Moving Matters: Paths of Serial Migration - Rilegato

Ossman, Susan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 080477028X ISBN 13: 9780804770286

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2013

Riassunto

Moving Matters is a richly nuanced portrait of the serial migrant: a person who has lived in several countries, calling each one at some point "home." The stories told here are both extraordinary and increasingly common. Serial migrants rarely travel freely—they must negotiate a world of territorial borders and legal restrictions—yet as they move from one country to another, they can use border-crossings as moments of self-clarification. They often become masters of settlement as they turn each country into a life chapter.

Susan Ossman follows this diverse and growing population not only to understand how paths of serial movement produce certain ways of life, but also to illuminate an ongoing tension between global fluidity and the power of nation-states. Ultimately, her lyrical reflection on migration and social diversity offers an illustration of how taking mobility as a starting point fundamentally alters our understanding of subjectivity, politics, and social life.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Susan Ossman is author of Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City (1994) and Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Cairo, Paris (2002). She has held academic positions in Morocco, France, the UK, and the US, and she currently teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Susan Ossman is author of Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City (1994) and Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Cairo, Paris (2002). She has held academic positions in Morocco, France, the UK, and the US, and she currently teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

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MOVING MATTERS

Paths of Serial MigrationBy Susan Ossman

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7028-6

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................ixIntroduction.....................................11 Cosmopolitan Content...........................192 Nomadic Action.................................363 Moving Through Immigration.....................584 Pulling Oneself Together.......................785 Present Continuities...........................1026 A Poetics of Attachment........................125Conclusion.......................................141Notes............................................149References.......................................169Index............................................181

Chapter One

COSMOPOLITAN CONTENT

Efforts to define the cosmopolitan have been at the center of recent debates about world politics, new forms of culture, and human rights. Is he a product of the global market or a reflection of the growth of transnational political connections? Is she a member of an emerging elite or a product of a new world culture? An ever-growing literature seeks to define this elusive figure. But whether we picture the cosmopolitan as a concerned world citizen in a Greenpeace t-shirt asking for donations or a businessman in an Armani suit engaged in a conference call in an airport lounge, whether we seek to include the exile or the world-music performer in this global portrait gallery, all we can know for sure about the cosmopolitan is that disengagement is her defining feature.

The cosmopolitan moves from settled ideas or societies or cultures toward a freedom born of a widening of political perspectives and cultural imaginations. Her gravity-defying performance might be understood as a critique of prevalent assumptions about our being the product of the social worlds we are born into. Through him we seek to recognize that societies have grown beyond the nation, to form outlooks that are not mired in received opinion, to account for global connections made possible by the intensification of exchange and travel associated with globalization. The movement toward a cosmopolitan consciousness leads to a distanced way of looking at what holds people together at their most universal. A movement toward anywhere creates the cosmopolitan's allure.

Cosmopolitans are defined by a mental disposition, bringing to mind Georg Simmel's account of "individualistic persons" who

with their qualitative determinacy and the unmistakability of their life contents, therefore resist incorporation into an order that is valid for everyone, in which they would have a calculable position according to a consistent principle. Conversely, where the organization of the whole regulates the achievement of the individual according to an end not located within him or herself, then their position must be fixed according to an external system. It is not an inner or ideal norm but rather the relationship to the totality that secures this position, which is therefore most suitably determined by a numerical arrangement.

If cosmopolitanism can be understood as a movement to reassess the "inner and ideal norms" that organize the world system and inform an inchoate global culture, we might follow this figure in his many forms to conceive a politics of the future. But by what means of transportation might we embark on this journey? the relationship of physical displacement to the cosmopolitan's critical disengagement is a point of contention. Many assume that some experience of international travel is what makes the cosmopolitan worldly. But others claim that being swept up in flows of images and information about distant lands suffices to lift someone out of a context she has inherited, setting her on the road to the disengaged appreciation and deliberation typical of the cosmopolitan individual. In either case, we should be suspicious of the very idea that one might leap in a single bound from what is given to everyone, to what we should hope for. What place does the cosmopolitan move away from? What generates the momentum of her motion? A flight toward the cosmos is taken to signal the individual's freedom from the gravity of tradition and to step beyond the narrow confines of nationalism. But how might the cosmopolitan know when he has reached a resting point from which to observe his own progress? At which moment might he decide to ponder his position? Some suggest that "cosmopolitan virtue" involves a distancing related to modes of Socratic irony. But are there not various kinds of distance and manners of achieving it?

