Description
Book SynopsisModern Migrations, Black Interrogations uses reflections on the Black experience to consider the “unasked question of blackness” in modern migration and movement. The editors and contributors use the lens of Black Studies to show how migration—compelled by force or suggestion, from the transatlantic African slave trade to the Great Migration and the current refugee crisis—has been structured to reinforce white supremacy.
Focusing on antiblackness in immigration and examining restrictions on freedom of movement and on settling alike, chapters address how Black im/mobility operates and how it can be distinguished from that of the migrant and the colonial settler, as well as from the transgressive mobilities of Indigenous populations. Looking at blackness, borders and border practices, and displacement,
Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations investigates racialized boundaries that determine immigration policy, citizenship, legality, and i
Trade Review“In modernity, from the transatlantic slave trade to today, the ‘migration’ of Black people is incommensurable with that of others. As Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations
argues and demonstrates, reckoning with antiblackness and Blackness fundamentally destabilizes conventional histories, categories, meanings, and politics. Wide-ranging yet penetrating, the book’s theoretical, empirical, and literary analyses pose a bracing challenge to all academics, policymakers, and activists concerned with mobility.”—
Moon-Kie Jung, Coeditor of Antiblackness and author of
Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present“The editors and contributors to this volume give migration studies a much-needed shake-up. Theoretically rich and analytically tight, its wide-ranging chapters probe and expose the unacknowledged extent to which antiblackness shapes the way we think and talk about the movement of people. Rather than just implicating the usual suspects, Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations
calls on well-meaning humanitarians—scholars, activists, and the like—to wipe the smudge of antiblackness from our lens. This is a bold and important book.”—
Jamie Longazel, Associate Professor of Law and Society at John Jay College, affiliated faculty in the International Migration Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and coeditor of
Migration and Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas (Temple)
