Neoliberalism Strikes Back: Crossborder Migration from the Global South to the United States and Europe

• In Event: Transnational Public Pedagogies of Immigration: Race, Gender, Coloniality, and Media

Abstract

This presentation comparatively examines mainstream and alternative representations of contemporary cross-border migration to the United States from Mexico and to the European Union from Africa, western Asia, and eastern Europe in order to develop new pedagogies of transnationalism.

Postcolonial theory has helped theorize post-1960s migration from former European colonies to Western Europe as a response to the aftermath of 19th century colonialism that created deep inequities between colonial and colonized nations. But it less useful for understanding contemporary migration from the “Global South,” a geography that includes but also exceeds formerly colonized nations, to the United States and Western Europe. In order to comparatively understand movements from Mexico and Central America to Mexico and from West Asia, Africa, and eastern Europe to western Europe, we need to more clearly theorize migration as an effect of the global neoliberal project to which the United States and various western European nations have committed themselves since the 1980s.

The deepening of inequities among individuals and groups inside and among nations spurs global migration, even though divergent immigration systems in the receiving countries differently regulate the primarily economic migration from Mexico to the United States and Morocco to Western Europe as well as the refugee movements from West Asia to Western Europe. This presentation develops a comparative lens that foregrounds issues of neoliberalism and thus situates the widely theorized migration across the militarized US-Mexico border in response to growing inequities since the implementation of free trade agreements into the growing body of discourses about global crossborder migration. Now dominant discourses about migration to each nation that attempt to chalk up these inequities to cultural, ethnic or religious differences among populations draw on remarkably similar tropes, and immigrants encounter comparable difficulties overcoming increasingly militarized border formations. Through this lens, the US-Mexico border emerges as one object and geography of attention among a set of global trajectories.

The presentation also imagines transnational pedagogies for teaching alternative lenses through the study of fictional and cultural representations by examining performance art and literary representations of contemporary migration from Mexico to the United States, Morocco to Spain as well as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq to Germany, including work by Ana Castillo, Sherko Fatah, and Ville Tietäväinen.

Author

• Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State University