The cosmopolitan's remoteness from the grounds of social experience has led to accusations that those who seek the politics of the future in the development of the cosmopolitan subject have imagined her as a reflection of their own intellectualism. Vernacular, ordinary, not to mention "abject" cosmopolitans have been devised or recognized in response to these criticisms; these qualifications seem to render the link between forms of life and forms of consciousness more precise. Yet hyphenation simply underscores the value attributed to the term of reference. While recognizing the good intentions of those who seek to expand the cosmopolitan to those whose image rarely comes to mind when we conjure up this worldly figure, we must consider the fundamental deference that amending the cosmopolitan implies. The cosmopolitan's conceit is born less of ethnocentrism or class position than a failure to see that his claim to novelty is a rendition on a well-known song, an old standard composed during the Enlightenment. A two-step contrast of settlement to airy flight sets the tempo for the distinctive melodies of modern nations and societies. It is in contrast to the unmoving grounds of unconscious, bodily practices associated with the past, the countryside, tradition, and exotic peoples that it develops its progressions. To recognize the continuing power of its cadence is essential, but to understand how it persists in drawing the entire world into its compositional logic might require paying attention to the way its instruments are made and its orchestras assembled.

The cosmopolitan takes the nations of the modern age as her point of departure for taking wing toward a politics of the cosmos. She does not depart from any place, but from a space made of earlier flights. She follows previous generations who have progressively left behind some ground of warm social bonds and inherited culture to join a more abstract, individualized modern society. She mimes the moves of the peasant to the city, the sense of belonging as it moves from the village to the nation, now taking those as her starting point. Following the compelling direction of this displacement from an image of the social world as warm, all embracing, perhaps maternal, she moves yet again, this time distancing herself from the national imaginations that are already the sign of an earlier upheaval. She pulls away from habit to seek some ethereal space from which one might gain a perspective on the world at large. But how does she find the content of her character in this way of moving away from the ground toward the cosmos? Does her face lose its color in the course of this skyward motion? Or, as some writers theorize, does she have the opportunity to collect colors from the world at large to paint her face in hybrid forms of consciously remixed and reassembled patterns? In either case, one must wonder what distinguishes her from those other late-modern subjects that sociologists tell us are increasingly self-reflexive and ecumenical in composing the self, taking a mix-and-match approach, finding meaning in celebrations of personal bricolage. How does she select the colors that give her face expression, how does she collect the contents from which she might form her character? What motivates her to select one shade or opinion rather than another?

Nadia Tazi points out that cosmopolitans "permit themselves a certain distance that includes a vanity or perhaps a naiveté, a belief that they are able to understand both sides." Because cosmopolitanism is conceived as a critical distance, "cosmopolitans will naturally feel a great repugnance for Manichaeisms, or the brutal choices imposed by crises. When they feel themselves in a double bind, they either go elsewhere, hopping from a dyschronic point to a consonant one, from a disparity to a comparity, or they must find their balance and mobility through an emotional and intellectual detachment that cuts them apart." The cosmopolitan is aloof: she inhabits a place from which she can contemplate alternatives. But admission to this lofty space seems to require a disconnection not only from the ground but from one's own emotions and the impulses that lead to relationships with actual others. What's more, the lack of definition of what makes up a cosmopolitan condemns him to phrase his critiques in the very cultural and political languages from which the cosmopolitan gaze promises distance.

To conceive figures in motion in opposition to some "absolute ground" encourages us to see those who move as exceptions. It leads us to ignore how states and regions and ideas about the world at large take form and gain in forcefulness because of how they construe the ground, not because they are stuck in place. To explore how choreographies of power are related to the backgrounds against which individual faces, bodies, and lives might be projected does not mean discarding paradigms of settling. Rather, it involves moving away from an emphasis on oppositions of territory to mobility and instead concentrating on how and when and why certain backgrounds come to the fore and attending to how ways of moving accompany manners of settling down and making oneself at home. Those who repeat the migration journey observe that family trees can have roots in many places and that states often wage war to consolidate their territory; the image of a nation or the regularities of culture require effort to maintain. They often tell their stories against the background of territorial disputes, lands where the forces of state and settled society are difficult to discern, and places where tongues intermingle.

In a world in motion, it is a sign of privilege to live where the social and political abstractions that guide the way the world at large is imagined seem natural, where place and polity and culture appear seamlessly bound together. This is one of the things that make the idea of a cosmopolitan perspective achieved by distancing oneself from the grounds of social life to appear so narrow-minded and elitist. While many serial migrants seemed to effortlessly embody prevalent images of the sophisticated, tolerant, educated, politically perspicacious cosmopolitan, their stories led me to take note of how the cosmopolitan's pretension is not essentially one of economic or social position or style. It is the cosmopolitan's claim of flying away from what others live through that leads serial migrants to overwhelmingly refuse any association with a figure they tend to perceive as a modern-day Icarus. Those who make their lives across borders find little appeal in a flight to nowhere in particular and see cosmopolitanism as an indication of hubris.

