Translocal Geographies

Spaces, Places, Connections

Ayona Datta, Katherine Brickell, Katherine Brickell, Katherine Brickell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317007050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Bringing together a wide range of original empirical research from locations and interconnected geographical contexts from Europe, Australasia, Asia, Africa, Central and Latin America, this book sets out a different agenda for mobility - one which emphasizes the enduring connectedness between, and embeddedness within, places during and after the experience of mobility. These issues are examined through the themes of home and family, neighbourhoods and city spaces and allow the reader to engage with migrants' diverse practices which are specifically local, yet spatially global. This book breaks new ground by arguing for a spatial understanding of translocality that situates the migrant experience within/across particular 'locales' without confining it to the territorial boundedness of the nation state. It will be of interest to academics and students of social and cultural geography, anthropology and transnational studies.

PART 1
Introduction: Translocal Geographies

Chapter 1

Introduction: Translocal Geographies

Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta

Translocality draws attention to multiplying forms of mobility without losing sight of the importance of localities in peoples’ lives (Oakes and Schein 2006: 1)

In recent years, there has been a coalescing of interest surrounding the notion of translocality, which increasingly appears in geographical work on transnationalism (see for example, Cartier 2001, Freitag and von Oppen 2010, Grillo and Ricco 2004, Castree 2004, Katz 2001, McFarlane 2009, Oakes and Schein 2006, Smart and Lin 2007, Tolia-Kelly 2008). Seen as a way of situating earlier deterritorialized notions of transnationalism which focussed largely on social networks and economic exchanges, translocality takes an ‘agency oriented’ approach to transnational migrant experiences. As Oakes and Schein (2006: 20) argue, translocality ‘deliberately confuses the boundaries of the local in an effort to capture the increasingly complicated nature of spatial processes and identities, yet it insists on viewing such processes and identities as place-based rather than exclusively mobile, uprooted or “travelling”‘. Taking into account the ever variegated localized contexts where transnational networks are maintained, negotiated and sustained in everyday urban life, scholars now assert the importance of local-local connections during transnational migration (Conradson and McKay 2007, Gielis 2009, Smith 2001, Smith and Guarnizo 1998, Mandaville 1999, McKay 2006a; Velayutham and Wise 2005). They suggest that localities need not necessarily be limited to the shared social relations of local histories, experiences and relations, but can connect to wider geographical histories and processes – in a way that articulates a ‘global ethnography of place’ (Burawoy 2000).

These calls to situatedness during mobility however, still retain national boundaries as the predominant focus of local-local connections. This is perhaps the history of translocality itself which has emerged from a concern over the disembedded understanding of transnational networks. Research on translocality primarily refers to how social relationships across locales shape transnational migrant networks, economic exchanges and diasporic space. In such an inquiry spatial registers of affiliation that are part of migrants’ everyday embodied experiences remain largely unexplored. The effect of this has been to subsume the debates on translocality within a wider notion of transnationality. Translocality is now widely seen to be a form of ‘grounded transnationalism’ – a space where deterritorialized networks of transnational social relations take shape through migrant agencies. This means that translocality as a form of local-local relations exists primarily within the debates on transnationalism.

In this book we argue that there is a need to understand translocality in other spaces, places and scales beyond the national. Thus we are interested in translocal geographies as a simultaneous situatedness across different locales which provide ways of understanding the overlapping place-time(s) in migrants’ everyday lives. As our starting point then, we understand translocality as ‘groundedness’ during movement, including those everyday movements that are not necessarily transnational. We call these translocal geographies because we take a view that these spaces and places need to be examined both through their situatedness and their connectedness to a variety of other locales. And in doing so, we open up ways of examining migration not only across other spaces and scales such as rural-urban, inter-urban and inter-regional but also bringing into view the movements of those supposedly ‘immobile’ groups who do not fall under the rubric of a transnational migrant but who negotiate different kinds of local-local journeys (both real and imagined). By grounding translocality within different scales and locales then, we are able to examine translocality beyond a notion of ‘grounded’ transnationalism (we will come back to this issue later in this chapter).

A theoretical and methodological challenge?

Such a conceptualization of translocal geographies provides us with both a theoretical and a methodological challenge. If we are to move beyond a focus on the primacy of national space, we have to map out how other spaces and places can become significant during the process of migration and movement. These may be interstitial spaces that are part of the itinerary of movement; they maybe sites from where movement and migration in other spaces and places are organized; or they may even be the corporeal body which moves across spaces. To theoretically account for these as constitutive of translocality means that we need to pay attention to their multiple and hybrid histories, their politics and social constructions, their material geographies, and their connections to other scales and places. If this means we pay attention not just to the transnational migrant; but also to those who move across other scales beyond the nation, we can no longer confine ourselves to the debates on transnationalism. Rather, we will need to take into account geographies of inter-regional or inter- and intra-urban movements. Finally, if we are to focus on the everyday materiality, corporeality and subjectivity of movement, we will also need to deploy a wider range of methodological tools which can capture not just the economic exchanges, political organizations or social networks across sites of departure and destination, but also the negotiation of wider range of spaces and place in between. Through this approach we believe we can examine the translocal geographies of everyday lives across spaces, places and scales.

