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Mobilities, Categorization, and Belonging: The Challenge of Reflexivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2024

Anne Friedrichs  and
Bettina Severin-Barboutie
Anne Friedrichs
Affiliation:
Leibniz Institut für Europäische Geschichte Mainz friedrichs@ieg-mainz.de
Bettina Severin-Barboutie
Affiliation:
Université Clermont Auvergne bettina.severin_barboutie@uca.fr
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Introduction
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Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 10
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© Éditions de l’EHESS 2024

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Footnotes

This introduction was originally published in French as “Mobilités, catégorisation et appartenance. Un défi de réflexivité,” Annales HSS 76, no. 3 (2021): 445–55.

*

We would like to thank Nora Berend, Deepra Dandekar, Marc Horton, Christoph Kalter, Friedrich Lenger, Elena Isayev, and Thomas Weller for their comments as we began to work on this transtemporal approach. We have learned a great deal from them and from their research on human mobilities in different temporal spaces, from the last two millennia in East Africa to the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in the final third of the twentieth century. We are also grateful to Eveline G. Bouwers, Jana Bruggmann, Noëmie Duhaut, Bernhard Gißibl, Denise Klein, Sarah Panter, Johannes Paulmann, and John Carter Wood at the Leibniz Institute of European History, and to the Annales editorial board for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this text.

References

1. See, for example, Dietmar Dath, “Eigenwerbung, Schmerz und Abscheu,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 3, 2017, http://blogs.faz.net/filmfestival/2017/09/03/eigenwerbung-schmerz-und-abscheu-1074/.

2. Bert Rebhandl, “Wohin kann man überhaupt noch emigrieren?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 18, 2017, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kino/ai-weiwei-im-kino-wohin-kann-man-ueberhaupt-noch-emigrieren-15297493.html. See also Murielle Joudet, “‘Human Flow’: abri cinématographique pour vies mutilées,” Le Monde, February 7, 2018, https://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2018/02/07/human-flow-abri-cinematographique-pour-vies-mutilees_5252877_3476.html.

3. For earlier debates, see Leo Lucassen, The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

4. Simon Hattenstone, “Ai Weiwei on His New Life in Britain: ‘People Are At Least Polite. In Germany, They Weren’t’,” The Guardian, January 21, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/21/ai-weiwei-on-his-new-life-in-britain-germany-virtual-reality-film; Johanna Luyssen, “Entre Ai Weiwei et l’Allemagne, le divorce est consommé,” Libération, February 12, 2020, https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2020/02/12/entre-ai-weiwei-et-l-allemagne-le-divorce-est-consomme_1777988/. Weiwei has since settled in Portugal, at least temporarily.

5. Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (New York: Routledge, 2005); Benjamin C. Campbell and Michael H. Crawford, eds., Causes and Consequences of Human Migration: An Evolutionary Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

6. Excellent historical works include Daniel Roche, Humeurs vagabondes. De la circulation des hommes et de l’utilité des voyages (Paris: Fayard, 2003); Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006). On the call for a “mobility turn,” see John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000). See also the journal Mobilities, founded in 2006.

7. See, for example, Claudia Moatti and Wolfgang Kaiser, eds., Gens de passage en Méditerranée, de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne. Procédures de contrôle et d’identification (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2007); Claudia Moatti, Wolfgang Kaiser, and Christophe Pébarthe, eds., Le monde de l’itinérance en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne. Procédures de contrôle et d’identification (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2009); Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

8. Among the special issues published in recent years by different academic journals, see Nikolaos Papadogiannis and Detlef Siegfried, eds., “Between Leisure, Work and Study: Tourism and Mobility in Europe from 1945 to 1989,” special issue, Comparativ 24, no. 2 (2014); Sarah Panter, ed., “Mobility and Biography,” special issue, Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 16 (2015); Jens Olaf Kleist, ed., “History of Refugee Protection,” special issue, Journal of Refugee Studies 30, no. 2 (2017); Anne Friedrichs, ed., “Migration, Mobilität und Sesshaftigkeit,” special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 44, no. 2 (2018); Bettina Severin-Barboutie and Nikola Tietze, eds., “Flucht als Handlungszusammenhang in asymmetrischen Machtverhältnissen,” special issue, Zeithistorische Forschungen/ Studies in Contemporary History 15, no. 3 (2018); Jessica Richter and Anne Unterwurzacher, eds., “Migrationswege,” special issue, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 31, no. 1 (2020). See also the dossiers “Migrations,” “Exodes,” and “Diasporas,” in Annales HSS 66, no. 2 (2011). For an earlier multi-disciplinary approach, see Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, eds., Migration Theory: Talking across Disciplines, 3rd ed. (2000; New York: Routledge, 2015).

9. See Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47.

10. We prefer to speak of “mobile concepts” rather than use the metaphor of traveling, which implies that concepts act like human beings. See Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

11. For early efforts in the field of refugee and forced migration studies, see, for example, Jérôme Elie, “Histories of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-Quasmiyeh et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23–35. See also Karen Akoka, L’asile et l’exil. Une histoire de la distinction réfugiés/migrants (Paris: La Découverte, 2020).