ORIGINAL DISTANCE

When I asked Hélène if she considered herself a cosmopolitan, she laughed and said that she is merely a "Terrian"—a person of the Earth, unable to view it from afar or to escape the forces of gravity. We met in Manama, where she was working as a manager for a software company. She left her native France many years ago to live in Belgium, Senegal, San Francisco. Still, she explained that she hangs on to her origins, weaving her boundary-crossing life from the threads of Paris:

We [serial migrants] build our own idea of our background. For example, I carry with me this notion that I am Parisian, which has become a sort of cultural idealistic label. It is actually very remote from being a Parisian in Paris. In fact, I cannot relate to what Parisians are today. I could no longer live like they live. The word "Parisian" has different meanings for them and for me.

If truth emerges from statistics gathered at a given place and time, then the way that Hélène uses Paris as a source of continuity for her life story might be seen as involving a good measure of illusion or self-deception. She is the first to explain that her enactment of the Parisian throughout her moves across the world has more to do with her own past than with "how people live in Paris now." She recognizes that those who live today in France's capital are shaping the city in ways that she ignores. She calls her use of Paris as a background to figure herself "culturally idealistic" and thus separates it out from the city as a territory populated by its current inhabitants. When she considers herself a Parisian, she does not move away from a settled place but instead contrasts the idea of the "really lived" to an "ideal" form of figuration, invoking a manner of taking one's distance from the street, the nation, and one's own natural body that is integral to the figure of the Parisienne, a highly gendered figure of a type of woman who has learned to take a certain distance from the idea that a person is simply a product of a natural or social milieu.

Over a century ago Louis Octave Uzanne wrote that "a woman may be Parisienne by taste and instinct ... in any town or country in the world," yet "fully five sixths of the women in Paris" were "provincial in spirit and manners." A distance from the idea of the natural body marks modern beauties around the world; a step away from the land and one's birth culture sets the steps of the modern dance that the cosmopolitan takes to a new level of perfection. A "Parisienne" evolves with reference to a specific city that is varied and changing, an image as much as an environment. She incorporates a distinctive distance from the populace and the street, which themselves are defined in contrast to the "natural" body of the peasant, the savage, or the immigrant who has come to the city from some far-off native place, and her own unfashioned corporality.

Anyone from anywhere might become Parisian, but for a woman to show herself to be a Parisienne she must be willing to work with a particular understanding of the city, of culture, and self-cultivation. To take on this identity involves following a consistent principle. This principle is not independent of the content of the place, but the content is not grounded in some fundamental way; rather, it is tethered to a specific ground through multiple mediations. Indeed, the Parisienne could be considered a critical demonstration of the determination to break with the idea that a person is simply a product of an unconsciously transmitted habitus, a singular emanation of some natural cultural context. This "idealized cultural label" is defined and limited by reference to a particular ideal of the city and to a specific metropolis. It is a reminder of the importance of place but also of the fact that places, like images, are made of movement as much as some grounded physical and cultural substance. The Parisienne reverses the idea of the universal as expressed in a movement between a singular place or way of life and a set of global possibilities.

Hélène walks with reference to the capital of France even while she roams the world. She has lived in Brussels, San Francisco, Dakar, and Manama. She explains that drawing herself with the pencil of Paris offers protection from the danger of "getting too involved." The Parisienne's "detachment" from the natural social body means that she, like Hélène, is able to "avoid becoming too caught up in political or social causes in any single place." This clinging to Paris might be interpreted as a symptom of a lack of cosmopolitanism, the Parisian herself a failed effort to see the world from a wider perspective, an attachment to a certain cultural ideology, economic and social status, or political order.

Wherever Hélène has lived, she has been troubled by the inequalities and injustices she observes: poverty in Dakar, racism in the United States, and the "caste system" that reigns in the Gulf countries profoundly disturb her. By tying her life together with the threads of Paris, she says that she can "maintain a certain distance" from those who suffer. The distance from her own "nature" and emotions that she learned by becoming a Parisienne makes tolerable her inability to fight the injustices she observes in each of her homelands. Hélène's pain does not arise from being torn between points of view or ideologies; Hélène is not sure, but thinks that her depth of feeling might arise from her "left-leaning" politics, the persistence of ideals set while she was growing up in a country where calls for liberté, egalité, and fraternité are ever present. Although she insists that hanging on to herself as a Parisienne helps her to "avoid involvement," a distance may be necessary precisely because she assumes a certain understanding of equality, a certain universal set of principles about justice. Not only might this indicate that she is especially aware of inequality as expressed in position or status, or that she is conscious of her own good luck at being born into the French middle class, but it might also lead one to imagine that as an individual someone should ideally be able to take action anywhere. Yet how is this possible? It is difficult even to imagine a form of charity or political action that can cross several borders and remain effective, and nearly impossible to develop a political conversation in several languages according to such a cosmopolitan ideal. Helen's conundrum points to the real challenges of developing a cosmopolitics and the limits of imagining solutions in terms of a cosmopolitan subject. In this sense, the elitism or ordinariness of the cosmopolitan subject is irrelevant.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from MOVING MATTERSby Susan Ossman Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 080477028X
• ISBN 13: 9780804770286
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 186
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile