[URBANTH-L]Call for Papers: "Transnational Migration, Race, and Citizenship" Issue, Ethnoscapes: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context

[ethnoscapesjournal at kirwaninstitute.org]

Call for Papers

Ethnoscapes: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the
Global Context

Issue Two, Spring 2007
“Transnational Migration, Race, and Citizenship”

The editorial staff for the new peer-reviewed journal Ethnoscapes: An
Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context
invites submissions for its second issue on the subject of “Transnational
Migration, Race, and Citizenship.” Ethnoscapes maps the development of
important themes in the field of race and ethnic studies by using a
“classic” piece as a point of departure for a reconsideration of critical
issues within the contemporary economic, political, and cultural terrain.

While the classic piece establishes the thematic parameters of each issue,
authors are under no obligation to actively engage the arguments posed by
that work.

Issue two explores the subject of "Transnational Migration, Race, and
Citizenship" with consideration of the chapter "The Shock of Alienation"
from Oscar Handlin's ground-breaking The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the
Great Migrations that Made the American People. In this chapter, Handlin
investigates the relationships between labor, cultural membership,
citizenship, and the production of racial difference. Citing violence
against Chinese and Filipino immigrants in the early 19th century, he
details the ways in which labor tensions in the US were integral to the
establishment of federal anti-immigration policy aimed at these
"unassimilable" groups. According to Handlin, cultural variation and
poverty status became the criteria used to infer an ostensibly inherent
racial inferiority that served as the basis for denying Chinese and
Filipino immigrants the rights and protections that accompanied
citizenship.

While labor, cultural membership, and race remain central components of
the current complexities of immigration, new concerns have emerged since
the 1951 publication of Handlin's Pulitzer Prize-winning history. On one
hand, new signs of deterritorialization—the increasing incidence of dual
citizenship, home-country remittances, expatriate involvement in
home-country politics, and "diasporic" community-building—have led some to
assert the declining relevance of the nation-state as a primary attachment
and the declining significance of citizenship itself. On the other,
debates and policy developments around immigration and citizenship suggest
that the nation-state's power to regulate the movement of labor and
capital within and across borders is far from obsolete. In particular,
state power continues to have a profound impact on racialized disparities,
processes of racialization, and on the burdens and benefits of
citizenship. In this new context, we are compelled to reconsider the
nature of transnational migration, the nature of citizenship, the link
between the two, and the role of race in mediating that link.

To this end, the “Transnational Migration, Race, and Citizenship” issue of
Ethnoscapes seeks manuscripts that investigate:

A) Economic Flows, Migration, and Racialized Disparities
How is migration racialized/ethnicized and gendered? What is the
relationship between late capitalist economic operations, migration, and
racialized disparities in health, education, self determination and
representation, and wealth? In what ways do “citizenship gaps”—spaces in
which market participation forecloses political membership—re/produce
racialized disparities globally?

B) Borders, Boundaries, and “The Nation”
How is immigration policy racialized? What is/should be the current role
of the nation-state in generating policy that regulates the movement of
wealth and people across borders and in regulating resultant disparities?
What forms of regulation/governance that exceed the nation-state can be
conceptualized? What role does cultural nationalism play in political
membership? What transnational forms of political and cultural membership
are/can be imagined?

C) Processes of Racialization
In what ways are immigrant populations affecting domestic racial
hierarchies and racial identities? How are transnational cultural flows
affecting conceptualizations of race and ethnicity? Their relationship to
nation?

The deadline for manuscript submission is March 2, 2007. Please send
submissions to mmaltry at kirwaninstitute.org and
editors at kirwaninstitute.org. See
http://www.kirwaninstitute.org/ethnoscapes/styleguide.html to prepare your
document in accordance with the style guidelines of Ethnoscapes.

Melanie Maltry
Assistant Editor, Ethnoscapes
The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
The Ohio State University