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Theorising About and Beyond Transnational Processes

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Diversity and Contestations over Nationalism in Europe and Canada

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology ((PSEPS))

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the developing field of transnational studies and the place of migration studies within it. It begins by examining the barriers that initially blocked the emergence of transnational studies. Briefly noting the emergence of four subfields, the chapter suggests several distinctions that were lacking in the initial emergence of a new paradigm and allow for contemporary theory-building. This new theory-building should address structures of power that legitimise social inequalities. The chapter cautions that transnational studies, while taking migration scholars beyond methodological nationalism, can produce new silences. Transnational studies may even obstruct the analysis of imperialism.

This is an edited and updated version of a chapter first published in 2009 in Caribbean Migration to the United States and Western Europe: Essays on Incorporation, Identity and Citizenship. E. Mielants, M. Cervantes-Rodriguez and R. Grosfoguel (eds), Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press, pp. 18–42.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Of course, Europeans settled without impediment in their colonial territories, including the Caribbean.

  2. 2.

    Prussian development required migrant labour, but Polish workers were periodically defined as a threat and restrained intermittently during this period.

  3. 3.

    The United States, currently portrayed as the land of immigrants, unlike European states, was actually the first and, for a time, the only state to erect significant barriers when it passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 for a ten-year period that was renewed in 1892.

  4. 4.

    Bodnar (1985), Cinel (1982), and Wyman (1993) were able to break sufficiently with US methodological nationalism to document return migration and transnational connections, but they did not develop a theoretical framework to encompass this scholarship.

  5. 5.

    Horace Kallen used the term “melting pot” in the 1920s. However, until the 1960s and the growth of the third-generation, US nation-state building focused on the assimilation of immigrants. In immigrant studies, the term “ethnic group” was rarely used, and this alternative view of immigrant settlement received little attention. Caribbean discussions of “plural societies” were promoted by M.G. Smith (1965). These were reflections about relations within colonial empires that brought together culturally disparate peoples.

  6. 6.

    But see a summary of a related trend in Europe (Brubaker 2001), as well as a parallel redefinition of the term “assimilations ” (Faist 2003).

  7. 7.

    Here I build on an article by Daniel Mato (1997).

  8. 8.

    In 1998, Sidney Mintz, building on a lifetime of Caribbean studies, took the emerging discussion of transnationalism to task for disregarding the long history of transnational processes and the heritage of Caribbean scholarship. However, Linda Basch, Karen Olwig, Patricia Pessar, Nnina Sorensen, Georges Fouron, Joyce Toney, and I, along with many others, developed studies of transnational migration and cross-border connections that built from Caribbean history and scholarship.

  9. 9.

    Faist (2000b) contrasts “social ties” with symbolic ties. He encompasses, in his sense of social ties, a commitment to a common interest or norm. My term “ways of being” decouples social ties from the common identities and norms that lead people to express shared “ways of belonging ” (Glick Schiller 2003).

  10. 10.

    The name “Roger Carlos” is a pseudonym, in keeping with our research protocol.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany

    Nina Glick Schiller

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  1. Nina Glick Schiller
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    John Erik Fossum

  2. CNRS, Sciences Po, Paris, France

    Riva Kastoryano

  3. Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Birte Siim

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Glick Schiller, N. (2018). Theorising About and Beyond Transnational Processes. In: Fossum, J., Kastoryano, R., Siim, B. (eds) Diversity and Contestations over Nationalism in Europe and Canada. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58987-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58987-3_2

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