Migration, Narration, Identity .windows.net

CHAPTER 1

Migrating Modernities

Iain Chambers, University of Naples

A translated world

What happens when `roots' are uprooted and transformed into `routes'? After all, one of the significant ways of narrating Occidental modernity lies precisely in such narratives of mobility: from the age of maritime discovery and the Atlantic slave trade to the mass migrations of Europe's rural poor to the New World, to today and capital's global reorganisation of planetary labour power through the biopolitical selection and policing of the south of the world in its material and immaterial journeys north. Perhaps more than what I have to say, Michael Winterbottom's In this world (2002) most effectively illustrates this and the following arguments. The type of perspective this brushes up against challenges and ultimately undoes the static identities once proposed by the European nation state and today expressed in the desire for homogeneous localisms. It suggests a world in a state of migration and translation. Here the local insistence on belonging secured in `blood and soil' fights a losing, if still brutal and vicious, battle to preserve its claims on the world.

These considerations of a `translated' and `translatable' world also lead to a significant shift in method. Rather than thinking of migration and modernity, for example, as seemingly neutral objects of historical, sociological, anthropological and literary enquiry (a criticism that can still be brought against many contemporary sociological and anthropological perspectives), we might change register here and begin to think with migration and follow its implications into the folds of a multiple modernity. Rather than presume a priori to be in the position to explain and ultimately control the phenomenon, the process, we might come to be affected by migration in our critical language and everyday understandings of a changing world. This, again, would be to abandon the shorelines of previous certainties in order to register, negotiate and navigate processes that are never simply ours to determine and define.

Opposed to the critical security afforded by an unambiguous terrestrial and territorial location (for example, think of the display of identitarian certitude in the organisation of national museums and libraries, in the curriculums and syllabuses of schools and universities), perhaps we need to entertain a more open and altogether less assured critical attitude. This would involve learning from the elsewhere, learning from how what we consider to be `our' world is

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translated as we come to be dispossessed of a modernity that we are used to considering only in our terms. The one time objects of anthropological attention and more occasionally of historical and social analysis ? the others, the nonEuropeans, the migrants ? have today to be recognised as historical subjects. They, too, are translators, taking and transforming our languages, technologies and techniques elsewhere, rendering modernity otherwise. They are no longer simply the passive objects of our concerns and concepts. We, in turn, can become objects of an other's gaze; we, too, that is our modernity, can be translated and rendered different, re-routed and renewed. So, and to repeat, this is not so much about thinking of migration and the subaltern south of the world, for example, as thinking with migration and the once excluded world of the migrant, the rural peasant and the dispossessed of the shanty towns that cling to edge of today's metropolises.

The initial impetus of this argument is drawn from Antonio Gramsci's consideration on "The Southern Question" ? La Questione Meridionale (1926) ? that gives attention to the integral part played by the subaltern, peasant south in the economical and political realisation of the industrial, urban north. Today such considerations can be extended from the south of Italy to the south of Europe, to the southern shore of the Mediterranean and, ultimately, to the south of the planet. The centre is not only dependent on its peripheries, it can also be evaluated through them. This, of course, is echoed in Frantz Fanon's noted dictum that the First World is fundamentally a product of the Third World.

Now this translatable space, which is the modern world, is increasingly characterised by the drift of language: consider those earlier empires of violently sea-borne empires that have left their linguistic, literary and cultural marks all over the globe: Spanish, English, French, but also more minor empires such as Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, even German. These languages, clearly no longer the property of their originary `homelands', also host other histories and cultures, also provide a home for others. Out of this matrix, formed over five centuries as the world has persistently come to be elaborated in European image and interests, there emerge counter-histories, counter-narratives, other accounts of modernity and the modern world.

Migration and modernity

The critical idea, then, is that migration provides a stark cartography with which to map, narrate and consider the transit and transformation of global modernities. Nearly every day the so-called `immigrant problem' occupies the headlines of European and North American newspapers, often accompanied by the photos of abject and invariably non-white bodies squeezed together in airless

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containers, or else huddled on tiny boats crossing the Mediterranean, to be abandoned, if they survive, on its northern beaches.

Yet these `aliens', these foreign bodies are not, of course, foreign; they are intimate partners in the planetary procedures that have made the modern world. For migration is one of the central chapters of modernity. Its violent and structural, not accidental, history proposes a largely unacknowledged critical narrative with which to register modernity. Today, there exists far more than merely a suggestive connection between the slave histories and political economies of the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic and the contemporary countergeographies of migration.

