Boundaries, Margins and Migrants: on Paradigm Shifts, Heterogeneity and Culture Wars

Abstract

Drawing on recent developments in cultural studies and in the social studies of science, this paper discusses an approach to the phenomenon of migration that defines migrants, migrations, movement, travei or exile as the rule rather than a break with "normality", without taking national states as the "natural" units for the analysis of migration flows, but as one of the different scales on which the phenomenon of migration emerges, and conceivlng migrants as "boundary actors" that negotiate and articulate "hybridi' or heterogeneous cultural configurations, relying on cultural repertoires from different origins, rather than as exemplars of irreducibly alien cultures on the margins of national societies. This approach is homologous with a "cosmopolitan" view of migration, foreigners and cultural configurations and processes, that stands in opposition to current restrictive state policies, boundary policing and "migrant scares".