Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

This article explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach to the study of migration and distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely obscured by traditional migration scholarship but that become clear when we use a transnational lens. Finally, we locate our approach to migration research within a larger intellectual project, taken up by scholars of transnational processes in many fields, to rethink and reformulate the concept of society such that it is no longer automatically equated with the boundaries of a single nationstate. Social scientists have long been interested in how immigrants are incorporated into new countries. In Germany and France, scholars’ expectations that foreigners will assimilate is a central piece of public policy. In the United States, immigration scholars initially argued that to move up the socioeconomic ladder, immigrants would have to abandon their unique customs, language, values, and homeland ties and identities. Even when remaining ethnic became more acceptable, most researchers assumed that the importance of homeland ties would eventually fade. To be Italian American or Irish American would ultimately reflect ethnic pride within a multicultural United States rather than enduring relations to an ancestral land. Now scholars increasingly recognize that some migrants and their descendants remain strongly influenced by their continuing ties to their home country or by social networks that stretch across national borders. They see

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Conceptualizing simultaneity: a transnational social field perspective on society

Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Ana Celia Zentella. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.323 pp.

Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York

Deborah Gould’s volume is a beautifully written account of direct-action AIDS activism in the United States from its emergence in the mid-1980s through its decline in the early 1990s. The story of ACT UP, the central focus of the work, illuminates the complex history of both the AIDS epidemic and the political dynamics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities at a key moment of transition. Founded during the conservative backlash of the Reagan era and active through the conservative turn in LGBT politics of the early Clinton years (with the prioritization of questions like military service), the group’s confrontational tactics, radical discourse, and political successes prove something of an anomaly. Explaining this anomaly is Gould’s central concern, and in doing so, she offers a compelling argument for the importance of addressing affect and emotion in the study of social movements, providing a carefully nuanced conceptual framework to do so. Positing the need for an “affective ontology,” Gould introduces the notion of emotional habitus as a way to highlight the social dimensions of feeling. Focusing on dynamics both within ACT UP and in the larger society, she traces the affective and emotional undercurrents that permitted the emergence and subsequent decline of contentious AIDS activism. As she explains in the introduction, an emotional habitus operates through a kind of “emotional pedagogy,” beneath the level of consciousness, establishing a “template for what and how to feel,” naturalizing some feelings and inhibiting others (p. 34). Following Pierre Bourdieu, Gould is careful to recognize the stabilizing force of habitus, but the emotional habitus she describes is not static and closed but rife with tensions and in flux. In Part I, for instance, the author analyzes the contradictory emotions that circulated in LGBT communities after the first reported cases of AIDS in the early 1980s, including pride, fear, grief, guilt, shame, a desire for acceptance, and an incipient anger, still too weak in its capacity to mobilize. Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986, which upheld states’ authority to criminalize sodomy in starkly homophobic terms, came as a “moral shock” that fundamentally transformed the emotional habitus of LGBT communities, crystallizing anger at government inaction on AIDS and opening the emotional possibilities for a more contentious politics. Gould presents this constellation of feelings by weaving together interviews, movement documents, public speeches, and reports of the epidemic in both the LGBT and mainstream press. Indeed, her use of evidence is noteworthy not only for its breadth but also for the way she marshals it to reveal what is often difficult to register: repressed emotions, affective states, and foreclosed possibilities of action. She thus contrasts, for example, predominant community and activist responses to the few initial calls for civil disobedience in the early 1980s—discouraging such action, defending the government, and calling on people to reign in their anger—with those following Hardwick, which found a new resonance with the widespread outrage provoked by the case. In the year after Hardwick, activists founded ACT UP. In Parts II and III of the book, Gould traces the “emotional work” performed by these activists, initially finding receptiveness to their demands and disruptive tactics; subsequently, less so. Another key turning point in this story is the election of Bill Clinton, which promised greater social acceptance for gays and lesbians, provided we behave. Indeed, while careful to avoid drawing a direct causal link between particular emotions and specific political tactics, the author elaborates a central tension throughout the book between a contentious, direct-action activism, fueled primarily by anger, and an activism that operates through established political institutions, reflecting (among other feelings) an ambivalent hope for social acceptance and a certain shame about gay/queer difference. Thus mapping a second transformation of the emotional habitus, she documents a growing chorus of political and LGBT community leaders who dismissed ACT UP’s tactics as counterproductive, irrational, juvenile, or outdated. In this inauspicious context,Gouldalso traces how, within the group, an omnipresent though generally unacknowledged grief over the rising death toll of family and friends and a growing despair about the chances of finding a cure | |

Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS

I argue that the study of narrative identity would benefit from more sustained and explicit attention to relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity. I review what is known about these different types of narrative identity and argue that these narratives are created for different purposes, do different types of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. After exploring the inherently reflexive relationships between and among these various narratives of identity, I conclude with demonstrating how examining these relationships would allow a more complete understanding of the mutual relevance of social problem construction and culture, of the work of social service organizations attempting to change clients' personal narratives, and the possibilities of social change. Exploring relationships between and among different types of narrative identity would yield a better understanding of how narratives work and the work narratives do.

