Transformative Homes

ABSTRACT

In the era of global workflows and massive migrations, it has been suggested that the notion of home is breaking free from its material aspects to become a set of exportable routines and practices. On the other hand, it is argued that the materiality of spaces and objects can support migrants' well-being in the new destination. Drawing on the ethnography of a Moroccan household in Rome, Italy, we illustrate how actions pertinent to the material home can favor identity development and the exercise of agency. First, we discuss squatting as a collective action of appropriation and transformation, which led to the identification with a transnational, intercultural category of migrant. Second, we illustrate the activities of furnishing as the locus of syncretic and reflexive processes, in which elements of the host country and themes from the migratory experience are mixed and reinterpreted in novel ways. Our analysis supports the view that the materiality of the home and the actions it affords play a major role in the socio-psychological adjustment of migrants and—on a wider scale—in processes of cultural dynamism and renovation.     

Interpreting Home in the Transnational Discourse

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to present a selection of primary findings culled from empirical data collected in Dublin with post-European Union enlargement Polish migrants as the cohort in study. One aspect of the project was to investigate how that group interpreted home since they have left Poland. Based on the outcomes of interviews with thirty-one informants, the narratives reveal a group of individuals who continuously contest social constraints and push the boundaries of previously held notions of migration, identity, and home. This article situates their aspirations, preferences, and practices within discourses of transnationalism, thereby connecting their migration experiences with a consciousness of feeling at home in the world. This article breaks up “home” as interpreted by the informants into three categories—centered home, sentimental home, and transportable home. The wide range of perspectives held by informants and the inability to clearly define their position with regard to the notion of “home” reinforces the hypothesis of this article that, for a transnational cohort, the meaning of home is contested. In relation to the wider international literature regarding concepts of home, this article makes a contribution to the deepening scope of migration research in Ireland.     

TERROR AND THE COLONIAL IMAGINATION AT WORK IN THE TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATE SPACES OF JAKARTA,INDONESIA

This article examines the role of the imagination in the construction of meaningful places out of economically defined and organized spaces. It seeks to understand the processes through which a colonial imagery is deployed in the negotiation of a complex and continually transforming transnational corporate order. This article is based on research conducted while working as a cross-cultural trainer within a transnational corporate office space in Jakarta, Indonesia. I discuss cross-cultural training as a space within which a colonial discourse based on terror and uncertainty persists, producing an ambivalent understanding of foreign overseas labor. I argue that a colonial approach to the social relations that take place within trans-national spaces persists for both Western-born and Indonesian members of the transnational capitalist class and is central to their perspective on capitalist expansion.     

Three Forsaken Poets: Significant Absences in Balkan Modernism

ABSTRACT

Narratives dealing with the literary histories of South-Eastern Europe frame the canon of the nineteenth and twentieth century mostly in terms of rebirth, or re-awakening of a national culture. The literary history of Balkan modernisms and the avant-garde proves no exception to this rule. Its history has been often narrowed down to an often implicit monolingual canon with an ‘ethnic’ pedigree. This essay, although critical of these excluding mechanisms, does not propose a deconstruction of the national modernist canon. Instead, it wishes to reflect on alternative models for literary history, with alternative parameters that include figures of transition in terms of (national) language and ethnicity. It draws on three examples: Victor Tausk, Stanislav Vinaver and Monny de Boully.     

Performing new identities: the community language of post-crisis Italian migrants in London

ABSTRACT

After the 2008 global crisis, Italy has experienced a relevant resumption of emigration. Tens of thousands of young Italians have chosen London as their favourite destination, giving rise to a new Italian community in the city. This article focuses on the transformation of migrants’ national identity and on a distinctive device of identity expression: language. Sample cases, extracted from a dataset collected for an original doctoral project, are used to explain how the insertion of English elements in speakers’ native language become the expression of the loss of pure national identity and of the renegotiation of transnational and migratory identities.     

