Join us! This summer we will host a book event on Thomas Nail’s The Figure of The Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015). Stanford University Press has all the relevant information as well as a few excerpts from the book. There are also two interviews about the book here and here that might be of interest. I encourage you all to pick up a copy of the book and participate with us in the comments section. The following have already agreed to post:
Robin Celikates (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Andrew Dilts (Loyola Marymount University, USA)
Todd May (Clemson University, USA)
Ladelle McWhorter (University of Richmond, USA)
Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna, Italy)
Adriana Novoa (University of South Florida, USA)
Daniella Trimboli (University of British Columbia, Canada/University of Melbourne, Australia)
The following is taken from the Introduction of The Figure of the Migrant.
The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant. At the turn of the century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history. Today, there are over 1 billion migrants. Each decade, the percentage of migrants as a share of the total population continues to rise, and in the next twenty-five years, the rate of migration is predicted to be higher than during the last twenty-five years. It has become more necessary for people to migrate because of environmental, economic, and political instability. Climate change, in particular, may cause international migration to double over the next forty years. The percentage of total migrants who are non-status or undocumented is increasing, which poses a serious challenge to democracy and political representation.
…
Today, the figure of the migrant exposes an important truth: social expansion has always been predicated on the social expulsion of migrants. The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant not only because of the record number of migrants today but also because this is the century in which all the previous forms of social expulsion and migratory resistance have reemerged and become more active than ever before. This contemporary situation allows us to render apparent what had previously been obscured: that the figure of the migrant has always been the true motive force of social history. Only now are we in a position to recognize this.
The argument of this book is developed in four parts. Part 1 defines and lays out the logical structure of social motion. Part 2 argues that the migrant is defined not only by movement in general but by several specific historical conditions and techniques of social expulsion. Part 3 shows how several major migrant figures propose an alternative to this logic, and Part 4 shows how the concepts developed in Parts 2 and 3 help us to better understand the complex dynamics of contemporary migration in US-Mexico politics.
An und für sich 