Migration

Something new about Migration
Christian Ruby*
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PhænEx, 11, no. 1 (spring/summer 2016): 141-162, © 2016 Mark William Westmoreland, et al. : A Roundtable on : Thomas Nail. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford University Press, 2015. 312 pages. Prepared by MARK WILLIAM WESTMORELAND : https://www.academia.edu/25990681/A_Roundtable_on_The_Figure_of_the_Migrant?auto=view&campaign=weekly_digest


Abstract :



Thomas Nail :

I started doing the research for this book because I wanted to write about the importance of migration in contemporary politics, but when I started doing the research it seemed that the migrant was always being theorized as a secondary or derivative figure. Across several related disciplines - Anthropology, Geography, Philosophy, and Political Science — the migrant was treated as an exception to the rule of already existing theoretical frameworks. After doing the research I discovered that the opposite was actually the case. What became clear was that, today and in history, the migrant is not the exception, but rather the constitutive political figure of existing societies so far. Right now, I think political theory has this backwards. In my view, migration is historically constant — sedentary societies are the exception to this rule, not the other way around. Societies are constituted by migration and migrants and not the other way around. But by rejecting the foundations of existing political theory and theorizing the migrant along these lines I had to invent my own theoretical Framework.



Robin Celikates :

It’s an important and engaging contribution to the political theory of migration precisely because it takes these concerns seriously and asks them in the most fundamental sense, following an approach distinct from both the normative liberal paradigm and that of

critical migration studies. Accordingly, Thomas takes up the task to provide a new vocabulary to conceptualize the constitutive experience and reality of migration and of movement more generally, a task he seeks to accomplish by integrating philosophical theorizing with divergent literatures spanning an impressive historical arc, from the first creation of social centres around 10,000 BCE to the contemporary US-Mexican border. The most important general lesson of his dense book is that such a political theory requires us to move beyond the dominant understanding of the migrant and of migration from the point of view of stasis, of non-movement, and of states who claim the authority, and the capacity, to control and regulate movement. In contrast, what is called for is a positive understanding of the figure of the migrant and the practice of migration that is not primarily determined by lack, anomaly or failure