Recent scholarship has asserted that prolonged periods of 'waiting' or 'stuckedness' are becoming the condition of modern capitalism for many people. This article complicates this assertion by interrogating the affective life of migration, an act which offers the possibility of overcoming, but also reinforces, existential stuckedness. Using two ethnographies with young aspiring male migrants in Egypt, and older migrant men in the Netherlands, we reveal how migration, both before and after physical movement, is experienced through constant existential oscillation: between ''amal' (hope) that the good life is arriving, and 'ikti'āb' (an Egyptian understanding of depression) when a new blockage is met. Developing existing understandings of migratory experience and governance, the article argues that oscillation emerges out of 'cruel' migratory regimes which perpetually offer up the promise of the good life to aspiring migrants, while inhibiting the means of achieving it for the majority. ARTICLE HISTORY
This article explores how notions of citizenship are negotiated in encounters between parents and youth care professionals in Amsterdam in the context of heated debates over citizenship and belonging. We draw on ethnographic research on Egyptian migrant parents’ interactions with the welfare state, and on the work of youth care professionals. We found that both parents and professionals were invested in universal forms of citizenship. Parents wanted to be treated like their fellow citizens regardless of their background, while professionals wanted to care for all children. While parents feared and suspected that their children were subject to unfair treatment, professional practices left little space for disagreement or a consideration of racialized aspects of their encounters with clients. We conclude that notions of equal citizenship provide a primary, but uncertain ground for the elaboration of citizenship and belonging in parenting encounters, which is haunted by the spectre of difference and inequality.
Over the last quarter-century, a growing body of scholarship has emerged that examines the historical and cultural intersection of Black and Japanese lives. These Afro-Japanese encounters, as the title of this volume suggests, constitute a discursive metaphor of transnational movement, discovery, and engagement. In their introduction, William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz describe their work as constituting a 'new wave' of scholarship on cultural, intellectual, and artistic 'transracial exchange [s]' (p. 13) between Japan and diasporic Black culture and communities, noting that texts produced by such encounters tell 'new stories' which, in the case of the volume at hand, include those heretofore untold in part because traditional disciplinary boundaries have impeded their production.Traveling texts and the work of Afro-Japanese cultural production successfully transgresses these disciplinary boundaries, covering a range of topics as eclectic and syncretic as the encounters themselves. It is divided into three sections: 'Art and performance', 'Poetry and literature', and 'Sound, song, music', with chapters covering such topics as ganguro subculture (Cornyetz, chap. 2); the African American blackface ukiyo-e portraits of conceptual artist iROZEALb (Crystal S.Anderson); representations of 'black' robots in Japanese popular culture (McKnight); Japanese Rastafarianism (Marvin Sterling); the sociopolitical context behind the Japanese translation of James Weldon Johnson's 'Negro national anthem' (Shana Redmond, chap. 9); the haiku of Richard Wright and Amari Baraka (Yoshinobu Hakutani and Michio Arimitsu's chapters); Japanese rap (Dexter Thomas Jr. and Noriko Manabe's chapters); and Black enka performer Jero (Kevin Fellezs).While the topography traversed in these chapters is diverse, a common thread emerging from them is the Japanese association of blackness with resistance and rebellion as a means to critique the status quo and to forge resistive identities. However, as historian Reginald Kearney points out in his pioneering African American views of the Japanese (1998), Japan has historically occupied a similarly reflexive space in the African American imagination, despite occupying, as Sterling puts it in his chapter 12, an 'extra-diasporic space . . . largely untouched by the Atlantic slave trade ' (pp. 239-40). Perhaps because of this placement, both sides have seen qualities in the Other that have led them to question, resist, and reinscribe essentialist racial tropes as they seek both affinities and differences with that Other. The theme is explored in Anne McKnight's chapter 7 on 'black' robots in the Japanese translation of Czech writer KarelČapek's 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) and other Japanese cultural products in which the multivalent meaning of blackness that these entities embody is presented as a catalytic force for social change, anti-colonial insurrection and liberation, as well as serving as a critique of
In 'The only true people', Bethany J. Beyyette and Lisa J. LeCount have gathered Mayanists from a diverse range of disciplinary practicesarchaeology, epigraphy, ethnography, history, and linguistics -to discuss ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Divided into two sections, 'Maya identities of the present and the ethnographic past' and 'Archaeological explorations of identity construction', the respective chapters discuss how to define and study Maya ethnicity, with an emphasis on ethnogenesis. The underlying theoretical orientation of the volume is based on Barth's fundamental Ethnic groups and boundaries (1969), and the anthropologist Jonathan Hill's key theories on ethnogenesis. Hill contributes the preface, reviewing what is essential about ethnogenesis and considering the various chapters' contributions to the concept. The volume concludes with a short essay by the archaeologist Edward Schortman, who emphasizes that networks play a central role in the politics of identity. Several chapters explore the problem of treating Maya identity as a salient overarching category, and this short review focuses on those.Overall, the volume is uneven and for the most part, the authors rarely go beyond Barth in their discussions of ethnic identity. Discussions of Mesoamerican and Maya identity from Sol Tax's Heritage of conquest (1952) to more recent treatments of the topic are largely ignored, as is Carol Hendrickson's 1995 monograph, Weaving identities, which uses Maya textiles to explore Kaqchikel Maya ethnic, community, cultural, and political identities. In short, there are many articles and monographs by Mayanist ethnographers that draw on a diverse range of evidence, including material culture, which help untangle the region's identity politics and make clear that 'Maya' does not represent a homogeneous culture.While homogeneity has been emphasized in the tourism industries and in some of the strategic essentialism of Guatemalan Maya political activists, scholars need to question why they use the overarching category Maya, to what ends that serves, and if that is an ethnic identity. The difference between academic classification and the self-designation of ethnicity and ethnic groups is not explicitly addressed in this volume. Several essays in the first section (C. Mathews Samson's chapter 2, Juan Castillo Cocom, Timoteo Rodriguez, and McCale Ashenbrener's chapter 3, and Matthew Restall and Wolfgang Gabbert's chapter 5), however, argue that Maya is not a very salient ethnic category for most of the people who are broadly lumped together.Cocom, Rodriguez, and Ashenbrener's challenging and creatively written 'Ethnoexodus: escaping Mayaland' offers the most critically self-reflexive discussion about ethnic identity and ethnogenesis in the volume. They propose not using ethnicity or ethnogenesis but rather the concept of ethnoexodus, because it captures the fluidity of how people practise and embody multiple identities. I would argue, however, that there are instances where Maya as an ethnic
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