Nation and Migration: Past and Future (A Special Issue of American Quarterly)

Much of the terrain in American studies has been transformed in recent years by a fundamental reconsideration of the relationship among capitalism, the nation-state, and human migration. Nation and Migration focuses on this disciplinary shift and offers a contemporary understanding of the transnational circulation of migrants and immigrants in a global economy.

In the first section, contributors evaluate issues of citizenship and state power, examining the mechanisms through which immigrants are regulated, restricted, and disciplined by state institutions and agents. The next section presents differing perspectives on transnationalism. This discussion is followed by essays that address how migrants and migrant communities experience their tenuous positions. The concluding section analyzes literary representations of the entwined processes of imperialism, globalization, and transnational migration.

Covering a broad range of nationalities and topics, the essays that make up this book suggest that there are many borders to cross in the new scholarship on nation and migration.

David G. Gutiérrez is a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is a professor and the director of graduate studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California and author of God’s Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists Are Working for Immigrant Rights.