Transnational families and everyday geopolitical legacies

1. Transnational families and everyday geopolitical legacies Ann Phoenix

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Aims of the paper

5. (Post)colonial Critical approaches to theorising the legacy of colonialism Meta-analytic & deconstructive Analyses of ways in which knowledge can perpetuate & justify the hegemony and superiority of ex-colonisers 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 TalpadeMohanty] Colonisers and the colonised are inextricably linked in relational processes of racialisation and subjectification (Fanon 1967); diaspora space (Brah, 1996) Hence biographies of people in most of the world are postcolonial

6. (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)

7. 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) & interpellation. Foucault (1977, 1980) power relations produce subjects. Individuals are an effect, rather than the originators of power. Subjectification Butler: becoming a subject means simultaneously being subjected to power relations. • 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

8. Children sometimes impetus & often involved Complex international links shaped by care arrangements & displacement (Lutz; Parrenas) Spread across nation states; sense of collectivity (Bryceson & Vorela, 2002) Family & household not co-resident unities Transnational families • 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)

9. Intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw 1989, 1994, 2011, 2013) The different groups we belong to have varied amounts of power in relation to other groups 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 • 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).

10. 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).

11. Aims of the paper

12. Transforming Experiences: Re-conceptualising identities and ‘non-normative’ 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.

13. Riessman (2008, p. 3) ‘...Events ...are selected, organized, connected, and evaluated as meaningful for a particular audience.’ Homo narrans’: ubiquity of narratives (Fisher; Bruner) • Narratives connect past, present and future --sequence and temporality. • Autobiographies rewritten to make sense of changes in social-structural circumstances as well as in individual lives. • Basic human way of making sense of the world – we lead ‘storied lives’ (Riessman, 2008)

14. Aims of the paper

15. 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.

16. 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)

17. 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 m- language, 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.

18. 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...

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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 …

23. 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 th- yeah, 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.

24. 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’.

25. 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)

26. 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’.

27. 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.