Transnational families
and everyday
geopolitical legacies
Ann Phoenix
Interlinking of geopolitics, emotional
geographies and the everyday
• Mobilities and global links are increasingly
recognised as part of the everyday.
• Children’s local, everyday practices are
geopolitical (Hopkins, 2015; Pain and Smith,
2008; Pain et al., 2010).
• Children and young people are globalized in
complex ways.
2
Geopolitical legacies visible in the
everyday
• Where people viewed as coming from
taken as relational signifiers.
• Intersects with racialisation and other
social categories.
• Impacts on everyday practices and
emotions.
• Childhood experiences sedimented into,
and reworked in, adulthood.
3
Aims of the paper
1. Briefly discuss some concepts
(Post)colonial; transnational families; memory
2. The study and narratives
3. Examples of adults looking back on everyday
geopolitical legacies
4
(Post)colonial
Critical approaches to
theorising the legacy of
colonialism
Analyses of ways in
which knowledge can
perpetuate & justify
the hegemony and
superiority of excolonisers
Edward Said (1978) Orientalism: binary of
‘Oriental’ and ‘Western’ serve to other the
‘Oriental’ and justify Western rule by constructing
Westerners as rational (in opposition to Orientals’
emotionality). [c.f. Chandra Talpade Mohanty]
Colonisers and the colonised are
inextricably linked in relational
processes of racialisation and
subjectification (Fanon 1967);
diaspora space (Brah, 1996)
5
Meta-analytic &
deconstructive
Hence biographies of
people in most of the
world are postcolonial
(Post)colonial biographies involve
‘epistemic violence’
Foucault: ‘epistemic violence’ is the
imposition of a given set of beliefs over
another; power/knowledge.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: epistemic
violence results when the subaltern is
silenced by colonial & indigenous
patriarchal power. [Lata Mani]
Multiple marginalities and epistemic
privilege (Lorraine Code, 2014)
6
The psychosocial (post)colonial
Frantz Fanon
(1952)
colonizer/colonized
relationship is
normalized in the
psyche—the social
is psychic;
racialisation.
Althusser (1971)
subjectivity socially
produced through
Ideological State
Apparatuses (e.g.
schools, families,
religions) &
Subjectification
Butler: becoming a
subject means
simultaneously
being subjected to
power relations.
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interpellation.
Foucault (1977,
1980) power
relations produce
subjects.
Individuals are an
effect, rather than
the originators of
power.
•Butler (2004)discourses of the normative
construct ‘livable’ or ‘unbearable lives’
•Cannot recognise themselves in their
culture’s canonical narratives as persons.
•Have to assert their claim to a liveable
(or bearable) life and cultural legibility.
•Autonomy and subjectivity are
constrained by normalizing processes
Transnational families
Complex
international
links shaped by
care
arrangements
& displacement
(Lutz;
Parrenas)
Spread across
nation states;
sense of
collectivity
(Bryceson &
Vorela, 2002)
Children
sometimes
impetus &
often
involved
Family &
household not
co-resident
unities
Global care chains & the international transfer of caretaking (Hochschild, 2003;
Parreñas, 2001). ‘In these arrangements, under-valued and under-paid caring
jobs are passed on from western women to migrant women, and the migrant
women in turn employ poorer non-migrant women to look after the family
members they have left behind.’ (Zontini, 2007)
Intersectionality
(Kimberlé Crenshaw 1989,
1994, 2011, 2013)
Inductive,
theory arising
from
observation of
complexity of
everyday life
DECENTRING OF
CATEGORIES
“…the mutually constitutive
relations among social identities ...
The idea that social identities such
as race, gender, and class interact
to form qualitatively different
meanings and experiences.”
(Leah Warner, 2008, ‘A Best
Practices Guide to
Intersectional Approaches in
Psychological Research’,
Sex Roles
The different
groups we
belong to
have varied
amounts of
power in
relation to
other groups
•Heuristic for recognising
simultaneous positioning in
social categories—e.g.
gender, class, sexuality and
ethnicity--in non-additive
and non-essentialist ways
(Crenshaw, 1989; 1994).
Memory: Convergence between
different theoretical traditions
• Constructive process subject to change (Lambek and
Antze, 1996; Rosenthal, 2006).
