Nina Glick Schiller

Cristina Szanton Blanc

Linda Green Basch

This work comprising 15 papers develops a broad understanding of the emerging transnational experience of current immigrants to the United States, compares the patterns of transnationalism of different migrating populations, and re-examines current cconceptualisations of race, ethnicity, nationalism, class and gender.

Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered

Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration

Linda Basch

Christina Szanton Blanc

Nations Unbound is a pioneering study of an increasing trend in migration-transnationalism. Immigrants are no longer rooted in one location. By building transnational social networks, economic alliances and political ideologies, they are able to cross the geographic and cultural boundaries of both their countries of origin and of settlement. Through ethnographic studies of immigrant populations, the authors demonstrate that transnationalism is something other than expanded nationalism. By placing immigrants in a limbo between settler and visitor, transnationalism challenges the concepts of citizenship and of nationhood itself.

Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States

Nations Unbound

Ayse Simsek-Caglar

This books examines the relationship between migrants and cities in a time of massive urban restructuring, finding that locality matters in migration research and migrants matter in the reconfiguration of contemporary cities.

Rescaling Cities and Migrants

Locating Migration

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States

Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-states

Tsypylma Darieva

Sandra Gruner-Domic

This book approaches the concept of cosmopolitan sociability as a cultural or territorial rootedness that facilitates a simultaneous openness to shared human emotions, experiences, and aspirations. Cosmopolitan Sociability critiques definitions of cosmopolitanism as a tolerance for cultural difference or a universalist morality that arise from contemporary experiences of mobility and globalization. Challenging these assumptions, the book explores the degree to which a 'cosmopolitan dimension' can be practised within particular religious communities, diasporic ties, or gendered migrant identities in different parts of the world. A wide variety of expert contributors offer rich ethnographic insights into the interplay of social interactions and cosmopolitan sociability. In this way the book contributes significantly to ethnic and migration studies, global anthropology, social theory, and religious and cultural studies. Cosmopolitan Sociability was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Locating Transnational Religious and Diasporic Networks

Cosmopolitan Sociability

Georges Eugene Fouron

Combining history, autobiography, and ethnography, Georges Woke Up Laughing provides a portrait of the Haitian experience of migration to the United States that illuminates the phenomenon of long-distance nationalism, the voicelessness of certain citizens, and the impotency of government in an increasingly globalized world. By presenting lively ruminations on his life as a Haitian immigrant, Georges Eugene Fouron—along with Nina Glick Schiller, whose own family history stems from Poland and Russia—captures the daily struggles for survival that bind together those who emigrate and those who stay behind. According to a long-standing myth, once emigrants leave their homelands—particularly if they emigrate to the United States—they sever old nationalistic ties, assimilate, and happily live the American dream. In fact, many migrants remain intimately and integrally tied to their ancestral homeland, sometimes even after they become legal citizens of another country. In Georges Woke Up Laughing the authors reveal the realities and dilemmas that underlie the efforts of long-distance nationalists to redefine citizenship, race, nationality, and political loyalty. Through discussions of the history and economics that link the United States with countries around the world, Glick Schiller and Fouron highlight the forces that shape emigrants' experiences of government and citizenship and create a transborder citizenry. Arguing that governments of many countries today have almost no power to implement policies that will assist their citizens, the authors provide insights into the ongoing sociological, anthropological, and political effects of globalization. Georges Woke up Laughing will entertain and inform those who are concerned about the rights of people and the power of their governments within the globalizing economy. “In my dream I was young and in Haiti with my friends, laughing, joking, and having a wonderful time. I was walking down the main street of my hometown of Aux Cayes. The sun was shining, the streets were clean, and the port was bustling with ships. At first I was laughing because of the feeling of happiness that stayed with me, even after I woke up. I tried to explain my wonderful dream to my wife, Rolande. Then I laughed again but this time not from joy. I had been dreaming of a Haiti that never was.”—from Georges Woke Up Laughing

Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home

Georges Woke Up Laughing

Andrew Irving

The term cosmopolitan is increasingly used within different social, cultural and political settings, including academia, popular media and national politics. However those who invoke the cosmopolitan project rarely ask whose experience, understanding, or vision of cosmopolitanism is being described and for whose purposes? In response, this volume assembles contributors from different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to examine cosmopolitanism's possibilities, aspirations and applications-as well as its tensions, contradictions, and discontents-so as to offer a critical commentary on the vital but often neglected question: whose cosmopolitanism? The book investigates when, where, and how cosmopolitanism emerges as a contemporary social process, global aspiration or emancipatory political project and asks whether it can serve as a political or methodological framework for action in a world of conflict and difference.