Foreign Women and Toilets

This article considers representations of migrant women who work as domestic help and probes the abjecting logic of cleaning practices vis-à-vis current issues of legality, illegality, immigration, transcultural difference, and rage. I survey diverse media depictions of foreign women and cleaning scenes in transnational settings: Fear and Trembling (2003), Maid in America (2004), The Ukrainian Cleaning Lady (2002 The Ukrainian Cleaning Lady (Pani Z Ukrainy) (documentary) (2002) Pawe? ?oziński (dir.), Poland [Google Scholar]), Dirt (2003 Dirt (film) (2003) Nancy Savoca (dir.), USA [Google Scholar]), and Friends with Money (2006). I examine the formation and apprehension of female “foreign” subjectivity in relation to cleaning for others, in relation to dirt. The visual analysis discusses ways in which removing other people's dirt by an immigrant, migrant, or a guest worker intertwines with gendered and racialized processes of social abjection. Privileging images of toilets and expressions of rage, my analysis inquires into a conceptual correspondence between garbage and the cultural renditions of foreign others; into ways in which the concept of “dirt” gets transposed onto the cleaners suggesting that those who clean dirt are themselves disposable bodies, only useful and tolerable as long as they cohere the messy lives of “legitimate” and properly “clean” natives.     

Lost in Transnational Space? Migrant Farm Workers in Rural Districts

Abstract

In recent decades, theories of transnationalism have emerged as key perspectives for analysis of international migration. Drawing on Glorius and Friedrich’s (2006 Glorius, B. and Friedrich, K. 2006. Transnational social spaces of Polish migrants in Leipzig. Migracijske i enticke teme, 22(1–2): 163–180.  [Google Scholar]) model of transnationalism, the paper analyses the case of migrant farm labour in rural Norway and demonstrates how the social context of migrants’ work influences their building of various kinds of social-capital resources which are crucial for development of transnational space. The paper argues that circularity of migration is not sufficient to instigate full-fledged transculturation and hybrid identity-formation processes. In conclusion, the paper recommends that transnational theory should pay greater attention to the social contexts of migration and observe the limits of the theory’s application.     

Gay,Mexican and immigrant: intersecting identities among gay men in Los Angeles

This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnographic research study of sexual identity formation among self-identified gay Mexican men in Los Angeles, Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Relying primarily on in-depth interviews with 24 gay immigrant men and extensive participant observation in Los Angeles, this research explores the intersection of sexuality, social class, ethnicity and immigration in the participants' daily lives and identity formation processes, the potential ways that transnational social networks shape their identities, and the ways that sexuality impacts the contours of their transnational networks. This article argues that the participants' identities as gay men are best understood as hybrid constructions that integrate elements of the gender-stratified activo/pasivo model of homosexuality and the object-choice gay model of homosexuality, and that the integration of these models into their identities is impacted by social class, geography, and immigration. Further, this paper argues that the subjectivities of the gay immigrant men in this study are best understood within a transnational intersectionality framework which conceptualizes identities as hybrid constructions that are produced through the interaction of several salient social forces.     

Buying membership in the transnational community:migrant remittances,social status,and assimilation

I analyze the effects that social status and immigrant incorporation have on migrant remittances. Understanding remittances as one type of transnational practice, I conceptualize them as the fee that migrants pay to remain members of the transnational community. I define a “status hypothesis” in terms consistent with the view of transnational engagement as a response to status loss, predicting a negative association between increases in social status and remittances. Since immigrant incorporation usually entails status gain, this hypothesis is consistent with the conventional assimilation paradigm. While the status hypothesis could be linked to the new economics of labor migration as well, it collides with the view of transnationalism as an alternative path for successful immigrant incorporation. Using data on male Mexican migrants to the United States, I find enough support for the status hypothesis, indicating the need to clarify the ultimate meaning of transnational practices. In addition, my analysis shows that there is room to integrate economic theory, the assimilation paradigm, and the transnational perspective into a comprehensive understanding of transnational engagement.     

New frontiers facing urban sociology at the Millennium

The article examines some of the major challenges facing urban sociology at century's end given its traditions and lineages. These challenges arise out of the intersection of major macrosocial trends and their particular spatial patterns. The city and the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where these macrosocial trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study. Among these trends are globalization and the rise of the new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of specific types of socio‐cultural diversity. Each one of these trends has its own specific conditionalities, contents and consequences for cities, and for theory and research. Cities are also sites where each of these trends interacts with the others in distinct, often complex manners, in a way they do not in just about any other setting. The city emerges once again as a strategic lens for the study of major macrosocial transformations as it was in the origins of sociology. Can urban sociology address these challenges and in so doing once again produce some of the analytic tools for understanding the broader transformation?