Caroline R. Nagel

Dreaming the ordinary Daily life and the complex geographies of citizenship

This paper introduces the concept of ‘ordinary’ to analyze citizenship’s complexities. Ordinary is often taken to mean standard or routine, but it also invokes order and authority. Conceptualizing citizenship as ordinary trains our attention on the ways in which the spatiality of laws and social norms are entwined with daily life. The idea of ordinariness fuses legal structures, normative orders and the experiences of individuals, social groups and communities, making citizenship both a general category and a contingent resource for political life. We explore this argument using immigrants as an example, but the conceptualization of citizenship extends more broadly.

Topographies of home and citizenship: Arab-American activists in the United States

Home and citizenship carry contradictory and ambiguous meanings for immigrants as they negotiate lives ‘here’ and ‘there’. We use the concept of topography to analyze the ways in which activists in the Arab-American community draw connections between homes in the United States and in the Middle East. In intensive interviews, we ask activists about how their understanding of home influences their activism and positioning as citizens within the United States. Activists often bring to their work conceptualizations of home and citizenship that are open, and that connect home to broader forces operating at various scales and in more than one place. Rather than pursuing a deterritorialized, transnational citizenship, our respondents forged a politics of home and citizenship whose topography transcended localities and nations, even as they were often rooted in the spaces of both.

Integration and the negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the case of British Arab activists

Immigrant-receiving societies are increasingly emphasizing the need for immigrants to integrate into mainstream life. In Britain, this trend has manifested itself in ‘social cohesion’ discourses and policies. Discussions about social cohesion have often focused on the residential patterns of immigrant and minority groups in British cities, with the assumption that residential patterns are an indication of social integration. Integration, however, is also a socio-political process by which dominant and subordinate groups negotiate the terms of social membership. We explore the ways in which British Arab activists conceptualize their membership in and responsibilities to their places of settlement; we also consider how they reconcile notions of integration with their connections to their places of origin. Our study participants speak of the need for immigrants to participate actively in their society of settlement, but they reject the idea that integration requires cultural conformity or exclusive loyalty to Britain. Their definition of integration as a dialogue between distinctive but equal groups sharing a given place provides a normative alternative to social cohesion discourses.

Geopolitics by Another Name: Immigration and the Politics of Assimilation

Abstract In this introduction to the special issue on the geopolitics of migration, I discuss some of the problematic elements of current approaches to migration studies. In particular, I comment on the concept of ‘transnationalism’ as it has been applied to immigrant communities, and argue that claims about immigrant transnationalism resemble contemporary and historical polemics on the non-assimilation of immigrants. I propose that our understanding of the dynamics of immigrant-host society relationships must begin with an understanding of the geopolitical contexts in which migration takes place. I illustrate my argument using the case of Arab Americans in the aftermath of September 11, and I conclude by urging a reconsideration of the concept of assimilation as a ‘politics of sameness’.

‘We’re Just Like the Irish’: Narratives of Assimilation, Belonging, and Citizenship Among Arab American Activists

This paper examines narratives of assimilation and belonging as activists attempt to position Arab-Americans as citizens and full members of the American polity. In interviews with activists, the experience of the Irish as immigrants and citizens was often invoked as the paradigmatic example of how immigrants are incorporated as citizens—an example that activists promoted as one that Arabs would follow. By invoking the Irish experience, activists hope to remind Americans that immigration history is not one of effortless assimilation, but is rather characterized by systematic exclusion and marginalization. In so doing, they articulate narratives of assimilation and belonging that draw attention to (1) a shared history of immigration, marginalization, and acceptance, (2) the importance of civil rights movements that may seem to distinguish immigrants from a mythic mainstream whose race and ethnicity go unmarked, and (3) the ways in which the American experience is based on the acceptance of cultural differences predicated on shared political values of community. We argue that these strands of the narrative draw on themes in the national myth of immigration, belonging and citizenship, but that they are braided in ways that challenge many Americans’ views of their history.

Reconstructing space, re-creating memory: sectarian politics and urban development in post-war Beirut

Abstract For fifteen years Lebanon endured a civil war that transformed its capital city, Beirut, from the ‘Paris of the Mediterranean’ to a bloody battleground of rival sectarian factions. More than a decade after the civil war, Beirut is in the final stages of a multi-billion-dollar reconstruction effort that has attempted to re-create the ‘old’ cosmopolitan Beirut. This reconstruction process has represented not only rehabilitation of physical infrastructure, but, equally, an attempt to reinterpret Lebanon’s tumultuous past and to create a new collective memory for the Lebanese ‘nation.’ In this respect, and despite corporate efforts to recast Beirut as a stable, unified place, the city remains a site of struggle over the meanings of Lebanese identity and nationhood. The physical remains of war may be expertly hidden by gleaming new structures, but Beirut is a politicized space of competing meanings rooted in the region’s turbulent history.

