Migration and Identity

Chapitre 1 L'ethnogénèse du groupe franco-mauricien. Thèse pour le Doctorat en Science Politique, présentée par Catherine Boudet le 03 décembre 2004, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux, Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses, 642 pages.

During decades, Gaddafi’s Libya was like Eldorado for thousands of economic migrants from a fragile country as Niger. After different migration flows from rural nigeriens areas, people from Niamey join the way to Libya during the 2000s. They did it with a different project, more “individualist” and conceived in “capitalist” and “modernist” way. Libya’s war in 2011 caused their return in vulnerable conditions, in the same condition as circular rural movements. However, they assumed the failure of their migration plan with certain privileged circumstances, as a result of their urban feature and experience in Libyan cities. This new collective worked as a non-qualified workforce in multinationals and public companies during their life in Gadafi’s country. It is a flow with specific characteristics and it qualifies itself as Niameyzé, which refers to “authentic” citizens from Niamey. They use their experience in Libya and their perfomative “cosmopolitism” to try to obtain the “development rent”, which are subventions from international cooperation.

This paper wants to approach to this forced return of Niameyzé, trying to treat the reconfiguration of this urban collective identity, who is used to stratify and distinct from rural migrants in a country where the gap between both environments is huge. We will explain how the migration to Libya has impacted to the urban imaginary through the main important sociable masculine space in Niger, the fada. Our fieldwork has developed in these originally urban sites, related to globalized culture, where returned migrants talk about their life in Libya and express their emic notion of their distinction as a urban migrant.

Analysing natural-occurring talk is unimaginable without the study of narratives, since they represent a fundamental technique for linguistic structuring of human experience. These highly spontaneous, but at the same structurally well-organised linguistic acts, help us shape experiences, organise them linguistically, and give them meaning (Bamberg et al. 2007). But narratives also represent a primary locus for expressing individual and collective identities, which makes them and increasingly important object of study in humanities and social sciences (De Fina i Georgakopoulou, 2015). Consequently, linguistic study of narrative, which emerged from sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, investigates discursive construction of categories such as belonging, sameness, difference, etc. The experience of migration, whether being an exile, expatriate, refugee, or an economic migrant, strongly influences one’s sense of self, (re)defining one’s own and others’ identities and belonging to groups (De Fina 2003). By leaving one’s original surroundings, the migrant individual faces new possibilities and limitations of identity choices, which is reflected in certain linguistic and narrative strategies present in migrant discourse. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of a sociolinguistic interview with one female migrant, with special emphasis on sameness and difference, two complementary perspectives on positioning oneself and other actors in spatial and temporal dimensions of the migrant experience. Relation between the self and other actors of the experience is analysed on a semantic/thematic and lexical level. The former involved the analysis of topics widely present in the narrative (preparing to leave, the travel, arriving to a new town, job search etc.), whereas the latter focused on the analysis of temporal and spatial deixis and nomination of social actors. The analysis showed that discursive construction of migrant identity is characterised by constant tension between one’s needs and identifying with the group or space. This confirms existing research that migrant discourse is inherently ambivalent and constantly subject to continuous change (De Fina 2003, Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2008). Since in Croatian context narratives are studied within literary studies and philosophy, this research might put forward a proposal for similar qualitative research topics in applied linguistics in the future.

When borders are created then question of legality and illegality arises. With the change in destinations a struggle to prove one’s identity and nationality begins. This problem is more visible in case of migrant communities, gets multiplied when there is an
intra-religion divide and then identity becomes a critical subject. The assimilation of different ethnic groups and the perceived threat of the earlier inhabitants have culminated into the critical issues of identity and citizenship in the state. This paper talks about the issue of migration and identity crisis of a minority community in Assam, which has been assimilating people from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups who migrated to this region over a period of time. However, for past two decades a large chunk of non-Assamese population of East Bengal origin has moved out of Assam and has taken different occupations to support their livelihood. The paper ends with a suggestion that the areas of commonality cutting across the ethnic boundaries need to be strengthened instead of focusing on the singularity of communal identity.

During decades, Libya became El Dorado for thousands of Africans coming from south of the Sahara, attracted by work opportunities and panafrican rhetoric of Libyan Guide, Muammar Gaddafi. In these intra-african mobilities we find citizens from Niger, adjacent territory that shares border to Maghrebi country. They experience the hausa proverb Libya Kaman Turaï, “Libya like Europe”, the possibility of satisfying economic and social needs in Libya as they could do it in the Old Continent. Libya’s war in 2011 mean a turning point of these historical and circular trans-saharian fluxes, heirs of ancient caravan routes. Around 300.000 Nigeriens returned home in vulnerable conditions, after being persecuted as accomplishes of Gaddafi’s regime. By an ethnography in Niamey, capital of Niger, this thesis explores the life conditions of this group, who must accept the failure of their migration project and reformulate its social and familiar role, reconfiguring its representation in the urban communitarian location. By classical methods as participant observation and informal conversations in the fada, the main space of male sociability in the country, the study focuses on the different phases of the migration process, from the journey through the desert until the stay in Libya, as well as the forced return. The work analyses the transnational and translocal networks “from below”, which promote these mobilities, and emphasises the consequences of the return to Niamey’s social space. How return people are living in their society of origin? Are they ready to take the route again or would they rather stay in Niger? This monograph wants to assess some of these questions, revealing a particular, original and recent phenomenon, defined by social practices linked to the urban African environment and connected to both ethnic conceptions as well as new ways of “cosmopolitanism”.