As the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann puts it: `Counter-geography is where the subversive, informal, and irregular practices of space take place, the ones that happen despite state forces and supranational regulations.'1 In the subaltern cartographies of power that sustain the passage from the south of the world within planetary modernity a fundamental reconfiguration is in play. If Africa in the Americas not only economically made, but also culturally reinvented, the `New World' (from the blues and jazz to reggae and rap), then contemporary migrations, as the implacable symptoms of the planetary reorganization of the labour force of capitalist accumulation, are similarly destined to challenge and refashion the cultural contexts that they traverse and transform. In the words of the Italian sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago: `Immigration, more than any other phenomenon, is capable of revealing the so-called host society. When we speak of immigrants we speak of ourselves ... It is for this reason that an analysis of immigration which does not put itself in question ... is constitutionally amputated and ultimately false.'2

Race, power and democracy

Sustained and invariably amplified after 9/11 and the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York is the increasing identification of modern migration with a racialized `otherness'. The aggressive and fundamentalist languages that seek to defend `civilization' and `European' values invariably lend a potent racism to both individual state and European Union legislation busily identifying and managing the immigrant `emergency', within and beyond its borders. While the European Union extends itself eastward to include other polities, it

1 Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes, Introduction to The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa. Ed Biemann and Holmes (Barcelona: Actar, 2006), 7.

2 Alessandro Dal Lago, Non-persone (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2008), 13.

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simultaneously stretches exclusionary legislation southwards. Laws concerning citizenship and the management of the labour market increasingly betray the bio-political powers of national and transnational agencies to organize populations in racialised hierarchies that are rapidly popularized in everyday practices and associated forms of discrimination and apartheid. Power is translated into race and the racialising categories of control.

Racism is itself a direct offspring of the precise construction of existing political formations and what we call the `public sphere'. For these are spaces that are never simply open. They have consistently been constituted through inclusions and exclusions, through possibilities of access, control, and negation; and, above all, through the shifting political, cultural and historical orchestration of what passes for `identity' and `belonging' (national, civic, cultural, historical). This is why, ultimately, the ideology of liberalism, and its associated `freedoms', is founded on the widespread exercise of illiberal practices that monitor and where necessary negate the freedom of others.

In the end, civil freedoms in the north of the world have been structurally dependent on the lack, even negation, of the freedom of others. Further complicating the question is the prison house of identity, invariably tied to the conquest of the state by the idea of the nation, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The possible heterogeneity of the civil and cultural components of the state have increasingly been held hostage to the homogeneity required by modern nationalisms and their narration of modernity: this is as true of Britain, Italy and Poland, as of contemporary China, Turkey and Israel. Multiplicity is governed in the name of the singular, the unique; it is governed in the name of that pulsating abstraction of nationhood where the mythical securities of blood and soil still continue to reverberate.

The colonial present

So here we are forced to acknowledge that the present response of government to extra-European immigration is not merely a political reply to immediate xenophobia fuelled by economical and social crises. Beyond repressive legislation there is a structural violence inherited in particular modalities of reason that have historically emerged in the persistent gap between European humanism, its moral philosophy, and the practices of the West both at home and abroad. To think of the crucial interrelationship between colonialism, citizenship, democracy and migration in the realisation of Occidental modernity, is to register a historical violence both in the colonial cut and the subsequent postcolonial wound that bleeds into all accountings of the past and the present.

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Today, this troubled and unruly inheritance is augmented by the fact that the controlling distance of a colonial `abroad' is no longer available: Algeria, the Caribbean, sub-Saharian Africa, India are `here' amongst us. Such proximities are the frequently unwelcomed social side of globalisation. It is precisely these proximities, encountered most sharply in the cities, streets, signs, sounds and cultures of the so-called First or overdeveloped World that dramatically accentuate the planetary scale of the cruel interval between justice and the law, to quote the Cameroon intellectual Achille Mbembe.3 The migrant is always under the law, invariably in a state of illegality, and hence frequently without justice.

As the geographer Ali Bensa?d has justly noted, the contemporary global opening up of economic space is simultaneously accompanied by the brutal closing down of human space. Worldly time is domesticated, disciplined and then differentiated by the political needs of global capital.4 For example, the current militarization of the Mediterranean, precisely at the point where the Third World washes up against the overdeveloped one, does not simply recall other barriers ? the US/Mexico boundary fence or the wall between Israel and the scattered territories of an impossible Palestine (not to speak of all the electronic walls, eyes, and controls that track global movement as we walk through airports and downtown centres) ? but more precisely dovetails into strategies seeking to manage flows of planetary populations and wealth. Mobility, surely the essence of globalization, is here criminalized subsequent to juridical control, containment and being held in infinite custody. Once again, the migrant is inside the `law', but nearly always without rights or redress.5

This, of course, is also the translation of a colonial inheritance into the contemporary complexities and problematics of the postcolonial city. Faced with contemporary migration, it is impossible to ignore the ghosts of history, and the links in a chain that extends from West Africa five hundred years ago to the coasts of southern Europe today and then on into the heartlands of the occidental metropolis. These are the abusive links of the hidden, but essential, histories of the traffic in bodies ? across the Atlantic yesterday, across the deserts of north Africa, central Asia and northern Mexico today ? in the formation of modernity. The negation of a memory evoked by the questioning

3 Achille Mbembe, `What is postcolonial thinking? An interview with Achille Mbembe', Eurozine: articles/2008-01-09-mbembe-en.html.

