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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel examines U.S. and transnational public pedagogies of immigration, race, gender, and coloniality in the context of neoliberalism. Discourses of immigration in policy debates and the media produce forms of learning about immigration that span from pedagogies of assent to the maintenance of the status quo, including the naturalization of xenophobic ways of knowing and the often inadvertent affirmation of neoliberal notions of valuable life, to pedagogies of dissent which respond to and challenge these discourses.

In Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism Jodie Melamed defines “neoliberal multiculturalism” as procedure and discourse that portray multiculturalism as the “spirit of neoliberalism and posits neoliberal restructuring across the globe to be the key to a postracist world of freedom and opportunity” (138). Pro-immigrant discourse hinges on imagining the United States as an exceptional place in which immigrants and refugees have historically been welcome. This “nation of immigrants” narrative, which rebranded white supremacy in the civil rights era and idealizes ostensibly self-sufficient white ethnic immigrant heteropatriarchal families, has proven to be flexible enough to incorporate some immigrants of color as “model minorities,” and is predicated on the erasure of the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the acknowledgement of the U.S. as a settler colonial nation. This narrative has become more complicated as it reaffirms the benefits of certain kinds of immigration (i.e., highly skilled) and the simultaneous exclusion of others, including Mexican and Central American migrants and refugees from Muslim dominant nations. Oppositional discourses also draw on the liberal underpinnings of this “nation of immigrants” narrative. DREAM discourse asserts that immigrants deserve a path to legalization because they are otherwise law-abiding, especially hardworking members of heteronormative families, students, or have served in the military. Progressive immigration discourse was epistemologically limited in these ways long before Trump’s election, but now the political field will be further constrained.

Similar ideas are expanding to nations that have only recently become immigrant and refugee-receiving countries, particularly in Western Europe. Lacking longer histories of pro- or anti-immigration discourses, representations are shifting from an emphasis on humanitarian support to stigmatization of new arrivals, primarily refugees from West Asia, who are associated with racialized notions of religious and cultural otherness, in order to justify their selective inclusion and deportation. Along with Brexit, right wing, anti-immigrant populist movements are becoming prevalent in several nations. Yet oppositional pedagogies and organizations are also emerging.

This panel will analyze transnational representations of immigration as public pedagogies. Leah Perry will reconsider 1980s immigration discourses in light of indigenous scholars’ work on indigeneity and settler colonialism. Claudia Sadowski-Smith will comparatively examine representations of contemporary migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States, and from West Asia to Western Europe. Nandini Dhar will discuss first generation Indian women's food blogs through an analysis of the neoliberal ideologies of domesticity. Raquel Andrea Madrigal will spotlight the intellectual and political stakes of Indigenous sovereignty at the U.S.-Mexico border in relation to undocumented immigrant and migrant activism. Nina Morgan will chair and provide commentary.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Nina Morgan, Kennesaw State University

Individual Presentations

• Neoliberalism Strikes Back: Crossborder Migration from the Global South to the United States and Europe - Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State University

• The "Nation of Immigrants" is a Settler Nation: The Public Pedagogy of Immigration and Indigeneity in the United States - Leah Marie Perry, SUNY Empire State College

• Literalizing the Private: Indian-American Women Food Bloggers, Knowledges of "Home”, Domestic Labor and Culinary Creativity - Nandini Dhar, O.P. Jindal Global University, India

• Unlearning U.S. Migration on Tohono O’odham Lands: Anti-colonial Praxis, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies - Raquel Madrigal, University of New Mexico

Comment

• Nina Morgan, Kennesaw State University