Rethinking Geographies of Assimilation

This commentary argues for a reconsideration of the concept of assimilation in geographical research. Whereas critics of assimilation theory have often misrepresented assimilation research, those working within the assimilation framework have seldom explored societal understandings of “sameness.” This commentary advocates that geographers look at assimilation not only in terms of spatial patterns but also in terms of the discursive and material practices through which dominant and subordinate groups negotiate the terms of social membership. The need to arrive at a richer understanding of assimilation becomes more pressing as the assimilability of migrants becomes an increasingly salient topic of debate.

Making publics: Immigrants, regimes of publicity and entry to 'the public'

As groups struggle to gain visibility and voice in the public sphere and as new publics form, they may expand the sense of inclusiveness within a polity, but these new publics may also rub against broader, hegemonic ideals of ‘the’ public sphere. This paper utilises the concept of ‘regimes of publicity’ to explore how marginalised groups are included in the public. Regimes of publicity are the prevailing system of laws, practices, and relations that condition the qualities of a public and the ways that it is situated with respect to other publics. In exploring how publics might be formed and received, we focus on three interlinked elements of regimes of publicity—community and social norms, legitimacy, and the relations that constitute property—as they condition the strategies of activists and the resources that different agents and institutions bring to struggles over entry to the public. The argument we present highlights the ongoing nature of struggles for access to the public realm and the fragmented nature of the public.

“Under the Radar”: Undocumented Immigrants, Christian Faith Communities, and the Precarious Spaces of Welcome in the U.S. South

This article examines the limits of welcome that Christian communities of faith in the U.S. South extend to recent immigrants. We argue that churches are political spaces in which pastors and lay members weigh faith-based conceptions of hospitality against law-and-order discourses and in which notions of universal membership confront racialized immigration politics. Drawing on sixty interviews with pastors and lay ministers in thirty-five churches in Greenville–Spartanburg, South Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Charlotte, North Carolina, we show how hospitality within individual churches often operates quietly, “under the radar,” producing a politics of invisibility. This invisibility, although providing some shelter from harsh law enforcement practices, does little to fundamentally alter the precarious situation of immigrants. We show that as Christian ethics of hospitality come up against worldly social boundaries of race and legal status, the actual practice of hospitality in these churches falls short of biblical ideals. Our analysis furthers understandings of political and faith-based membership and the dynamic articulations between them.

Introduction: Spaces of Multiculturalism

In his 1998 book We Are All Multiculturalists Now, American sociologist Nathan Glazer argued, not without some regret, that multiculturalism had won the ‘culture wars’ in the United States, overturning social and political norms that had dominated American life until the 1960s (Glazer, 1998, p. 10). Glazer spoke of the widespread rejection of assimilation as an ‘imposition of the dominant culture’ and its replacement by a position that encouraged ethnic and racial minority groups to retain their distinctiveness. Cultural difference, from the multiculturalist standpoint, was no longer something to be maintained by families in the privacy of their own homes; rather, ‘culture’ had become a matter requiring public affirmation and validation, especially in schools and universities. Glazer was not alone in his assessment of multiculturalism’s growing influence in Western societies. Will Kymlicka (2001, p. 6), for instance described a “clear shift in public opinion towards viewing minority rights not just as a matter of discretionary policies or pragmatic compromises, but as a matter of fundamental justice” requiring codification in legislation. Far more sanguine in his outlook than Glazer, Kymlicka argued that the decoupling of societal membership from assimilatory nationalisms would serve in the long run to foster the integration of immigrants and minorities. Multiculturalism’s victory, however, seems to have been short-lived judging by the dramatic shift in tone in the academic literature at the start of the new millennium. Hesse (2000), for instance, speaks of the steady ‘demise of multiculturalism’ in Britain since the late 1980s, while Kundnani (2002), also writing in the British context, comments that the events since 9/11 had ‘sounded the death knell for multiculturalists’. Mitchell (2003) laments the shunting aside of multiculturalist principles in Canadian, American and British education policy and the concomitant promotion of neo-liberal discourses emphasising competitiveness and individualism. And lest any doubt remain about multiculturalism’s moribund state, Joppke (2004) documents the decisive shift in many Western immigrant-receiving societies away from multiculturalism and the adoption of a raft of policies—many of them formulated by ‘impeccable liberals’—that compel immigrants to conform to host society norms.