Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland

This volume responds to the question: How do you know when you belong to a country? In other words, when is the nation-state a homeland? The boundaries and borders defining who belongs and who does not proliferate in the age of globalization, although they may not coincide with national jurisdictions. Contributors to this collection engage with how these boundaries are made and sustained, examining how belonging is mediated by material relations of power, capital, and circuits of communication technology on the one side and representations of identity, nation, and homeland on the other. The authors’ diverse methodologies, ranging from archival research, oral histories, literary criticism, and ethnography attend to these contradictions by studying how the practices of migration and identification, procured and produced through global exchanges of bodies and goods that cross borders, foreclose those borders to (re)produce, and (re)imagine the homeland and its boundaries.

Margaret Franz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Tampa. She researches legal communication as it relates to race, coloniality, and national belonging. Her current project investigates the evolution of citizenship status in the United States by analyzing how official methods of interpretation coevolve with and respond to vernacular legal cultures that challenge state authority to define and enforce citizenship status. Her work on the cultural politics of birthright citizenship has appeared in Social Identities, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

Kumarini Silva is Associate Professor of Communication the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and co-editor of Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture (Palgrave UK, 2015). She current research extends the exploration of racialized identification in Brown Threat to understand how affective relationships, especially calls to and of love, animate regulatory practices that are deeply cruel and alienating.