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Moving Matters: Paths of Serial Migration
Moving Matters is a richly nuanced portrait of the serial a person who has lived in several countries, calling each one at some point "home." The stories told here are both extraordinary and increasingly common. Serial migrants rarely travel freely―they must negotiate a world of territorial borders and legal restrictions―yet as they move from one country to another, they can use border-crossings as moments of self-clarification. They often become masters of settlement as they turn each country into a life chapter. Susan Ossman follows this diverse and growing population not only to understand how paths of serial movement produce certain ways of life, but also to illuminate an ongoing tension between global fluidity and the power of nation-states. Ultimately, her lyrical reflection on migration and social diversity offers an illustration of how taking mobility as a starting point fundamentally alters our understanding of subjectivity, politics, and social life.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 9, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 18, 2016
"The serial migrant is not simply many things to many people; he is shaped by the variations among the systemic ways he is construed in the places of his experience. Some of these systems correspond to divisions between states; others do not. But the way in which modes of identification and rules of performance tend to be associated with particular political, cultural, or linguistic environments could suggest that the serial migrant is a rich collective of remnants of the wholes that make up ordinary social life. His life may appear as a creative amalgam of found objects or a bricolage of diverse cultural materials, but this does not solve the problem of developing a continuous self. The serial migrant's difficulty with difference is thus not simply that of being "other"; her problem with diversity is internal. The eternal addition of hyphenated identities is the question for her, not an answer. It is not a distance from origins and others but a potential for over-involvement with places and people that characterizes the serial migrant's dilemma."
(p.4-5)
"[M]any of the serial migrants I spoke with reported having had essentially the same dream, one in which all of their friends and relations we brought together, just once, in a single place and time."
(p.5-6)
"Each displacement serves as a reminder of those homes where one does not dwell at present."
(p.12)
"Most often migration is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal, a rite of passage that enables the migrant to occupy a new status as an immigrant. (...) when this rite of passage is reiterated, migration takes on certain ritual aspects. The reiteration of the migration story goes unnoticed, however; there is no public acknowledgement of this repetition or what it entails for the subject. [...] The move from a second homeland to a third country introduces and open-ended logic to the immigrant story and leads people to use borders as a way of structuring their life story."
(p.12)
"The immigrant may suffer from being perceived as a stranger, but the serial migrant struggles with an accumulation of ways of being "other."
(p.12)
"While history marches forward, the migrant might return to where she lived previously, allowing a measure of suppleness in a single life. But this flexibility comes at a price. One's life history may appear disconnected from the chronicle of any public world."
(p.13)
"[T]he sounds that fill the house are also the result of decisions about how language can be a strategic tool shaping the children's future. The particular mix of tongues creates a space of intimacy: it is a way of including each individual in the ongoing family story."
(p.33)
"Travelers may evade the settling action of a state, but for all of their desire and hunger and their ceaseless displacements, they do not transform anything, least of all themselves."
(p.39)
"All serial migrants move through immigration and then repeat the experience. Unlike the nomad, they rely on essential conceptions of culture or nationality or social position to punctuate their life narratives. They do not ignore borders but turn standard maps of the world into the grounds upon which to unfold themselves, taking possession of each new country by making it into a chapter of their lives."
(p.57)
"Serial migrants are not made of many places but of a shared experience: they have all moved out of immigration."
(p.57)
(The immigrant as a problematic figure, p.59)
"People who attempt a second migration are often those who have managed to come to terms with the challenges of settlement, those for whom a memory of their perseverance in fitting into the new environment has taken shape."
(p.66)
"When someone ventures beyond the endpoint of immigration, she shifts from a narrative in which she is pulled between two places, peoples, and cultures toward a situation in which the primacy of place, the warm embrace of community, and the received ideas of culture are subordinated to her life story."
(p.69)
"...[T]hey show little concern with the problems that shape others' ideas about immigration - 'feeling at home' or 'integrating' or 'assimilating.' Instead, they worry about a place becoming 'impossible' because of political or economic circumstances. They fret about feeling 'stuck' in any one place, for they seem to take it as a sign of a more general foreclosure of life's possibilities."
