Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations: Revisioning Migrants and Mobilities Through the Critique of Antiblackness(Studies in Transgression)

Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations uses reflections on the Black experience to consider the “unasked question of blackness” in modern migration and movement. The editors and contributors use the lens of Black Studies to show how migration-compelled by force or suggestion, from the transatlantic African slave trade to the Great Migration and the current refugee crisis-has been structured to reinforce white supremacy. Focusing on antiblackness in immigration and examining restrictions on freedom of movement and on settling alike, chapters address how Black im/mobility operates and how it can be distinguished from that of the migrant and the colonial settler, as well as from the transgressive mobilities of Indigenous populations. Looking at blackness, borders and border practices, and displacement, Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations investigates racialized boundaries that determine immigration policy, citizenship, legality, and inclusion. Additional chapters analyze communities, such as the Haitian diaspora in Miami, antiblackness in the context of Australian migration, and explore literary representations of justice, slavery and Black feminist consciousness. Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations uses (anti)blackness to rethink the way we understand borders, immigrant identity, barriers to integration, and the dynamics of migrant exclusion, while also providing an understanding of “otherness” for Black populations across nationalities.   Contributors: Maya Hislop, P. Khalil Saucier, Hyacinth Udah, Paula von Gleich, Tryon P. Woods, and the editors

About the Author :
Philip Kretsedemas was Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 2005–2022 and is the author of Black Interdictions: Haitian Refugees and Antiblack Racism on the High Seas. He is currently the Managing Director of Research, Evaluation and Data Analytics for the Acacia Center for Justice.. Jamella N. Gow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College.  

Review :
“In modernity, from the transatlantic slave trade to today, the ‘migration’ of Black people is incommensurable with that of others. As Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations argues and demonstrates, reckoning with antiblackness and Blackness fundamentally destabilizes conventional histories, categories, meanings, and politics. Wide-ranging yet penetrating, the book’s theoretical, empirical, and literary analyses pose a bracing challenge to all academics, policymakers, and activists concerned with mobility.”-Moon-Kie Jung, Coeditor of Antiblackness and author of Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present “The editors and contributors to this volume give migration studies a much-needed shake-up. Theoretically rich and analytically tight, its wide-ranging chapters probe and expose the unacknowledged extent to which antiblackness shapes the way we think and talk about the movement of people. Rather than just implicating the usual suspects, Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations calls on well-meaning humanitarians-scholars, activists, and the like-to wipe the smudge of antiblackness from our lens. This is a bold and important book.”-Jamie Longazel, Associate Professor of Law and Society at John Jay College, affiliated faculty in the International Migration Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and coeditor of Migration and Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas (Temple) "This critique of antiblackness upends existing assumptions and presents important new directions for scholarly inquiry in immigration law.... The book offers profound resistance to what has been labeled the 'mobility bias' and the linear progress narrative of migration. It is also a forceful reminder of the importance of interrogating silences around blackness and mobility, and of the powerful fruits of that inquiry."-Jotwell