Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America brings together scholars and artists across regions, generations, disciplines, and modes of expression to decenter the US-Mexico border as both a site and a concept. Calling for renewed attention to the spaces, identities, and conflicts that remain understudied and excluded from our hemispheric knowledge of forced movement, the volume reveals a wider diversity of migratory realities and considers race, ethnicity, and class beyond the hegemonic formations that eclipse non-US histories. Through multidisciplinary and geographically expansive essays that draw from history, social anthropology, environmental studies, feminist studies, and lived experience, the volume examines diverse migratory flows from Chile and Argentina in the South to Georgia and New York in the North. Individually and collectively, the essays remap migratory movements other than through the most studied South-to-North trajectories and remove the US and US-based racial formations from the center of analysis. By tracking East-West flows, intraregional mobilities, and changing conceptions of racial identity, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America complicates the concepts of forced mobility and border crossing by highlighting alternative liminalities in sites of transit, destination, and return. Demanding engagement with the submerged histories of racism and the production of ethnoracial categories beyond the Black/white binary, the collection brings into focus identities, sites, and forces that have not yet occupied the foreground of global migration study.
About the Author :
PATSY LEWIS is a professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her publications include Regional Integration in the Caribbean: A Critical Development Approach (Routledge, 2022) and Caribbean Integration: Uncertainty in a Time of Global Fragmentation (coedited with Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts and Jessica Byron, University of the West Indies Press, 2022).
KRISTEN A. KOLENZ is an assistant professor of international studies at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. She has published several journal articles, but this will be her first book.
ALEXANDRIA MILLER is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. She was selected as one of the 30 Under 30 Caribbean American Emerging Leaders by the Institute of Caribbean Studies in 2018.
Review :
"In this groundbreaking volume, Lewis, Kolenz, and Miller take scholarship beyond the accepted binaries and border-centered research structured by U.S. hegemony, offering a collection of insightful analyses of the interplay between mobility, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and the environment across the Americas. This 'de-centering' and 'unbordering' of migration studies is an urgently needed intellectual intervention."
--Noelle Kateri Brigden "author of The Migrant Passage: Clandestine Journeys from Central America"
"The moral panic engendered by immigration, globally, is critically and compellingly analyzed and demonstrated to be the product of colonial legacies of white supremacy, racialized hierarchies, and class exploitation (i.e., coloniality), all along the axis of gender. This makes the volume a needed, necessary, and imperative intervention in 'migration studies.'"
--Percy C. Hintzen "professor emeritus, University of California, Berkeley"