Such a theoretical and methodological challenge in rethinking locality and its connections to other spaces is not without precedents. Over a decade has passed since Burawoy (2000) encountered a similar challenge in the articulation of a ‘global ethnography’ – one which extended the remit of ethnography from bounded insular research sites to analyses of the wider forces, connections and imaginations in a global world. The theoretical and methodological approach of global ethnography, he noted would allow for a more situated understanding of localized experiences ‘as the product of flows of people, things, ideas, that is, the global connections between sites’ (Burawoy 2000: 29). Burawoy did not lose sight of the importance of locality; rather he offered an understanding of different faces of globalization through its grounding in the local. Crucially, Burawoy highlighted the continuing relevance of national spaces in shaping the forces and connections in a global world.

Burawoy’s insights are particularly significant for us since he highlights potential pitfalls of restricting ourselves to theoretical and methodological tools which are focussed primarily on micro-processes. In particular, his methodology of the ‘extended case method’(2000: 27) which reaches out from micro-processes to macro forces, connects the local to the global without losing sight of the real experiences of globalization operating in particular localities. Yet we find that it is precisely in this significant connection between the global and local that ‘global ethnography’ misses a crucial opportunity – it does not provide a way to understand the local as situated within a network of spaces, places and scales where identities are negotiated and transformed. Instead of exploring the spaces and scales of the locale, it grounds the local simply as a site of negotiation of the global – a place where globalization is experienced by social actors.

How then do we conceptualize and do a translocal geography that rethinks the local through a variety of spaces, places and scales? What are the different theoretical and methodological tools through which we can map out how everyday spaces and places acquire meaning and saliency during migration? How do we simultaneously pay attention to the corporeality and materiality of movement and settlement, and the physical environments through which migrants traverse, without losing sight of how these are also shaped by their connections to other localities and scales of movement?

Space, places and connections are the three axes of the theoretical approach in this book. Existing literature on migration points to the centrality of space in a number of associated ways; in conceptualizing ‘otherness’ (Cohen 2004, Sandercock 1998), in anchoring memory and nostalgia (Blunt 2003) and/or ‘re-memory’ (Tolia-Kelly 2004b). During migration and movement, spaces become simultaneously material and symbolic, located in the moral economies of the family (Velayutham and Wise 2005), in the material cultures of home (Tolia-Kelly 2004a, 2004b, Ureta 2007, Walsh 2006), in the socio-technologies of home-building (Datta 2008, Lothar and Mazzucato 2009), in urban neighbourhoods and ‘monster houses’ (Mitchell 2004). This book focuses on a variety of spaces which are related both to the local-local connections across transnational spaces, but also those that are part of more everyday mundane spaces of public transport, residential mobility, bodily and sensory perceptions that are negotiated during particular moments of migration and movement. We see these spaces as related to translocality at different scales that exist on a continuum from the corporeal body of the migrant to transnational spaces.

Reasserting this multiscalar approach to translocality means that we have to take seriously the material, embodied, and corporeal qualities of the local – the places where situatedness is experienced. And we have to examine the places where this ‘local’ resides. Of course, places are not inert recipients of migrants, but social actors are constituted by their interrelationships with, and their groundedness in, particular places. This is increasingly evident in the different encounters with ‘others’ that occur within particular physical locales, which are mediated through migrants’ transnational histories, cosmopolitan attitudes, diasporic belonging, national identity, and particular positionalities of gender, race, ethnicity and citizenship (Silvey and Lawson 1999). For most migrants, a new physical environment implies new ways of interacting with people; it involves new kinds of behaviours in these places, new modes of movements, and new kinds of corporeal experiences. In all of this, the symbolic and material qualities of places are transformed. We take here a ‘place-based’ rather than ‘place-bound’ understanding (McKay 2006b: 201) of the local, which means that as people become more mobile, so too do locales become stretched and transformed (Castree 2004: 135). In other words, we take a translocal view of place, following on from Massey (1999: 22), that places ‘may be imagined as particular articulations of social relations, including local relations “within” the place and those many connections which stretch way beyond it’. In her later thoughts on space, Massey (2005) takes this proposition further by suggesting that even as the political meaning of the local cannot be thought outside of contextual reference, it is also not enough to think of local/global linkages as an appropriate site of politics. Rather Massey notes that we need to take into account the political nature of places included therein and what kinds of interrelations between these places are produced from local/global linkages. This view of place raises the question – at what scale is the local constructed; at what scale is it politicized; and at what scale does it begin to have relevance in everyday lives?

