, they draw our attention to the role of narratives, myths, and processes of knowledge formation in the context of trans/national politics.
Suggesting a conceptualization of nations as “highly contingent cultural and psychological phenomena involving a wide range of heterogeneous and contradictory communications,” Wulf Kansteiner focuses his case study on the German television series Scene of the Crime, Germany’s Sunday evening primetime flagship program, and its engagements with migration. In light of its prominence in the German media landscape, Kansteiner interprets the series as a central site of German cultural memory and thus as part of the media framework for the society’s conceptualizations of migration. Given that German television has played an important role in the remapping of collective national-ethnic identities after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in Kansteiner’s view, TV networks and critics have not paid enough attention to the problematic narrative and aesthetic strategies with which crime shows influence perceptions of foreigners and processes of social integration. In his discussion of the conceptual frameworks at work in societies, Kansteiner advocates a mobility turn in memory studies and the politics of memory. Such a turn to the concept of mobility should, in Kansteiner’s view, conceptualize moving people not as deficient vis-à-vis an allegedly static location from which they emerge (emigration) or to which they aspire (immigration). Instead, through the employment of mobility, movement itself would become the focus of analytical and narrative interest. This would provide a foundation for a wide spectrum of multi-directional memories instead of homogenizing memory regimes and their inherent constructions of alterity.
The larger conceptual framework of national memory politics is also central for Friederike Eigler’s contribution. While Kansteiner’s focus lies on the German media landscape and the framework of memory politics, Eigler’s considerations engage predominantly with the concepts ‘postmemory’ and ‘postgeneration’ in the context of literary works. She discusses the heuristic value of these concepts for the study of flight and expulsion, and the role that literary texts play in their cultural remembrance. In light of the European history of contested public discourses on flight and expulsion it is not surprising that a considerable part of the new scholarship draws on memory studies as a methodological framework. Based on her discussion of this recent scholarship she asks how literary texts referencing national and transnational contexts can foster our understanding of particular aspects of ‘memory’ and ‘postmemory’ and thus contribute to a further refinement of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks in the scholarship on migration.
Both Kansteiner and Eigler draw our attention to societies’ interpretation and remembrance of the past as a powerful frame for their contemporary conceptualization of migration and their future politics of migration. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, in her contribution to this section, shares this outlook and adds her perspective on the power of Europe’s entangled colonial histories and the matrix of objectification and racialization informing local and national conceptualizations of migration and asylum. Proposing the concept ‘coloniality of migration,’ Gutiérrez Rodríguez develops an approach to migration within the theoretical framework of decolonial theory. In light of prevailing European myths about cultural homogeneity, racial and ethnic endogamy, immobility and territorial rootedness, the discussion of migration as an articulation of a modern world-system needs to be connected, as Gutiérrez Rodríguez argues, to the cultural, political, economic, and social legacies of European colonialism. Her discussion of the nexus between migration and asylum challenges the rupture among asylum, forced migration, and labor migration, and emphasizes instead the differential logic of racialization in the complex interplay amid the social, the economic, and the political.
The section concludes with Kader Konuk’s contribution, which highlights the political framework of forced migration and exile studies in the context of migrant academics. Using recent political developments in Turkey forcing academics into exile as a case study, her conceptual discussion of exilic displacement offers an engaged analysis of academic knowledge formation in its interrelatedness to state power and to national politics. To this end, Konuk argues for a reconceptualization of academics and intellectuals who have been forced to leave their academic institutions and countries. More nuanced and more adequate concepts are needed that reach beyond the individual hardship of what has been called the “conscious pariah” or “exilic intellectual.” In Konuk’s view, these concepts run the risk of too readily reducing the notion of “exile” to merely a metaphor for “uprootedness.” Consequently, this view of exile potentially distorts the historical record, diminishing the existential plight of those forced to migrate. Against this view of exile qua detachment, Konuk proposes the concept of multiple attachments. A critical investigation of these attachments teases out their implications both for the individual and for the respective societies at large, shedding light on the ambivalent liaison of nation-state and higher education.
