Migration, Modernity, and the Insurgent Temporalities of Sanctuary
Topics: Migration
, Urban Geography
, Black Geographies
Keywords: migration, sanctuary, modernity, resistance, Allan Pred
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56
Authors:
Katharyne Mitchell, University of California, Santa Cruz
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Abstract
Over the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in time within human geography. This temporal “re-turn” is especially pronounced in areas of migration research, where current scholarship examines the ways that asylum seekers are forced into racialized spaces of waiting, limbo, and uncertainty. There has been less scholarly attention, however, to the temporalities of resistance—the multiple ways that migrants and migrant activists effectively disrupt the temporal frameworks of modern systems of migration governance. In this paper I explore the ways that sanctuary practices achieve these forms of temporal disruption. Sanctuary challenges the dominant flows of modern, progressive time by altering time’s rhythm and direction, or by creating what Walter Benjamin called “dialectics at a standstill.” It does so through four alternative time trajectories—historical, legal, collective, and spiritual—that effectively challenge state hegemony over the meaning and control of (migrant) time. This challenge enables new forms of resistance to normative disciplinary temporalities associated with the control of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. It also explodes the linearity and stability of the modern present, revealing a constellation of subaltern movements contesting both the violent flows and blockages of racial capitalism. Through recognizing and refracting these global movements in what Allan Pred termed “a montage of the present”, from refugee struggles to Indigenous movements against pipeline flows to the highway blockades of Black Lives Matter, an alternative spatio-temporality of modernity may be glimpsed.
Migration, Modernity, and the Insurgent Temporalities of Sanctuary
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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