During movement, spaces and places are invested with ‘heightened material and conceptual significance’ (Cairns 2004: 30), making them important bases for cultural understandings of relatedness (Datta 2009a, Datta 2009b, Datta and Brickell 2009). But as Wilding (2007: 337) notes, this does not mean an ‘emphasis on processes, even as the multi-local “being there” is being asserted’. We examine translocal geographies as a set of dispersed connections across spaces, places and scales which become meaningful only in their corporeality, texture and materiality – as the physical and social conditions of particular constructions of the local, become significant sites of negotiations in migrants’ everyday lives.

The methodological challenge of our task then has been addressed through an examination of diverse sites of translocality, which are multi-scalar. They focus on the personal experiences and narratives of migrants during their movements across nations, cities, neighbourhoods, homes and regions. Shaped variously by gender, class, age, ethnicity and migrant status, we see these stories of migration and movement as inherently spatial, linking different places at different times through a series of corporeal and subjective journeys. These journeys are also part of everyday life – across urban spaces, neighbourhoods, rental homes, shops, hotels, public transport and so on. Understanding these journeys involves not just detailed narratives, but also migrant biographies, participant observations, diaries and textual accounts. But these journeys are also hard to document simply through these tools. The authors in this book also utilized visual tools of videotaping, photo documentation and participant directed photography to bring in those ‘absent’ spaces and places in migrants’ everyday journeys which are often hard for an ethnographer to access. Visual methods highlight the interconnected landscapes of migration, material embodiments of their journeys, and situatedness in particular spaces and places during everyday life. They move the discourses of migration as social networks, political organization or economic exchanges to multi-sited and multi-scalar translocal geographies.

This diversity of textual and visual methodological tools provides us with greater interpretive possibilities, nuance, and coherence to the range of embodied movements which are not captured within the transnational lens. They allow us to focus especially on the politics of subjectivity, corporeality and materiality during movement, which go beyond traditional approaches of settlement geographies and political economies. It is these variegated methodological tools which make visible a range of spaces and places that are part of migrants’ diverse registers of affiliation. When applied to a wide range of case studies from Europe, Australasia, Southeast Asia, Africa, North and Latin America, they suggest that localities are still crucial to understanding experiences of migration and movement. But these localities are also constructed through their reference to other scales and to real and imagined boundaries and territories. Using these methodological tools, we can look in-depth at translocality as a situated mode of human agency and mobility through variegated spaces and places across nations, regions, cities, neighbourhoods, buildings and bodies. These are part of the everyday politics of agency during movement that engages with locally specific configurations of identity, (non) belonging and spatial practice; but which at the same time bring to the fore a variety of situated frames of reference beyond the nation.

In the next few pages, we turn to the notion of a ‘grounded transnationalism’, which has much to contribute to translocal geographies. We take grounded transnationalism as our point of entry to situating movement but also our point of departure for understanding the varieties of other spaces beyond the nation. We then look at how these other spaces can be situated across scales through a notion of habitus that takes translocality as a ‘field’ of everyday practice across scales. Finally, we outline the diverse registers of affiliation during migration that produces a multi-sited and multi-scalar translocal geography.

‘Grounded’ Transnationalism

For many national citizens, the practicalities of residence and the ideologies of home, soil and roots are often disjunct, so that the territorial referents of civic loyalty are increasingly divided for many persons among different spatial horizons: work loyalties, residential loyalties, and religious loyalties may create disjunct registers of affiliation. This is true whether migration of populations is across small or large distances and whether or not these movements link traverse to international boundaries. (Appadurai 1996b: 47)

Appadurai was writing about the translocal at a particular historic moment when anthropological imaginations of the local were increasingly seen as limiting, sedentary and insular. Critiquing the implicit acceptance of territorially bounded nation states as the regulator of locality, Appadurai (1996a, 1996b) asserted that contemporary local life is divided along a range of spatial horizons that frequently go across, beyond and often without reference to the borders, and imaginaries of the nation. Appadurai (1990, 1993) defined nationalism less by territorial sovereignty, and more by the multiplicity of mobile practices enacted among refugees, tourists, guest workers, transnational intellectuals, scientists, and undocumented migrants whose lives are experienced through identities and aspirations which are not always rooted in, or to, national coordinates. This was a view shared particularly in the case of global elites who were held as the archetypal exemplars of disembeddedness accompanying the shift in relationships between mobility, territory and national affiliation (Hannerz 1996).

