Backed by papers: Undoing persons, histories, and return

Abstract

Deportations of long‐term U.S. residents to El Salvador and roots trips that Swedish transnational adoptees make to their countries of birth attempt to reconnect individuals to their origins. As they (re)connect, however, such journeys dismantle, reconfiguring the original departure—emigration or adoption—in ways that can destabilize current, future, and past selves and the national and familial belongings in which these selves are embedded. By examining the paths and disjunctures that journeys “back” entail, we consider the significance of “return” for the production of legal knowledge.

On the durability and the decomposition of citizenship: the social logics of forced return migration in Cape Verde

“…These resources are seen as an opportunity to enter a familiar informational and reflective space. Most DPs also foster what Yngvesson and Bibler Coutin (2006) call a 'materialization of existence' by keeping any type of apparently 'official' papers, such as bank account statements, bills and pictures of their former homes and cars, to prove their former lives in the diaspora.…”

Introduction: subjects of citizenship

“…Drohtbohm recounts how the Cape Verdean citizens deported from the USA justified their claims to membership in US society: 'I have also been working, I am a tax payer, I still have my bank account over there.' This reminds us of the material creation of rights that Veena Das refers to and which Drohtbohm, citing Yngvesson and Bibler Coutin (2006), calls the 'materialisation of existence'. 2 This materiality of existence and the rights assumed thereby is also detectable in a different, seemingly more existential vein, in Brian Donahoe's and Nandini Sundar's cases in which this materiality relates to land.…”

Enduring Uncertainty

“…Where this book is concerned, a transnational approach is relevant (cf. Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994), as deportation is in itself a form of 'forced transnationality' where 'home' and 'away' become unsettled locations (Peutz 2006;Yngvesson and Coutin 2006;Zilberg 2004).…”

“…1 Indeed, the majority of these early ethnographies of deportation dealt with deportations of long-term residents in the United States (Moniz 2004;Peutz 2006;Yngvesson and Coutin 2006;Zilberg 2004).…”