Authors: Jean Beaman and Orly Clerge
Journal: International Migration Review
Abstract: In the wake of recent interventions to better connect the subfields of international migration and race and ethnicity through a sociology of racialized immigration, we push this further by arguing for the necessity of a global Blackness perspective on global migration. Such a focus does not just reflect the role of race in the dynamics of migration, and vice versa, but more importantly shifts assumptions about this relationship. So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.
Key Findings
- Here, we have interrogated how Black lives do matter in for understanding the modern roots of human migration, both nationally and globally, as well as the sociology of migration more broadly.
- We believe that starting with the following operating assumptions in studying global migration broadens the analysis of how race, racism, and migration interrelate and argues for the need for a global Blackness perspective. First, mass migration in the modern world has always been a racial project (Omi and Winant 2014).
- Second, in the post-emancipation moment, European and US empires sought new ways to recreate slave-like labor conditions within their nations and empires.
- Third, in the postcolonial, neocolonial, and post-Civil Rights Movement era, the Black diaspora in Europe and the Americas lives and thrives in the shadows of these histories.
- We offer these operating frames as an invitation to migration scholars to resituate our framing of who migrants are, the importance of colonial and imperial histories in theorizing and studying migration, and subverting the white assimilationist and Eurocentric frameworks which dictate which human migrant lives actually matter.
Citation: Beaman, J., & Clerge, O. (2024). Ain’t I a Migrant?: Global Blackness and the Future of Migration Studies. International Migration Review, 58(4), 1727-1756. https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183241271685
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