A Moving Heart: Querying a Singular Problem of ‘Immobility’ in Afghan Migration to the UK

Abstract

This article offers a single case study of everyday suffering (khapgan--Pakhto; "feeling down") experienced by one Afghan migrant in the United Kingdom, Zmarai. Single cases may destabilize categories of the political as conventionally institutionalized in relation to Afghan migrants according to such concepts as diaspora, citizenship, refugees, trauma, and culture, etc. Drawing theorizations of the way affects are key to a political economy's analysis of migrant labor ('a moving heart'), the study moves away from political or psychological categories centered on the trauma of war and displacement, toward the unfulfilled promises of progress and liberty experienced less exceptionally within the family economy under transnational migration. This points to the salience of hope, and its loss, in the ways individuals assume, challenge, and reshape their load of cultural control and economic obligations--and raises questions around the problem of what, in a field of multiple interrelated mobilities, appears not to move.

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