12. The approach advocated here draws on Roger Chartier’s concept of “representation.” Particularly suited to the study of human mobilities, this notion offers a way to group and identify different actions and practices of representation: Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme représentation,” Annales ESC 44, no. 6 (1989): 1505–20; Chartier, “Pouvoirs et limites de la représentation. Sur l’œuvre de Louis Marin,” Annales HSS 49, no. 2 (1994): 407–18. We nevertheless expand the concept by integrating the evolutions in scholarship since Chartier first introduced it in the late 1980s. Postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ella Shohat, along with more empirically focused scholars such as Clare Anderson and B. S. Chimni, have encouraged reflection on the self-representation of “subalterns” contending with overarching power structures, and in this context have notably drawn attention to the power of scholars to categorize and classify phenomena such as mobilities. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; Ella Shohat, “The Struggle over Representation: Casting, Coalitions and the Politics of Identification,” in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Román de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995), 166–78; Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); B. S. Chimni, “The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View from the South,” Journal of Refugee Studies 11, no. 4 (1998): 350–74.

13. Camille Schmoll, Les damnées de la mer. Femmes et frontières en Méditerranée (Paris: La Découverte, 2020).

14. See Stefanie Gänger, “Circulation: Reflections on Circularity, Entity, and Liquidity in the Language of Global History,” Journal of Global History 12, no. 3 (2017): 303–18; Antonella Romano, “Des sciences et des savoirs en mouvement : réflexions historiographiques et enjeux méthodologiques,” Diasporas. Circulations, migrations, histoire 23/24 (2014): 66–79. See also Nina Glick Schiller and Noel B. Salazar, “Regimes of Mobility across the Globe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 183–200.

15. For a systematic overview of the interplay of citizenship and belonging, see, for instance, Frederick Cooper, Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). On the context-bound variants of cosmopolitanism and their superimpositions, see Thomas Nail, “Migrant Cosmopolitanism,” Public Affairs Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2015): 187–99.

16. See Stefan Hirschauer, “Un/doing Differences. Die Kontingenz sozialer Zugehörigkeiten,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 43, no. 3 (2014): 170–91. On the advantages of the concept of belonging compared to the older and still popular one of identity, see Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Zugehörigkeit in der mobilen Welt. Politiken der Verortung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). See also Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’.”

17. See, for example, Anne Friedrichs, “Multiperspektivität als Schlüssel zur Kontingenz von Zugehörigkeit. Der Umzug von polnisch-deutschen Arbeitern und ihren Familien aus dem Ruhrgebiet nach Frankreich,” Historische Zeitschrift 313, no. 3 (2021): 645–85.

18. See Henri Moniot, “L’histoire des peuples sans histoire,” in Faire de l’histoire, vol. 1, Nouveaux problèmes, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 149–71. See also Lisa Regazzoni, ed., Schriftlose Vergangenheiten. Geschichtsschreibung an ihrer Grenze – von der Frühen Neuzeit bis in die Gegenwart (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).

19. On temporalizing difference, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, 4th ed. (1983; New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); and Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). For an introduction to the postmodern debate, see Christoph Conrad and Martina Kessel, eds., Geschichte schreiben in der Postmoderne. Beiträge zur aktuellen Diskussion (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994). For an introduction to the postcolonial discussion, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995).

20. For a discussion of concepts such as the “life of objects,” “traveling objects,” and “itineraries,” see Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss, “Introduction: Biographies, Travels and Itineraries of Things,” in Mobility, Meaning and the Transformations of Things: Shifting Contexts of Material Culture through Time and Space, ed. Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013), 1–14.

21. Camille Lefebvre, “Itinéraires de sable. Parole, geste et écrit au Soudan central au xixe siècle,” in “Cultures écrites en Afrique,” ed. Éloi Fiquet and Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, special issue, Annales HSS 64, no. 4 (2009): 797–824, here p. 808. On the “lives of objects,” see Stefanie Gänger, Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Study of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

22. See, for example, Étienne Anheim, Mathieu Thoury, and Loïc Bertrand, “Micro-imagerie de matériaux anciens complexes (I),” Revue de synthèse 136, no. 3/4 (2015): 329–54; Mischa Meier and Steffen Patzold, Gene und Geschichte. Was die Archäogenetik zur Geschichtsforschung beitragen kann (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 2021).

23. William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group, 5 vols. (Boston: Richard G. Badger/Gorham Press, 1918–1920).

24. See, for example, Hans Peter Hahn, Materielle Kultur. Eine Einführung, 2nd ed. (2005; Berlin: D. Reimer, 2014).

25. See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).

26. For an overview of this debate, see Nils Riecken, ed., “Relational Lives: Historical Subjectivities in Global Perspective,” special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45, no. 3 (2019). For the period before 1800, see Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008). For related efforts in the field of global microhistory, see Romain Bertrand and Guillaume Calafat “La microhistoire globale : affaire(s) à suivre,” Annales HSS 73, no. 1 (2018): 1–18.

27. Riecken, introduction to “Relational Lives,” 325–40.

28. For self-reflexive approaches in the humanities, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50; and Doris Bachmann-Medick, “The Reflexive Turn/Literary Turn,” in Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture [2015], trans. Adam Blauhut (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 103–30. For self-reflexive approaches in the social science migration research, see Boris Nieswand and Heike Drotbohm, eds., Kultur, Gesellschaft, Migration. Die Reflexive Wende in der Migrationsforschung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2014).