Cluster IV:New Contexts – Changing Concepts
If concepts, in Mieke Bal’s sense, “help us see” (Bal 2009, 22) and “focus interest” (Bal 2007, 40), we ought to be attentive to the changing character of concepts and their situatedness in specific contexts. This is especially true in light of the mobility of concepts that Mieke Bal famously pointed to:
Concepts are not fixed. They travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities. Between disciplines, their meaning, reach, and operational value differ. These processes of differing need to be assessed before, during, and after each ‘trip.’ (Bal 2011, 12; on traveling concepts see Neumann and Nünning 2012)
Working with concepts in the study of culture more generally and in the study of migration more specifically thus requires a continued reflection on the commonalities and differences of these concepts as they change across time, across scholarly communities, and across the boundaries of academia. The contributions to this section focus on such changes and individual contexts while reflecting on the analytical tools in the field as central elements of our knowledge construction.
In that vein, Evangelos Karagiannis and Shalini Randeria scrutinize the concepts ‘migrant’ and ‘culture’ and their specific employments that shape the discourse on migration in academia as well as in politics. To draw attention to the nuances, changes, and political contexts of such concepts, the authors call for a socio-cultural anthropological approach to migration as a societal phenomenon. The authors demonstrate the importance of a nuanced contextualization of an analytical category like ‘migrants’ that allows us to trace semantic shifts over time in allegedly timeless concepts. It also reveals how these seemingly neutral descriptive or analytical terms are situated in a concrete socio-political discourse. Increasing skepticism towards the analytical fruitfulness of the concept of culture, on the one hand, and its parallel ascent in political discourses of migration, on the other, led anthropologists to treat ‘culture’ not as an analytical term but as an emic category – that is, as one belonging to the semantics of the societies under study. The increasing identification of the category of migrants with Muslims can be seen in the context of the recent practice of coupling the discourse on migration with Orientalism, i.e., the figuration of the ‘Undesirable’ as the quintessential ‘Other.’
Offering a sociological perspective on migration, Heike Greschke problematizes the proximity of conceptualizations of migration in the social sciences to nation-state notions of normality in society and argues that this proximity is also reflected in the prioritization of questions regarding social, or more specifically, cultural integration or segregation. In her approach to migration in the case of (transnational) migrant families, Greschke departs from ‘methodological nationalism’ and provides a two-fold, shifting perspective on transnational migration processes and practices. Greschke employs a specific actor-centered methodology that combines a micro and a macro approach and sheds light on the concept ‘migration’ in its interrelation with the concept ‘integration.’ In her attempt to disentangle the analytical concepts from the often emotionally charged terms used in the political arena, Greschke restricts the concept ‘integration’ to a systematic definition and thus differentiates ‘migration’ into distinct modes of mobility.
Changing concepts and new contexts bear great potential to create new perspectives for the study of migration particularly when these changing concepts go along with the development of new ‘operative’ analytical lenses. Doris Bachmann-Medick’s contribution to this volume is a case in point. She invites us to approach various forms of migration with the analytical lens of ‘translation’ in order to find new angles from which to reevaluate existing and inform future case studies of migration that have been presented in the disciplines of history, socio logy, or cultural anthropology. If embedded in a wider multidisciplinary approach, a translational perspective can shed light on the decisive pivot points in migration processes: their ‘pre-translations,’ context shifts, negotiation procedures, and processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well as multiple linguistic affiliations and conflicts of the migrants themselves. Such an employment of the concept ‘translation’ in the context of migration may also help us to be more attentive to the ambivalent role of migrants as agents of translation on the one hand and their day-to-day struggles as translated individuals and groups on the other.
In a similar vein, it is a principal concern of this volume to put forward a perspective on concepts that not only regards them as academic tools but also attends to their important role in political discourses as well as in people’s personal experience. To explore the translatability of these different dimensions in the work of concepts is thus one of the fundamental challenges in the study of culture and migration.
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