4 Ali Bensa?d, "The Militarization of Migration: Frontiers in the Mediteranean", in Biemann and Holmes, 2006, 12-31.

5 Enrica Rigo, Europa di confine. Trasformazioni della cittadinanza nell'Unione allargata (Rome: Meltemi, 2005); also Eyal Weisman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).

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presence of the contemporary migrant betrays a critical incapacity to consider one's own past and its responsibility in the making of the present. For the interrogative presence of the migrant announces planetary processes that are not merely ours to manage and define. He or she draws Europe and the West to the threshold of a modernity that exceeds itself and is not merely ours to manage and define.

The right to migrate

The right to migrate was announced in Article 13 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Europe's poor ? from Italy to Scandinavia, from Poland, Greece and Germany to Ireland ? exercised this `right' for several centuries. Today, no European state recognises this right; migration has largely become a criminal activity. The modern state is presently conducting a war, through the codified terror of its territorial jurisdiction, against those considered alien and not belonging to the nation. The modern state does not recognise human beings, only citizens. The migrant, as a non-citizen or non-person6 is reduced to an anonymous and abstract legal object: `bare life'7.

Here, returning to Ursula Biemann's `counter-geographies', we can register that postcolonial spatio-temporalities disturb and interrupt the presumptions of the measured legalisation of a controlled modernity by consistently inserting the unruly persistence of continual translation ? linguistic, historical, cultural ? into the picture. The plantation, the slave ship, colonial massacres in deserts and jungles, concentration camps, transit refugee centres, border agencies and security procedures, ghettos and segregation, do not simply propose the ghosts of Europe's colonial, imperial and global past; they are also practices and forms of power that cast their shadows over the postcolonial city and reproduce themselves in the affective economies of the present. It is, above all, the modern migrant who most intensely delineates this constellation.

Suspended in the nets of economical, political and cultural expropriation, it is the migrant who carries such histories and frontiers within herself, exposing the structural, epistemological and psychological violence distilled in the everyday textures of the postcolonial city. If the migrant's body is expressly written into punitive legislation, her mobility continually exposes the instability of abstract distinctions and borders. The migrant is not merely the historical symptom of a mobile modernity; rather she is the persistent and condensed interrogation of the true identity of today's planetary political subject. At the end

6 Alessandro Dal Lago, Non-Persone, (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008). 7 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi, 1995).

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of the day, his or her precariousness is also ours; for it exposes the coordinates of a worldly condition in both the dramatic immediacy of everyday life and in the arbitrary violence that is sustained in the abstract reach of the polity and the law. Citizenship is not a permanent state, it is a precarious one.

Citizenship and the postcolonial city

Perhaps it is above all in First World cities that the cultural and political struggle for the hegemony of the global narrative is most acutely relayed. It is here that different histories are both replayed and resisted as the city reveals in its biopolitics, racial, gendered and ethnic markers that are continually patrolled and zoned to establish who is socially, economically and politically `out of place'.

In the struggle for a space, a place, in the city, there once again emerges the archaeology of modernity: the city as the site of sedimented histories of migration (from the country to the city, from elsewhere to here; once on a local level now in multiple, and intricately connected planetary, scales). And if the policing of the city is also the policing of democracy, and the control and reduction of public space is also the control and reduction of its liberties, then the hybridisation of urban space in imperial European cities suggests that there are urban dwellers who are refusing and refuting the definitions allotted them. Their lives, their actions, suggest that the inter- and trans-cultural spaces of the city also house uprooted epistemologies in which identities and belonging, knowledge and understanding, are neither ethnically contained nor sustained in a single territory, but are rather tied to the multiple movement of urban life; in other words, are always in process, in transit, in translation.

It is here that the migrant's time ? as the temporality of repressed and negated times ? announces the metropolitan pulse of a migrating modernity. An interruption is operated in our time, like the blue note of a subaltern historical score: through it modernity migrates elsewhere to return with other modalities and meanings, but nearly always ? here lies the disquieting and displacing sense of an unhomely and decentred modernity ? within the languages of the West itself. Here we find slipping through our hands the disturbing theme that the seemingly universalist syntax of `democracy' has historically been sustained through the specific negation of democracy to others. Our political, economical and cultural `rights' have been elaborated through the structural negation of similar rights to others.

In his noted `Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940), Walter Benjamin observed that the historical emergency is a permanent condition. He was referring to the condition of the subaltern and the historically defeated: those

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