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Chronotopes of Migration Scholarship: Challenges of Contemporaneity and Historical Conjuncture

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Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism

Abstract

This chapter argues that temporal regimes of migration and migrants are rather neglected in migration scholarship, and even if they are scrutinized, the focus is usually on the different ways migrants experience time and/or the disjunctive temporalities shaping their agency. The temporality of value regimes that shape the location and the value of migration and migrants in a particular space and time are hardly addressed. This chapter focuses first on the temporal frameworks of migration scholarship (particularly of integration and post-migrant approaches) as chronotopes to scrutinize their culturalizing and ethnicizing logics in analyzing, migrant practices and emplacement in areas of settlement. It argues that these perspectives are of limited analytical value as they deny migrants and non-migrants contemporaneity. The chapter suggests an alternative perspective that brings migrants and non-migrants into a common analytical lens, and it approaches the study of migrancy and migrants’ cultural production in relation to the revaluation processes of capital accumulation and urban restructuring taking place at a particular conjuncture in time. Relatedly, the chapter situates the strategic success of the post-migrant intervention and of cultural producers within the broader dynamics of city-making and wealth generation in Vienna at a particular historical conjuncture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for example, Langhoff (2011), Bazinger (2012), Wahl (2013), Akbaba et al. (2009), and Garage X (2014).

  2. 2.

    In 2016, “50 percent of the Viennese [had] a migration background, i.e., they were born abroad or [had] at least one parent who was born abroad. 27 percent [were] non-Austrian passport holders and 34 percent were born abroad” (City of Vienna 2017).

  3. 3.

    For the concept of sociability and its importance for migration studies, see Simmel (1949: 257) and Glick Schiller and Çağlar (2013).

  4. 4.

    However, before taking up the co-directorship of the 2014 Wiener Festwochen, Langhoff resigned from this position (in 2013) to become the director of one of the central state cultural institutions in Berlin, namely, Maxim Gorki Theater . See Çağlar (2016).

  5. 5.

    Parts of the arguments and the empirical material of this chapter are based on my article “Still ‘migrants’ after all those years: foundational mobilities, temporal frames and emplacement of migrants” (Çağlar 2016).

  6. 6.

    In criticizing researchers focusing on the times of migration and migrants’ temporal predicaments, Cwerner rightly argues that scholars have often treated migrants either in relative isolation and, to some extent, outside time and history, or within a largely assumed scale of evolutionary time (2001: 30). According to him, this is particularly misleading in an increasingly interconnected globalized world. Unfortunately, as a remedy against this tendency, he urges migration scholars to engage with the (ethnic) interconnectedness of migrants within the changing cultural and political geographies of the world (2001: 31–33).

  7. 7.

    The processes of valuation and devaluation I have referred to are often closely entangled with the valorization and devalorization of groups and/or the places and practices that are associated with them. In our case, valorization of migrants (as well as post-migrants) was very much part of processes of value creation and the generation of wealth.

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  1. Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Ayşe Çağlar

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  1. Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Pauline Gardiner Barber

  2. Champlain College, Trent University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Winnie Lem

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Çağlar, A. (2018). Chronotopes of Migration Scholarship: Challenges of Contemporaneity and Historical Conjuncture. In: Barber, P., Lem, W. (eds) Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72781-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72781-3_2

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