• (Cognitive) unconscious (Hassin et al., 2006)
• Collective memories (Hallbwachs)
• Distributed memories (Bruner, 1996)
•
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development
•
Family myth (Thompson; Bertaux)
• Central to creating & sustaining identities.
• Evocative memories of migration (e.g. Chamberlain,
1997; Bauer and Thompson, 2006).
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Aims of the paper
1. Briefly discuss some concepts
(Post)colonial; transnational families; memory
2. The study and narratives
3. Examples of adults looking back on everyday
geopolitical legacies
11
Transforming Experiences: Reconceptualising identities and ‘nonnormative’ childhoods
ESRC Professorial Fellowship
Research Fellows: Elaine Bauer and Stephanie Gill-Davis & Leandra
Box
• Adults from varied ethnicised groupings who grew
up in ‘non-normative’ contexts.
• In-depth interviews with adults from each of three
strands: serial migration (N=53); visibly different
households (N=41); language brokers (N=40)
• Seven focus groups.
Homo narrans’: ubiquity of narratives
(Fisher; Bruner)
•Autobiographies
rewritten to make
sense of changes
in social-structural
circumstances as
well as in individual
lives.
•Riessman (2008, p.
3) ‘...Events ...are
selected, organized,
connected, and
evaluated as
meaningful for a
particular audience.’
•Narratives
connect past,
present and
future -sequence and
temporality.
•Basic human way of making
sense of the world – we lead
‘storied lives’ (Riessman,
2008)
Aims of the paper
1. Briefly discuss some concepts
(Post)colonial; transnational families; memory
2. The study and narratives
3. Examples of adults looking back on everyday
geopolitical legacies
14
Disjunctive experiences,
exceptionalism and identification 1
Leung: ‘And growing up in upstate New York, there wasn’t a large
Asian population and uh my teacher instead of, I guess,
encouraging me to try harder to pick up the language at the same
rate as my peers, she actually, I guess, kinda had pity on me in a
bit (.) and she didn’t require the same amount of I think (.) I guess
standard from me, so I didn’t have to work as hard or didn’t have
to get it as quickly as other students did. And sh- it would be
okay with her and for me, I knew that I that I was receiving some
special attention in that way and I thought that was really great
because I was like ‘oh, you can get away with this’. But um when I
was around five, they moved to California and that’s when it
completely changed because in Northern California, in the Bay
area, there’s a very large Asian American population.
Disjunctive experiences,
exceptionalism and identification 2
‘And I was thrown into the school district where (.) I
had a lot of peers that looked like me and they could
speak English perfectly fine, so at that stage I could
see that there was a problem there. And at the time, I
was just thinking ‘oh, like I won’t be able to make
friends’ you know, but now thinking back on it, it’s like
you know, there’s that difference there. So I entered
some speech programmes um my English improved a
lot and both for my parents I guess their language
capacity mostly stayed around like pretty basic
English.’ (Leung, Los Angeles)
Iconic memories of difference are
intersectional, emotionally marked and
made sense of retrospectively
Amorita: A very vivid memory of being in first grade and speaking
Spanish, because you would (.) we would attract each other and (.)
and you were (.) you know, you’d go to the group that (.) that mlanguage, my first language was Spanish. And so the other kids I
realised were that was also the first language and you’re a baby when
you’re in first grade and the teacher approaching us um and look (.)
was dressed like Jackie Kennedy so you know, you’re (.) just this
beautiful teacher coming. And she bent down and she had her hands
behind her back and she called us all over, we ran over and she
pulled out tootsie pops, a bunch of them in her hand and she gave us
all a tootsie pop and she says “I don’t want you speaking that ugly
language anymore, only stupid people speak that language” (softer)
and that was a real turning point in my heart and mind.
Disjunction on changing country:
learning difference
Lizzie: Well I think erm, the first challenging experience I
had really, after the four weeks I was registered in to
school. And I think that was the most daunting painful
experience that I can ever think of, and I think each
time when I reflect back to it I think to myself you
know, I just, I think, after a couple of months in school
I really hated my parents for bringing me. Cos there I
was with my nan in Jamaica, I was loved and there I
was at school. I can always remember the children
used to follow you and try to lift, pick your dress up to
see if you’ve got a tail. That’s the bitter experience of
school and I just use to hate school...