(p.70)
"A common manner of working with intervals defined by border crossings constitutes each serial migrant's experience. (...) What it does suggest, however, is that the reiteration of migration leads to particular possibilities for using political and cultural units to shape oneself. (...) Commonality is thus made of forms for problematizing the self rather than by occupying a similar position in a settled social structure or unconsciously transmitted culture."
(p.70-71)
"Turning homelands into periods of lives leads to a subordination of place to time."
(p.71)
(Repetition of migration doesn't change one's status in the eyes of the law: still an immigrant. Ritual goes unnoticed. p.73)
"But when what is conceived as a singular journey begins to become something of a habit, when the liminal temporality of the border crossing becomes a regularly practiced skill, when each homeland becomes one in a set that makes up a life, it becomes difficult to sort out the vast array of cultural elements that might be accumulated in the migrant's journey or to find the source of his foreignness. Which homeland might the serial migrant represent? Which culture might she call on to transform which community?"
(p.75)
"Serial migrants' life stories involve many of the same continuities and changes as those of people who never move at all, but their various countries act as signposts, offering them particular kinds of resources in establishing relationships among different versions of themselves, or modes of evaluating themselves."
(p.76)
"[T]he experience of a first migration can become like a territory of the imagination. When someone migrates a second time, or a third, what they leave behind is less their birthplace than immigration itself."
(p.77)
"Whether they embrace their subjection to the different definitions of who they are in various homelands or fight to dispel them as false, their struggle with the accumulation of truths about themselves according to successive social and political systems is part of the particular 'truth-generating process' that characterizes this form of life."
(p.80)
"From the immigrant's concern with the self as other, the serial migrant turns to the challenge of reconciling multiple ways of being another not only to others but to oneself.
(p.82)
"The specific lack of fit or ease of action she experiences in each location leads her to highlight some of the systematic differences among her homelands. One dramatizes these differences in order to sort oneself out. Self-reflection of this kind entails an assessment of the ways in which one's homelands offer systematic forms of identification, exclusion, possibilities for action or for relationships.
Collecting oneself in terms of systems joined by a life of progressive settlement encourages the subject to pay attention to himself both as a practicing representative of several homelands and as a free agent."
(p.90)
"If going home allows someone to 'recharge' or 'regain' himself, it is perhaps because returning to the point of departure allows for a clear and elegant closure of each chapter of a life. The birthplace is a kind of full stop; one uses it to punctuate the unfolding life. It is not simply a point from which to be born again; return holds out a promise of comparability."
(p.94)
"[S]erial migrants settle for so very long. They get mixed down in places others dream of escaping. To explain displacements by reference to an evolving career makes sense. But even to people who are open-minded and tolerant of difference when it comes to others in their midst, someone who makes an experiment of his life for no good reason, leaving one comfortable situation after another behind without a clear goal, must appear strange."
(p.104)
"People who have lived through several homelands might be seen not as freed up by mobility, but as over-socialized. Settling sequentially might be conceived as contributing to social reflexivity. One's story is recounted as a narrative of moving through contexts; there is an abstraction of national territories, not the self. Experience evolves through moves that are both a shedding of contexts and a gathering of them so as to bring something of each into the future. One develops a story by noting borders, unfolds a life location by following and recognizing continuities of relationships that span one's homelands."
(p.110)
"It may be annoying to be be mistaken for a 'regular' immigrant or categorized according to a variety of ethnic, racial, or sexual criteria, but repeating these encounters in each of one's homes can actually be productive in the process of self-definition through public action."
(p.111)
"Serial migrants have practical experience of how these different ways of coming together with others are encouraged or inhibited in different political landscapes. They notice how the present includes absences of the self they might welcome, tolerate, or reject. Yet they are less haunted by some framed, contained, total vision of the self in some former life, or perplexed by the task of pasting together the fragments of several such versions of who one is, than concerned with the ethical, aesthetic, or political valence of this selective invisibility."
(p.111)
"Even when she [the serial migrant] feels most at home, she is made of alternatives to the situation to which she feels most attuned."
