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Part I: Inclusion and Exclusion: Discourses of Belonging
- Rutgers University Press
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? Part I Inclusion and Exclusion Discourses of Belonging This first section of the book deals with immigrant belonging , with examples from the host nations of France, Italy, Ireland, and the United States. In the chapters that follow, we can see that the particular history of a country and its historical relationship to the immigrant populations entering its borders affects the modes of belonging possible for immigrants . The careful ethnographic work exhibited in these chapters illustrates the ways that belonging is a fluid process produced through relationship between the social practices of immigrants and the historical, structural, and cultural conditions within which they find themselves. The authors of these chapters, all of whom have conducted ethnographic fieldwork, based their analyses not only upon detailed social interactions, however, but also place them within the wider contexts in which immigrants as social actors negotiate their place in the new host society. Sources from media, law, public opinion, and formal institutions provide such contexts. Different sites in which belonging is enacted, discussed, or rejected are examined—including sport, music, social service agencies that deal with immigrants, maternity hospitals, and university campuses. Both explicit forms of protest and more informal ways of learning how to negotiate one’s position are discussed by the authors as modes of social agency on the part of immigrants. At the same time, the power of the dominant society to undermine the ability of newcomers to “belong” is never ignored. At a time when immigration has become such a visible and controversial topic, the issue of belonging for those of non-European ancestry who settle in both Europe and the United States is fraught with struggle and contest. Discourses of race, even when hidden in the “new” racism that does not explicitly use a racial vocabulary, are an integral part of discourses of belonging. When we talk about immigrant belonging, we can be talking about various things—possibilities of becoming a citizen in the formal legal sense, possibilities of belonging in a more vernacular sense (“cultural citizenship”), or possibilities of transnational belonging in which the immigrant has two “homes” (the new host country and the country left behind). In the chapters to follow, all of these ways of belonging are addressed. Paul Silverstein addresses the performance of racialized citizenship in what he calls “Algerian France,” especially in Paris. The relationship of North Africans, especially Algerians, to metropolitan France is one in which citizenship and belonging are not congruent processes. During the time that Algeria was a colony of France, legislation granted French citizenship to inhabitants of Algeria—although this was a form of second-class citizenship compared to that of “native” French. After the war of independence , the issue of gaining French citizenship was more complex. The racialized nature of Algerian citizenship in France persists. Starting with the case of Zinedine Zidane, of the French soccer team, who has Algerian parents, Silverstein shows how citizenship is surveilled by the dominant society and also performed by the immigrant. Another example, that of the disenfranchised North African youth of French housing projects, illustrates the rejection of belonging to France on the part of alienated youth who practice a form of what Silverstein calls “politics without politics.” At the same time that they reject France, they also make use of images from the storming of the Bastille in their protests. Flavia Stanley similarly takes up the idea of race and citizenship in her study of social services for immigrants in Rome. Italy as a nation has always recognized its internal regional diversity and sharp contrasts are still drawn between southerners (stigmatized as backward) and northerners. Its historical formation from a fragmented series of smaller states gives it a different national flavor than France, for instance, which has asserted its homogeneity and underplayed its regional cultural distinctions. In her fieldwork, Stanley paid attention to talk about immigrants among social workers and also paid attention to immigrant responses to the intake interviews and Italian language school in which they participated as part of the process of incorporation . A distinction between citizenship and nationality comes across clearly in her study, so that “Italian-ness,” an aspect of nationality, becomes a category of belonging not easily entered by immigrants. Italy’s anxieties about immigration, despite its relatively low level of immigration compared to other European nations, are, Stanley suggests, related to its marginal status in the European Union. Angèle Smith’s chapter looks toward changing laws of citizenship in Ireland that altered the relationship between motherhood...