Migration and Transnational Studies

Abstract

This chapter argues against simplistic notions of “simultaneity” in contemporary migration and transnational studies, and suggests that the transnational social field cannot be conceptualized as continuous and homogeneous. Instead it is “ruptured” as migrants create new socialities, networks, and moral careers. This explains why migrants can “never return home,” as Stuart Hall has argued, and why they experience a sense of irresolvable “double consciousness” whenever they do so. The critique of so-called methodological nationalism in international migration studies fails, moreover, to take account of the continued saliency of national borders. In this respect a key limitation of the American school of transnational studies, the chapter proposes, is a tendency to focus exclusively on individual cross-border movement. This methodological individualism leads, however, the chapter contends, to the neglect of transnationalism as a social and cultural movement that inscribes itself spatially, morally, and imaginatively in the dispersed places where migrants settle.

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