(p.124)
"Seeing people we cared about together for the first time might be a joyful incarnation of the reverie of bringing all of our loved ones together. The music was a medium for reveling in a poetics of attachment that was very specific to each subject, not simply some generalized appeal to a global youth culture in the course of growing old. One does not rejoice in the generalities of being a cosmopolitan."
(p.129)
"The value of motion is not easy to measure; the loss of oneself that might accompany moving to yet one more place is easy to recognize."
(p.138)
(p.4-5)
"[M]any of the serial migrants I spoke with reported having had essentially the same dream, one in which all of their friends and relations we brought together, just once, in a single place and time."
(p.5-6)
"Each displacement serves as a reminder of those homes where one does not dwell at present."
(p.12)
"Most often migration is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal, a rite of passage that enables the migrant to occupy a new status as an immigrant. (...) when this rite of passage is reiterated, migration takes on certain ritual aspects. The reiteration of the migration story goes unnoticed, however; there is no public acknowledgement of this repetition or what it entails for the subject. [...] The move from a second homeland to a third country introduces and open-ended logic to the immigrant story and leads people to use borders as a way of structuring their life story."
(p.12)
"The immigrant may suffer from being perceived as a stranger, but the serial migrant struggles with an accumulation of ways of being "other."
(p.12)
"While history marches forward, the migrant might return to where she lived previously, allowing a measure of suppleness in a single life. But this flexibility comes at a price. One's life history may appear disconnected from the chronicle of any public world."
(p.13)
"[T]he sounds that fill the house are also the result of decisions about how language can be a strategic tool shaping the children's future. The particular mix of tongues creates a space of intimacy: it is a way of including each individual in the ongoing family story."
(p.33)
"Travelers may evade the settling action of a state, but for all of their desire and hunger and their ceaseless displacements, they do not transform anything, least of all themselves."
(p.39)
"All serial migrants move through immigration and then repeat the experience. Unlike the nomad, they rely on essential conceptions of culture or nationality or social position to punctuate their life narratives. They do not ignore borders but turn standard maps of the world into the grounds upon which to unfold themselves, taking possession of each new country by making it into a chapter of their lives."
(p.57)
"Serial migrants are not made of many places but of a shared experience: they have all moved out of immigration."
(p.57)
(The immigrant as a problematic figure, p.59)
"People who attempt a second migration are often those who have managed to come to terms with the challenges of settlement, those for whom a memory of their perseverance in fitting into the new environment has taken shape."
(p.66)
"When someone ventures beyond the endpoint of immigration, she shifts from a narrative in which she is pulled between two places, peoples, and cultures toward a situation in which the primacy of place, the warm embrace of community, and the received ideas of culture are subordinated to her life story."
(p.69)
"...[T]hey show little concern with the problems that shape others' ideas about immigration - 'feeling at home' or 'integrating' or 'assimilating.' Instead, they worry about a place becoming 'impossible' because of political or economic circumstances. They fret about feeling 'stuck' in any one place, for they seem to take it as a sign of a more general foreclosure of life's possibilities."
(p.70)
"A common manner of working with intervals defined by border crossings constitutes each serial migrant's experience. (...) What it does suggest, however, is that the reiteration of migration leads to particular possibilities for using political and cultural units to shape oneself. (...) Commonality is thus made of forms for problematizing the self rather than by occupying a similar position in a settled social structure or unconsciously transmitted culture."
(p.70-71)
"Turning homelands into periods of lives leads to a subordination of place to time."
(p.71)
(Repetition of migration doesn't change one's status in the eyes of the law: still an immigrant. Ritual goes unnoticed. p.73)
"But when what is conceived as a singular journey begins to become something of a habit, when the liminal temporality of the border crossing becomes a regularly practiced skill, when each homeland becomes one in a set that makes up a life, it becomes difficult to sort out the vast array of cultural elements that might be accumulated in the migrant's journey or to find the source of his foreignness. Which homeland might the serial migrant represent? Which culture might she call on to transform which community?"
(p.75)
"Serial migrants' life stories involve many of the same continuities and changes as those of people who never move at all, but their various countries act as signposts, offering them particular kinds of resources in establishing relationships among different versions of themselves, or modes of evaluating themselves."
(p.76)
"[T]he experience of a first migration can become like a territory of the imagination. When someone migrates a second time, or a third, what they leave behind is less their birthplace than immigration itself."