When borders are created then question of legality and illegality arises. With the change in destinations a struggle to prove one's identity and nationality begins. This problem is more visible in case of migrant communities, gets multiplied when there is an intra-religion divide and then identity becomes a critical subject. The assimilation of different ethnic groups and the perceived threat of the earlier inhabitants have culminated into the critical issues of identity and citizenship in the state. This paper talks about the issue of migration and identity crisis of a minority community in Assam, which has been assimilating people from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups who migrated to this region over a period of time. However, for past two decades a large chunk of non-Assamese population of East Bengal origin has moved out of Assam and has taken different occupations to support their livelihood. The paper ends with a suggestion that the areas of commonality cutti...

The article presents an autobiographic study of a Central Eastern European immigrant to Medellin, Colombia. Based on the understanding of culture as a rhizome, an ever-changing assemblage of the preferences, memories, aspirations, experiences and relations the author explores how migration triggers the disassemblages and the new assemblages for the Self. But since in our everyday reality we are dealing rather with the material than ideal, the article focuses on the material side of the transformations trigged by migration: particularly, on the materials a person uses to assemble the known. Interviews with the Central East European Immigrants in Medellin, Colombia, and personal observations, including the self-reflection based on the correspondence, diary and other forms of records such as photography, drawings, gardening, cooking or knitting over the six years produces data for the study. Interviews and observations over the other fellow-immigrants formed part of the self-reflection path for the author.

This file contains the cover image, Table of Contents, Preface by Patricia Ebrey, and Introduction by the author/translator

The book was published by the Edwin Mellen Press (August 1, 2004).
Hardcover : 230 pages.
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0773463526; ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0773463523

This study discusses the notion of agency in language and how it is constructed in narrative discourse. It does so by looking into linguistic devices and discursive strategies that speakers employ when recounting their personal experiences in narrative form in order to negotiate their and other social actors’ agency and, by extension, discursively construct various identity positions. The argument presented is that agency should be studied as a discursive phenomenon, and for narrative discourse, this means taking into account how agency emerges in the interplay of different layers of narrative context, i.e., the story world, the storytelling world, and the wider social context in which the first two are embedded. The analysis, based on a corpus of narratives of personal experience of migration told by female migrants from Croatia, focuses on two most prominent devices for agency construction in Croatian: pronominal shift and constructed dialogue. Systematic usage of these linguistic devices across narrative context results in discursive strategies of (de)agentivisation, generalisation, and delayed agency, which are further discussed in the paper.

Migrant women settling in the UK have to prove English-language proficiency and citizenship knowledge in their first two years. Both of these are seen as indicators of integration for migrant women. What are migrant women’s own perceptions of integration and how do their daily interactions play a role in their language development and integration? This Doctor in Education (EdD) Institution Focussed Study explores the role of out-of-class interactions in migrant women’s perceptions of their language development and their integration process through a case study with participatory methods of data collection. Using Bosswick & Heckmann's (2006a) interactive aspect of integration together with sociocultural theories of language development as theoretical perspectives, a case study of this phenomena was carried out. Findings indicate that the out-of-classroom interactions in English are important to enable wider community engagement and integration for migrant women. Formal settings such as work and children’s schools provide opportunities for interactions in informal settings and ESOL classes are perceived to play an important role in developing interactions in informal settings.

La guerra 2011 en Libia y la caída de Gadafi comportaron el retorno de miles de migrantes africanos a sus países de origen, perseguidos como "mercenarios", acusados de colaboración con el régimen depuesto.

El artículo analiza el impacto y las consecuencias sociales, políticas y económicas en países vecinos, relevantes por lo que a migración en el Magreb se refiere.

Freiburg im Breisgau gilt nicht nur als außergewöhnlich ökologische Stadt, sondern stellt sich auch als besonders offen und ausländerfreundlich dar. Dieses Buch bestätigt die besonderen Anstrengungen der Stadt für eine interkulturelle und problemorientierte Integrationspolitik, zeigt jedoch auch, dass die Stärkung der politischen Partizipation ausländischer Bürgerinnen und Bürger in Deutschland auf allen staatlichen Ebenen vernachlässigt wird. Anhand einer empirischen Untersuchung über die Teilnahmeformen lateinamerikanischer Gruppierungen wird veranschaulicht, welche Diskrepanz besteht zwischen den Partizipationsinteressen und Möglichkeiten von Migranten und den offiziellen politischen Teilnahmekanälen für Ausländer/innen. Die traditionellen Instrumente aus der Gastarbeiterzeit entsprechen nicht mehr den heutigen Strukturen und Bedürfnissen. Unter diesen Gegebenheiten bieten kulturelle Identifikationen der Migranten die stärksten Anreize für öffentliche Teilnahme dar.