Whose Cosmopolitanism?

Combining history, autobiography, and ethnography, Georges Woke Up Laughing provides a portrait of the Haitian experience of migration to the United States that illuminates the phenomenon of long-distance nationalism, the voicelessness of certain citizens, and the impotency of government in an increasingly globalized world. By presenting lively ruminations on his life as a Haitian immigrant, Georges Eugene Fouron—along with Nina Glick Schiller, whose own family history stems from Poland and Russia—captures the daily struggles for survival that bind together those who emigrate and those who stay behind. According to a long-standing myth, once emigrants leave their homelands—particularly if they emigrate to the United States—they sever old nationalistic ties, assimilate, and happily live the American dream. In fact, many migrants remain intimately and integrally tied to their ancestral homeland, sometimes even after they become legal citizens of another country. In Georges Woke Up Laughing the authors reveal the realities and dilemmas that underlie the efforts of long-distance nationalists to redefine citizenship, race, nationality, and political loyalty. Through discussions of the history and economics that link the United States with countries around the world, Glick Schiller and Fouron highlight the forces that shape emigrants’ experiences of government and citizenship and create a transborder citizenry. Arguing that governments of many countries today have almost no power to implement policies that will assist their citizens, the authors provide insights into the ongoing sociological, anthropological, and political effects of globalization. Georges Woke up Laughing will entertain and inform those who are concerned about the rights of people and the power of their governments within the globalizing economy. “In my dream I was young and in Haiti with my friends, laughing, joking, and having a wonderful time. I was walking down the main street of my hometown of Aux Cayes. The sun was shining, the streets were clean, and the port was bustling with ships. At first I was laughing because of the feeling of happiness that stayed with me, even after I woke up. I tried to explain my wonderful dream to my wife, Rolande. Then I laughed again but this time not from joy. I had been dreaming of a Haiti that never was.”—from Georges Woke Up Laughing

Ayse Çaglar

In Migrants and City-Making Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller trace the participation of migrants in the unequal networks of power that connect their lives to regional, national, and global institutions. Grounding their work in comparative ethnographies of three cities struggling to regain their former standing—Mardin, Turkey; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Halle/Saale, Germany—Çağlar and Glick Schiller challenge common assumptions that migrants exist on society’s periphery, threaten social cohesion, and require integration. Instead Çağlar and Glick Schiller explore their multifaceted role as city-makers, including their relationships to municipal officials, urban developers, political leaders, business owners, community organizers, and social justice movements. In each city Çağlar and Glick Schiller met with migrants from around the world; attended cultural events, meetings, and religious services; and patronized migrant-owned businesses, allowing them to gain insights into the ways in which migrants build social relationships with non-migrants and participate in urban restoration and development. In exploring the changing historical contingencies within which migrants live and work, Çağlar and Glick Schiller highlight how city-making invariably involves engaging with the far-reaching forces that dispossess people of their land, jobs, resources, neighborhoods, and hope.

Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration

Migrants and City-Making

Ayse Çağlar

In this book Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Çaglar, along with a stellar group of contributing authors, examine the relationship between migrants and cities in a time of massive urban restructuring. They find that locality matters in migration research and migrants matter in the reconfiguration of contemporary cities. This book provides a new approach to the study of migrant settlement and transnational connection in which cities rather than nation-states, ethnic groups, or transnational communities serve as the starting point for comparative analysis. Neither negating nor privileging the nation-state, Locating Migration provides ethnographic insights into the various ways in which migrants and specific cities together mutually constitute and contest the local, national, and global. Cities are approached not as containers but as fluid and historically differentiated analytical entry points. Chapters explore migrants' relationship to the neoliberal rebranding, redevelopment, and rescaling of down-and-out, aspiring, and global cities in the United States and Europe. The various chapters document the pathways of incorporation and transnational connection of migrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Migrants are approached not as a homogenous category but in terms of their range of experiences of class, racialization, gender, history, politics, and religion. Setting aside the migrant/native divide that haunts most migration studies, the authors of this book view migrants as residents of cities and actors within them, understanding that to be a resident of a city is to live within, contribute to, and contest globe-spanning processes that shape urban economy, politics, and culture.

Nina Glick Schiller

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