Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home

by Nina Glick Schiller, Georges Eugene Fouron

Combining history, autobiography, and ethnography, Georges Woke Up Laughing provides a portrait of the Haitian experience of migration to the United States that illuminates the phenomenon of long-distance nationalism, the voicelessness of certain citizens, and the impotency of government in an increasingly globalized world. By presenting lively ruminations on his life as a Haitian immigrant, Georges Eugene Fouron—along with Nina Glick Schiller, whose own family history stems from Poland and Russia—captures the daily struggles for survival that bind together those who emigrate and those who stay behind.
According to a long-standing myth, once emigrants leave their homelands—particularly if they emigrate to the United States—they sever old nationalistic ties, assimilate, and happily live the American dream. In fact, many migrants remain intimately and integrally tied to their ancestral homeland, sometimes even after they become legal citizens of another country. In Georges Woke Up Laughing the authors reveal the realities and dilemmas that underlie the efforts of long-distance nationalists to redefine citizenship, race, nationality, and political loyalty. Through discussions of the history and economics that link the United States with countries around the world, Glick Schiller and Fouron highlight the forces that shape emigrants’ experiences of government and citizenship and create a transborder citizenry. Arguing that governments of many countries today have almost no power to implement policies that will assist their citizens, the authors provide insights into the ongoing sociological, anthropological, and political effects of globalization.
Georges Woke up Laughing will entertain and inform those who are concerned about the rights of people and the power of their governments within the globalizing economy. “In my dream I was young and in Haiti with my friends, laughing, joking, and having a wonderful time. I was walking down the main street of my hometown of Aux Cayes. The sun was shining, the streets were clean, and the port was bustling with ships. At first I was laughing because of the feeling of happiness that stayed with me, even after I woke up. I tried to explain my wonderful dream to my wife, Rolande. Then I laughed again but this time not from joy. I had been dreaming of a Haiti that never was.”—from Georges Woke Up Laughing

Genres: School, Anthropology

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 2001

Reviews

[Ailecia Alabama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Eugene Fouron’s book Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home is most concerned with using their concept of long-distance nationalism to complicate traditional views of nationalism, especially as it is regarded in immigrant communities in the United States. Using the example of Haiti, Schiller and Fouron look at the transnational citizenship of Haitian immigrants to the United States and the ways in which they participate in both the United States and Haiti. The authors focus on the story of the transmigrants, who are defined as people who live across borders (3) and participate in both their country of origin and country of residence, in order to force “scholars and political leaders to begin to re-conceptualize the nature of immigration” (3) and the nature of nationalism.
The authors take a unique approach in crafting their interpretation of the Haitian transmigrant and the familial networks they support in Haiti. Georges Eugene Fouron, as a Haitain transmigrant, provides access to stories that I believe Nina Glick Schiller would not have access to on her own. This relationship, though more egalitarian, reminds me in some ways of Karen McCarthy Brown’s relationship to Mama Lola, the vodou priestess who was the primary subject of her ethnography Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. (Interestingly enough, McCarthy Brown writes the book jacket review for Georges Woke Up Laughing.) I was particularly interested in the ways in which the authors used interview text and their own responses within their analysis of the transmigrant and Haitian experiences. This added to the conversational tone of the work, and therefore, disrupts the scholar-subject hierarchy found in so much ethnographic work.
Much of their work is focused on the kinship ties between transmigrants and people living in Haiti, which is sustained through gift giving, commission, remittance, and other fiscal support between Haitians living in the United States and Haitians living in Haiti. They place this story within a historical understanding of Haiti that brought us to a place in the 1990’s where Haitian migrants were able to participate in nation-building projects for Haiti instead of being viewed as traitors who abandoned their nation. They also place their analysis within the complicated reality of neoliberal globalization and the way that the world economic system has negatively impacted the ability of Haiti to be more self-sufficient. But without these tensions, the authors would not be able to tell the complicated story of subaltern transmigrants who develop self-esteem and feel like people of importance via their gift-giving and fiscal support to their home countries from the position of living life as a member of a racially oppressed group in the United States. This complicated identity status for Haitians who are also U.S. citizens allows us to complicate traditional notions of immigration that cast immigrants to the United States as completely assimilated into the great melting pot of ethnicities. The writers place this within the current cultural and political climate of America that currently focuses more on multiculturalism and cultural pluralism (114).

[Julia Hahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting in the fact that through Georges life I discovered the familial ties that hold transmigrants to their homeland of Haiti.