Abstract
Movements transform relationships and the forms they take—planetary movements transform geological formations and relationships between planetary lives; social movements transform planetary lives and social formations. Elisa T. Bertuzzo’s interdisciplinary book Archipelagos: From Urbanisation to Translocalisation (2019) studies how labourers move or migrate across geographies, the relationships labourers construct in this movement and the new kind of urban forms that emerge through this movement. It follows 10 migrants from West Bengal, India and Bangladesh as they move within the region as well as to other parts of India with the broader aim of theorising contemporary form of urbanisation as “translocalisation”. And it does so by drawing on different narrative and conceptual devices.
With regards to the former, the book follows the East Indian literary and performance-based form of the jatra. The 10 jatras, which form the 10 chapters of the book (in addition to an afterword) are used to tell its readers the life stories of 10 migrants. Each jatra opens with a poster of the performance, a time and a place, which then change as the story moves along with its protagonists. The jatras have three main characters: the sutradhar, the bibek and the migrant. The sutradhar is the one in whom others confide and the one who connects scenes and narratives with words and information when the plot gets chaotic. She guides the reader in terms of how space is produced through the movements of the migrants. The bibek, meanwhile, is a wise fool, who plays the role of the conscience and an interpreter. The latter emerges through her travels across different dimensions of time (past and present) as well as from the space of the stories to that of global processes and knowledge production and back. She provides a moral voice to the stories. And lastly, there are the migrants—the life-story tellers, the ones who narrate their experiences of movement as they move across geographies for byabasha (work).
Storytelling or narrating life stories of migrants is the other narrative device employed by the book. These life stories perform many roles: they articulate and bring fore the experiences of the 10 migrants—those without a fixed abode and do not or cannot write in their language; they elucidate how their experiences are compatible or co-habitable with the experiences of others; they represent the spaces through which the migrants move and produce (p. 246); and they contribute to the worldwide circulation of something much more unassuming and more universal than knowledge—a kind of wisdom to make the world habitable [citations?]. Lastly, in the “Afterword” to the book, these life stories become mediums to ask the question of “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1968/1996) in a new way: Who can tell a story, occupy a space, love their locality, region, country? (p. 217). In doing so, the book operationalises the writings of Walter Benjamin on storytelling and Bertolt Brecht’s experiments with epic theatre to think about new urban geographies and adds to a growing literature on the relationship between city-making and the sensorial acts of storytelling (Chandola, 2012; Khanolkar, 2018; Sandercock, 2003; Simone, 2010, 2014).
Although the life stories revolve around the lives of the people-on-the-move, multiple other elements make their appearances: vehicular infrastructures (trains, buses, trucks, etc.), weather, crops, rivers, schedules, mental maps, factories, farmlands, wetlands, beaches, food and so on. These elements have their own rhythms and also give a sense of the rhythms of the migrants’ movements. The movements of the migrants are in no way smooth. They are often interrupted and disrupted by the rhythms of others: missing trains, unavailability of transportations, climate changes, changes in work, shifts in capital flows and so on. The mental maps in the book, inspired by Guy Debord’s method of dérive but without its intoxications, illustrate the time and space of the migrants’ movements and how they intersect with the rhythms of transportation, agriculture and work availability. The maps also give a sense of how migrants locate themselves, their desh (home) and their bidesh (where they go to work). Although these maps often tend to locate them in identifiable two dimensions, the narrative elucidates how their sense of place and identities are always in movement. Lastly, these elements are also the material elements with which migrants weave together a geographical and geological sense of the village, the region and, more importantly, the city.
The sense of the city that emerges in the book is ex-centric and decentralised. They are archipelagoes that sometimes extensions of the big cities and most other times have emerged in villages, towns and/or along infrastructural and geographical networks. The city of these migrants is not as a locale to which they travel but an entity that emerges through their movements for seeking different livelihoods. It is an entity that emerges outside the given patterns of dominant capital flows and industrial investments; an entity that extends beyond the official boundaries of the “urban” and is thus an entity that is translocal. And yet, as the book shows, these migrants do continue to travel to the “urban” for seeking livelihoods. Archipelago, the title of the book, is a heuristic framework to think about these new forms of cities, which is articulated by connecting the different experiential and material aspects of the lives of the people-on-the-move. In doing this, the book dislodges the dominant narratives and debates on urbanisation that often find home in terms such as “planetary urbanisation” (Brenner & Schmidt, 2015) 1 or are “metro-centric” (Bunnell & Maranganti, 2010).
Besides jatra, storytelling and archipelagoes, the movement itself is also an important conceptual device that Bertuzzo operationalises to weave together the translocal sense of space and time. The use of the term movement, rather than migration, is intentional here. As she states, migration continues to be popularly associated with the act of moving from one place point to another and is seen as exceptional, unfortunate (rather than structural necessity) and a lack, rather than as a movement or as de- and re-location. Furthermore, she argues, this movement is not exceptional but rather the norm under the existing capitalist system (p. 274). The conceptual play on migration that Bertuzzo introduces (or rather transduces) in the book is by reframing it as “dwelling-in-movement”. Here the word “dwelling” connotes two things: First, inhabiting that is at the same time cohabiting with others and second, the re-arranging of elements through inhabiting. The experiences and imaginations of the migrants play a central role in both (p. 49). In doing so, the book moves away from explanations of migration merely as precarity, instability, and impossibility of work and workers, and towards an understanding of migration driven by the lived experiences of migrants, how they dwell-in-movement and how they stitch together a translocal space and time.
Lastly, the term translocalisation itself needs some attention. The term has a specific reference to the conceptual work of the French urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In his book The Urban Revolution (2003), written in the 1960s, Lefebvre introduces the term “the urban phenomenon” as the most recent stage in the historical and dialectical unfolding of social formations. For Lefebvre, the urban is the site of capitalist formations as well as its contradictions of implosion and explosion, centrality and expansions, and so on. These contradictions, he suggests, play out in the everyday life of cities, and when attended to carefully could possibly point ways for a truly revolutionary social formation. Bertuzzo’s book furthers these Lefebvre’s ideas on the urban phenomenon in two ways.
First, she makes a case for “translocalisation” as the most recent phase in urbanisation, which, she suggests, Lefebvre did not think of or imagine would occur. For Bertuzzo, translocal is not simply being somewhere else than one’s home, or being in-between, or being in two places at once. Rather it connotes a way of reading the world as a place where one’s permanence in a locality is temporary and devising translocal tactics as an integral part of one’s life (p. 277–279). The second way in way in which the term translocal furthers Lefebvre’s ideas is in reference to Lefebvre’s ideas on “transduction”. Given his insistence on concrete abstractions, for Lefebvre, transduction implies an incessant loop of feedback between reality and theory, which could help introduce invention and knowledge in order to imagine and actualise an utopia—an urban revolution. Bertuzzo, drawing on Lefebvre’s ideas of the urban revolution and transduction, uses the concept of “translocalisation” to elucidate how people-on-the-move dwell-in-movement and in turn produce a differential space. The ways in which this differential space is produced, she suggests, could provide translocal tools of resistance in the face of capitalist domination and precarity. Thus, the book hopes to open up avenues for existing forms of praxis (such as activism) geographically, which otherwise find themselves geographically restricted by the splintering of geographies. What these tools look like, however, remains illusory in the book.
I will end with a few questions that the book brought forth for me—questions that could probably open up new avenues for thinking about contemporary forms of urbanisation, movement of people across geographies for livelihoods and the emergence of different forms of cohabitations. These are also questions that sprout in the book but are left somewhat unexplored. And they are primarily about relations. First, the book performs the work of describing the lives of the people-on-the-move. These are hard lives, and yet, as the book shows, people devise strategies to work with and around these hardships by dwelling-in-movement. But what kind of relations of cohabitation emerge in this dwelling-in-movement and what do they look like? What is the nature of these archipelagic relations? What kind of conceptual devices of cohabitations emerge in these translocal stories and cities? And how do they connect with concepts that could help project the utopian quest for right to the city? Second, the book is about people’s movement for byabasha. The later seems to figure in the book as an end point for this movement rather than as a moment in the movement, and hence often lies outside the forms of cohabitation elucidated in the book. What is the relationship between byabasha that these migrants engage in and the dwelling-in-movement? How are production spaces related to the differential forms of cohabitation and the production of differential spaces? Third, the book suggests that translocalised people partake, if mentally, of events occurring simultaneously in distinct and distant spaces, which results in the reconfiguration of the perception of time and space (p. 248). But what are the details of this reconfigured (dissected and fragmented) time and (vectorised) space of translocalisation? What is their relationship to the dominant order of things (such as capitalism), wherein movement too is a norm? Is this relationship of interruption, multiplication or bypassing? And what are the mechanics of it? Despite these questions, Bertuzzo’s book is a must-read for scholars engaging with questions of labour, migration and cities.