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Disjunctions produce socioemotional
understandings
• Experiences of seeing how one /parents are
treated lead to disjunctions that produce
outsiderness.
• Recognition that where parents come from is
devalued – epistemic violence.
• Geopolitical legacies.
• Space and place both important.
• Intersectional positioning & embodied
diffderences.
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Arabic-Swedish written account—
enjoyment and shame
Husniyah: When we were newly arrived and none of us spoke
Swedish, translators usually addressed my mother when translating,
even if the topic was about school and us kids. I didn't need to take
responsibility and my mom handled the information. After a while I
had to tell my mom what had happened in school and what the
teachers told us to prepare for the next day. This was my first
encounter with translating for my parents and I found it quite
amusing. I was also rather proud of myself for knowing things that
my parents didn't. At the same time, I didn't want people to know that
my parents didn't understand Swedish or that their language skill
was poor. To me, it was kind of a family-secret that I usually enjoyed
but did not want to reveal to others.
Positioned in space and place
But I think to the wider sense of society it was always
something that I was aware of as a child and a little bit
uncomfortable of but more towards being with my dad
actually in public, because I could sense er, that
people were probably more (laughing) surprised, by
that, than when I was with my mum. Because I think in
terms of the continuum of sort of (laughing) colour.
Obviously they perceived me being nearer to my
mum’s skin (laughing) colour and therefore closer in
some way to her and more likely to be her genuine
offspring than they did my father.
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Learning difference within the family
Maria: …the grandmother, um a bit of a witch, um she um she
was probably more sort of working class Irish background,
probably aspiring to be or wanting to, you know, portray
something other than she was. Um, also an alcoholic, um she
was …furious that my dad got together with my mum, she used
to call my mum names so I remember her being racist to my
mum. …she’d call my mum all sorts of names, um and also
basically that we weren’t, we weren’t good enough because we
were mixed. We were, you know, we weren’t white British, we
weren’t, yeah, so as far as sh- and always this thing of ‘my son
is just too good for you’ whereas, you know, quite the opposite
to be frank. …all (.) very, very, you know, un- very unpleasant
woman …
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Discomfort & guilt at parental social
positioning  ‘acts of citizenship’
I have very clear memories of uh accompanying my
mother to the doctor st uh quite a few times and my
father to the doctor …when um they’d built a small
house on a farm and .hh um it was actually not their
land and they lost the house, it was just a whole
disaster that happened and I had to interpret with the
lawyers about that um which was very awful… So thyeah, that’s the uh experience and then many years
later… I worked for the unions for some years working
with immigrant, mainly mi- immigrant women workers,
Timorese refugees and Italian women workers in
factories and stuff. … and uh I (.) st I didn’t know why
actually I was driven in to do- doing that, but then I (.) I
realised later why I was doing it.
Pain & discomfort as socioemotional
signifier
• More than children’s general embarrassment
with their parents.
• Shape ontological subjectivities.
• Built on recognition of geopoliotical
differences as negatively marked.
• Processes invisible to the children
experiencing it.
• Lead to ‘acts of citizenship’.
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Parents try to redress negative social
positioning—negotiating relationality
F: …cos she just saw it as we wouldn’t get on if we
couldn’t speak the Queen’s English. But she also said
to me when I talked to her about it, she said that she
sees it as the language of oppression anyway, because
it’s not English and it’s not …whatever African
language we had of origin - this is her view … which I
respected in the end. … so she has it as a means of
communication of expression, but she didn’t want it
because she said we’re here now, and you have to get
on. And you can’t get on if you continue to speak like
that. (Jamaican patois) (Serial migration focus group)
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Legacies of geopolitics for
transnational families
• Adult retrospective narratives of childhood
patterned by histories of migration and
geopolitical relations.
• Emotionally marked, embodied, intersectional
and ontological by epistemic violence.
• Often produce ‘acts of citizenship’.
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Geopolitical legacies visible in the
everyday
• Where people viewed as coming from
taken as relational signifiers.
• Intersects with racialisation and other
social categories.
• Impacts on everyday practices and
emotions.
• Childhood experiences sedimented into,
and reworked in, adulthood.
27