(p.77)
"Whether they embrace their subjection to the different definitions of who they are in various homelands or fight to dispel them as false, their struggle with the accumulation of truths about themselves according to successive social and political systems is part of the particular 'truth-generating process' that characterizes this form of life."
(p.80)
"From the immigrant's concern with the self as other, the serial migrant turns to the challenge of reconciling multiple ways of being another not only to others but to oneself.
(p.82)
"The specific lack of fit or ease of action she experiences in each location leads her to highlight some of the systematic differences among her homelands. One dramatizes these differences in order to sort oneself out. Self-reflection of this kind entails an assessment of the ways in which one's homelands offer systematic forms of identification, exclusion, possibilities for action or for relationships.
Collecting oneself in terms of systems joined by a life of progressive settlement encourages the subject to pay attention to himself both as a practicing representative of several homelands and as a free agent."
(p.90)
"If going home allows someone to 'recharge' or 'regain' himself, it is perhaps because returning to the point of departure allows for a clear and elegant closure of each chapter of a life. The birthplace is a kind of full stop; one uses it to punctuate the unfolding life. It is not simply a point from which to be born again; return holds out a promise of comparability."
(p.94)
"[S]erial migrants settle for so very long. They get mixed down in places others dream of escaping. To explain displacements by reference to an evolving career makes sense. But even to people who are open-minded and tolerant of difference when it comes to others in their midst, someone who makes an experiment of his life for no good reason, leaving one comfortable situation after another behind without a clear goal, must appear strange."
(p.104)
"People who have lived through several homelands might be seen not as freed up by mobility, but as over-socialized. Settling sequentially might be conceived as contributing to social reflexivity. One's story is recounted as a narrative of moving through contexts; there is an abstraction of national territories, not the self. Experience evolves through moves that are both a shedding of contexts and a gathering of them so as to bring something of each into the future. One develops a story by noting borders, unfolds a life location by following and recognizing continuities of relationships that span one's homelands."
(p.110)
"It may be annoying to be be mistaken for a 'regular' immigrant or categorized according to a variety of ethnic, racial, or sexual criteria, but repeating these encounters in each of one's homes can actually be productive in the process of self-definition through public action."
(p.111)
"Serial migrants have practical experience of how these different ways of coming together with others are encouraged or inhibited in different political landscapes. They notice how the present includes absences of the self they might welcome, tolerate, or reject. Yet they are less haunted by some framed, contained, total vision of the self in some former life, or perplexed by the task of pasting together the fragments of several such versions of who one is, than concerned with the ethical, aesthetic, or political valence of this selective invisibility."
(p.111)
"Even when she [the serial migrant] feels most at home, she is made of alternatives to the situation to which she feels most attuned."
(p.124)
"Seeing people we cared about together for the first time might be a joyful incarnation of the reverie of bringing all of our loved ones together. The music was a medium for reveling in a poetics of attachment that was very specific to each subject, not simply some generalized appeal to a global youth culture in the course of growing old. One does not rejoice in the generalities of being a cosmopolitan."
(p.129)
"The value of motion is not easy to measure; the loss of oneself that might accompany moving to yet one more place is easy to recognize."
(p.138)
January 28, 2014
Moving Matters is a poetic kind of academic literature. I saw Susan Ossman speak at the American Library in Paris and I was intrigued by the premise of her research: to better understand serial migrants, people who have lived in at least three countries for at least three years per country. The work is especially interesting if this pattern describes your life, or the life of someone you love. Ossman's writing style was heavy for me at first, with overly long sentences that turned in on themselves before resolving -> but I grew to like it.
December 30, 2019
An important topic (people who live in multiple countries throughout their adult life). I feel like this book only skims the surface and doesn't make any really strong arguments, but maybe that's not the point. It is possibly the first scholarly work on the topic of serial migrants and it is presented in a coherent, accessible fashion. I hope others will follow up on the topic with more specific angles to go beyond the necessarily introductory groundwork laid by Ossman in this book. I recommend it to anyone interested in modern-day nomads and why people travel.
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February 28, 2014304.8 O84 2013
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews