Abstract
Reactions which homogenize, freeze, reduce, and simplify the complexity of identities are still the common experience of migrants—whether as “guest” worker, enforced migrant, exile, or refugee—in their everyday encounters in the so-called globalized world. Terms such as integration, adjustment, and adaptation are expressed not only by members of the “host” country but also by the members of the “homeland,” as if the migrants left their original identity behind them to put on a completely different identity in their “new life.” What is more interesting is to see such views, perspectives, and discourses even in current academic work. Migrants are people who wished, managed, or were forced to move beyond borders; yet academic inquiry often considers them along the lines of “nation as unit.” The book Mediating Migration, by Radha Sarma Hegde, offers a reaction and challenge to the media, as one of the sources (as well as outcome) of this perspective, and also contributes to the growing academic literature that analyzes these issues in their complexity. Hegde is associate professor of media, culture and communication at New York University.
Mediating Migration shows that the issues are far from simple and that there is no single way of adaptation to or integration into the host society for migrants. Hegde goes beyond looking at how migrants are represented and produce or consume media texts. By building and following the premises and suggestions of critical works such as Arjun Appaduari’s (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization and Mitchell and Hansen’s (2010) Critical Terms for Media Studies, the book tries to grasp the politics of mobility in the current global era with its multiple layers: the cultural politics, social dynamics, and lived geographies of migrants who redefine belonging to home, nation, community, and citizenship through their mobility, transnational visibility, and modes of connection. Using the concept of “diasporic itinerancy” in different contexts as a point of departure, the book is organized around the themes of legitimacy, recognition, publics, domesticity, and authenticity.
Mediating Migration does not limit the analysis on transnational migrancy to cultural aspects; the role of economy in the whole process is also taken into account. The neo-liberal character of globalization is emphasized and illustrated with concrete examples throughout the book. Different chapters show how food and music play a role in the market economy in globalizing India, and how the neo-liberal economy creates ways to use and commercialize the longings, desires, affections, and attachments of the migrants. Undocumented migrants are analyzed: their innovative social media activism making the invisible visible, creating and circulating a debate on citizenship (Dreamers), and how deported, undocumented migrants form, for global capital in different countries, an “attractive,” “flexible” low-wage workforce.
The differing mechanisms of regulation and control by states are mentioned, especially the government surveillance of mobility and the ensuing difficulties it creates. The issue of the culture of suspicion and fear is analyzed through the instance of misidentification of a South Asian college student as the Boston Bomber. The gender perspective is prominent in the chapter discussing Muslim women’s veiling as seen in the gaze of a male British politician. Another chapter on gender analyzes how South Asian women use food blogs to “establish a transnational circuit of exchange, a dynamic connection with their country of origin that is no longer a lost homeland.” The use of digital media appears in another chapter on music where southern Indians living in the United States use social media to preserve and communicate traditional Carnatic music.
The book manages to explore, as is beautifully expressed here, “multiple beginnings and endings in order to loosen fixities and think about migration and media” having “wrestled” with aspects of these questions:
How do migrants perform and re/produce their transnational locations? How are fields of meaning created, enabled, circumscribed, and experienced? How do we describe the experience of transnational mobility and its intersections with complex lines of power? Why and how do we arrive at or begin from particular types of material and discursive sites and formations? What are the circuitous trajectories through which ideas and ideologies concerning migration come to visibility? How do nations and publics connect and authenticate their presence? How are identites and cultures performed and mediated via digital pathways?
The questions asked and the discussions provided in different cases through this book can open up new debates and widen our horizon for future research to be conducted on/with different transnational migrant communities in different settings in the world.