At around the same time when Appadurai (1996a; 1996b) was calling for a deterritorialization of connections through translocality, Mitchell (1997) was calling for a geographic imagination to be reinserted within research and writing on transnationalism. often seen in opposition to globalization, transnationalism had examined migration beyond economic and demographic perspectives to an understanding of migrant experiences and lived spaces, and in so doing had articulated the different social, cultural, political and economic networks of migrants across national borders. Mitchell was concerned about a sense of dislocatedness that had come about in these articulations of transnational connections. For Mitchell, a ‘grounded’ sense of transnationalism was important to examine the spatio-temporal constructions of migrants’ experiences and the ways that spaces and places were not simply backgrounds, but played active roles in the dynamics of mobility and movement. This grounded transnationalism is our point of entry into translocality.

The paradoxical call for simultaneous situatedness and deterritorialization in the late 1990s, can perhaps be understood better as the complex historical trajectories of these two concepts. In the 1990s, transnationalism as the notion of increased movements and connections across national borders focussed a large part of its attention on the making and managing of global networks of economic exchanges and entrepreneurship (Hannerz 1997; Skrbis 1999; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Werbner 1999). These networks were examined for the ability of migrants to make and manage diasporas, business connections, political links, and livelihoods across large physical distances. Translocality on the other hand emerged from anthropological challenges to the investigation of bounded locales. It attempted in the 1990s to explode a notion of insularity invested in the locale to look at transnational connections without the need for situatedness. But, in the new millennium, as transnationalism became increasingly grounded, translocality came increasingly to be seen as an aspect of transnationalism.

There were many reasons why this came about. With calls for a grounded transnationalism, it became apparent that many of the transnational networks are shaped through the specificity of locales. In a challenge to the deterritorialized conceptualizations of translocality, Werbner (1997: 12) noted that transnational networks are based on loyalties that are ‘anchored in translocal social networks rather than the global ecumene’. Transnational migrant entrepreneurship connected uneven geographic development to the trajectories of migrants from the developing to the developed nations, their economic activities, and their remittances sent back to particular towns and villages in their homelands (Olson and Silvey 2006, Harney 2007). Transnational missionary work within specific local contexts created religious communities across national borders (Mahler and Hansing 2005). And the transnational movement of aid workers in development organizations and aid agencies were facilitated by localized development practices (Bebbington and Kothari 2006). Transnationalism therefore began to be seen as a multifaceted, multi-local process in which diasporic communities were simultaneously emplaced and mobile – producing what Katz (2001: 724) called a ‘rooted transnationalism’.

Grounded or rooted transnationalism in many ways has shaped the trajectory of translocality. Even as transnationalism was being called to become more situated, it was becoming clear to scholars that these transnational connections were only possible through local-local connections across national spaces. Writing on the relations between a town in the Dominican Republic and that of a neighbourhood in Boston, Massachusetts, Levitt (2001: 11) contended that people ‘are all firmly rooted in a particular place and time, though their daily lives often depend on people, money, ideas, and resources located in another setting’. Through the political participation of Mexican migrants in California and Mexico, Smith (2003) highlighted similarly that the practices of transnationalism, while linking collectivities across more than one nation, are actually embodied in relations which are situated in specific local contexts (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). Transnational migrants were therefore never bereaved of locatedness; rather they were always socially and spatially situated actors rooting the transnational in the place-making practices of the translocal (Smith 2005a).

Grounding transnationalism within specific locales also meant that scholars could move away from examining migrant subjectivities as overwhelmingly linked to structural limitations, such as in the case of asylum seekers or refugees (Koser 2007) and focus instead on social agencies of migrants in everyday spaces. They showed that these ‘coping strategies’ of poor migrants were not restricted to their economic livelihoods; rather to the ‘repertoire and mobilisation of skills and expertise that require the forging of noneconomic, social, and cultural allegiances’ (Kothari 2008: 501-502). While transnationalism research had focussed earlier on ‘juridical-legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality, and war-making capabilities’ (Ong 1999: 15), a grounded notion of transnationalism which emerged from these critiques, brought the importance of locality to the forefront.

Research on transnationalism became more nuanced and sophisticated through attention to its situatedness, by articulating a notion of translocality that was based on local-local connections across national boundaries. Translocal then became situated within the transnational – as a local site of exchange made possible through the movement of people or ideas across national spaces. In turn, translocality became a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1: INTRODUCTION: TRANSLOCAL GEOGRAPHIES
• PART 2: TRANSLOCAL SPACES: HOME AND FAMILY
• PART 3: TRANSLOCAL NEIGHBOURHOODS
• PART 4: URBAN TRANSLOCALITIES: SPACES, PLACES, CONNECTIONS
• PART 5: EPILOGUE
• Bibliography
• Index