The study of identity as cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives : Theoretical and empirical integrations

Puerto Ricans maintain a vibrant identity that bridges two very different places - the island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Whether they live on the island, in the States, or divide time between the two, most imagine Puerto Rico as a separate nation and view themselves primarily as Puerto Rican. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, and Puerto Rico has been a U.S. commonwealth since 1952. Jorge Duany uses previously untapped primary sources to bring new insights to questions of Puerto Rican identity, nationalism, and migration. Drawing a distinction between political and cultural nationalism, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican "nation" must be understood as a new kind of translocal entity with deep cultural continuities. He documents a strong sharing of culture between island and mainland, with diasporic communities tightly linked to island life by a steady circular migration. Duany explores the Puerto Rican sense of nationhood by looking at cultural representations produced by Puerto Ricans and considering how others - American anthropologists, photographers, and museum curators, for example - have represented the nation. His sources of information include ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interviews, surveys, censuses, newspaper articles, personal documents, and literary texts.

The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move : Identities on the Island and in the United States

When people move across state borders, they enter not only a different labor market and political structure but also a new system of social stratification by class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Migrants bring their own cultural conceptions of their identity, which often do not coincide with the ideological constructions of the receiving societies. As a mulatto Dominican colleague told me recently, she "discovered" that she was black only when she first came to the United States; until then she had thought of herself as an india clara (literally, a light Indian) in a country whose aboriginal population was practically exterminated in the 16th century. For most Caribbean immigrants in the United States, race and color have played a crucial role in the formation of their cultural identities. Two different models of racial hegemony are juxtaposed in the process of moving from the Caribbean to the United States. On one hand, Caribbean migrantsespecially those coming from the Spanish-speaking countries of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico-tend to use three main racial categories-black, white, and mixed-based primarily on skin color and other physical characteristics such as facial features and hair texture (Seda Bonilla, 1980). On the other hand, the dominant system of racial classification in the

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2634171.pdf

Reconstructing Racial Identity Ethnicity, Color, and Class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico

In this article, I analyze recent intellectual debates on the Puerto Rican nation and its persistent colonial relation with the United States. First, I trace the development of a nationalist discourse on the Island, primarily among intellectuals, writers, and artists during the 20th century. I identify several problems with this discourse, especially the exclusion of ethnic and racial others from its definition of the nation. Then I argue that any serious reconceptualization of Puerto Rican identity must include the diaspora in the United States. I focus on the increasingly bilateral flow of people between the Island and the U.S. mainland—what has come to be known as circular, commuter, or revolving door migration. The Spanish folk term for this back-and-forth movement is extremely suggestive: el vaiveYi (literally meaning fluctuation). La nacion en vaiven, the nation on the move, might serve as an apt metaphor for the fluid and hybrid identities of Puerto Ricans on both sides of the Atlantic. My thesis is that massive migration—both to and from the Island—has undermined conventional definitions of the nation based exclusively on territorial, linguistic, or juridical criteria, [cultural identity, diaspora, nationalism, transnationalism, circular migration, Puerto Ricans]

Nation on the move: the construction of cultural identities in Puerto Rico and the diaspora

In this comprehensive comparative study, Jorge Duany explores how migrants to the United States from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico maintain multiple ties to their countries of origin Chronicling these diasporas from the end of World War II to the present, Duany argues that each sending country's relationship to the United States shapes the transnational experience for each migrant group, from legal status and migratory patterns to work activities and the connections migrants retain with their home countries Blending extensive ethnographic, archival, and survey research, Duany proposes that contemporary migration challenges the traditional concept of the nation-state Increasing numbers of immigrants and their descendants lead what Duany calls "bifocal" lives, bridging two or more states, markets, languages, and cultures throughout their lives Even as nations attempt to draw their boundaries more clearly, the ceaseless movement of transnational migrants, Duany argues, requires the rethinking of conventional equations between birthplace and residence, identity and citizenship, borders and boundaries |Duany explores how migrants to the United States from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico maintain multiple ties to their countries of origin Chronicling these diasporas from the end of World War II to the present, Duany argues that each sending country's relationship to the United States shapes the transnational experience for each migrant group, from legal status and migratory patterns to work activities and the connections migrants retain with their home countries

Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States

This article focuses on the bilateral flow of people between Puerto Rico and the United States - what has come to be known as circular, commuter, or revolving-door migration. It documents the migra...

Jorge Duany

Papers

The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move : Identities on the Island and in the United States

Reconstructing Racial Identity Ethnicity, Color, and Class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico

Nation on the move: the construction of cultural identities in Puerto Rico and the diaspora

Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States

Mobile Livelihoods: The Sociocultural Practices of Circular Migrants between Puerto Rico and the United States