1st Edition
Translocational Belongings Intersectional Dilemmas and Social Inequalities
This book explores the multiform and shifting location of borders and boundaries in social life, related to difference and belonging. It contributes to understanding categories of difference as a building block for forms of belonging and inequality in the world today and as underpinning modern capitalist societies and their forms of governance. Reflecting on the ways in which we might theorise the connections between different social divisions and identities, a translocational lens for addressing modalities of power is developed, stressing relationality, the spatio-temporal and the processual in social relations. The book is organised around contemporary dilemmas of difference and inequality, relating to fixities and fluidities in social life and to current developments in the areas of racialisation, migration, gender, sexuality and class relations, and in theorising the articulations of gender, class and ethnic hierarchies. Rejecting the view that gender, ethnicity, race, class or the more specific categories of migrants or refugees pertain to social groups with certain fixed characteristics, they are treated as interconnected and interdependent places within a landscape of inequality making. This innovative and groundbreaking book constitutes a significant contribution to scholarship on intersectionality.
Prolegomena: a personal borderscape
1. Introduction. Marking places: dilemmas of difference and inequality
2. Branding places: dilemmas of ordering
3. Assembling places: dilemmas of articulation
4. Hierarchising places: dilemmas of class and stratification
5. Transgressing places: dilemmas of gender, intimacy and violence
6. Territorialising places: dilemmas of b/ordering the nation
7. Epilogos. Transforming places: towards a politics of translocation
Biography
Floya Anthias is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Social Justice at Roehampton University, London, UK. Amongst other works, she is the author of Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Migration, the co-author of Racialised Boundaries and the co-editor of Woman, Nation, State; Into the Margins: Migration and Exclusion in Southern Europe; Gender and Migration in Southern Europe: Women on the Move; Paradoxes of Integration: Female Migrants in Europe; Rethinking Anti-racisms: From Theory to Practice; Contesting Integration, Engendering Migration and Work and the Challenges of Belonging.
'With a focus on processes of power underpinning ‘difference’ across such axes as class, race and gender, this text provides a sustained critique of essentialist thinking. Its innovative reworking of the concepts of intersectionality, stratification, and political economy is likely to set new agendas on addressing questions of inequality. Incisive theoretical and political analysis at its best.' - Avtar Brah, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London
'Floya Anthias offers a nuanced and astute account of the changing forms of social inequality in the contemporary global environment. She challenges simplistic accounts of belonging and identity and seeks to show that we need to move beyond dominant paradigms and perspectives.' - John Solomos, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK
'This book is a masterpiece: with a translocational lens, Anthias focuses on insights from studies on intersectionality, bordering and belonging, migration, nationalism, racism, violence, intimacy and social class and demonstrates how they are entangled in complicated ways. Yet, she is not satisfied with depicting dilemmas but instead provides heuristic tools and theoretical frames for their adequate analysis.' - Helma Lutz, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, co-author of Gender and Migration: Transnational and Intersectional Prospects
"Translocational Belongings, introduced by incisive personal memories of growing up in an activist migrant family, captures the human condition of the migrant, offering a distinctive account of border crossings, in the real world and in sociological theory. Scrutinising intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, class, ascribed cultural differences and social inequalities, the author grounds new horizons for solidarity politics beyond fixed belonging." - Aleksandra Ålund, Professor Emerita, Linköping University, Sweden
'This tour de force considers key debates in sociological and social theory engaging with gender, ethnicity, racialization, and class locations, borders and boundaries, difference and belongings. It transcends disciplinary boundaries speaking also to philosophy and political theory [...]. A fascinating theoretical re-reading, extending and rethinking of feminism, race/ethnicity and class theory. It provides fresh and insightful contributions on the potential and shortcomings of class and stratification theorisations since Marx’s Capital and the revived interest in class via the works of Bourdieu, Foucault, Tilly, Agamben.' - Nicos Trimikliniotis, Ethnic and Racial Studies
'The power of Anthias’ argument is threefold. Not only does she go beyond the limits of methodological nationalism and synthesise the transnational scale into her theory, making visible how scale is an important aspect of the contradictory nature of translocal belonging and difference. Her analysis and political perspective also highlight the notion of agency that is possible in relation to actors’ contradictory belonging. Contrary to Patricia Hill Collins or Nira Yuval-Davis, Anthias argues that identity and deconstructive solidarity politics will possibly both play a role in political activism because they are produced by intersections of categories of difference. In addition, she combines economic and cultural dimensions in her analysis in order to address a major lacuna in current sociological attempts to investigate how power works within the state of the neoliberal world.' - Jana Schäfer and Anna Amelina, European Journal of Women's Studies
'Anthias points to the limitations of dialogical politics, favouring instead the importance of ‘asserting the right to have rights…. that is, claiming the rights to difference and the right to be equal, despite difference’ (p. 182). This is a text brimming with incisive theoretical and political analysis at its best.' - Avtar Brah, European Journal of Women's Studies
‘In her much-praised and discussed book, Floya Anthias summarizes her decades-long work on translocational positionality, refining and operationalizing the traveling concept of intersectionality by weaving together a coherent theoretical framework of "translocation belongings." Her book is an essential contribution to intersectionality, identity, difference, bordering, and belonging studies. …Combined with the goals of resource allocation and ensuing struggles and also agency and positionalities of social actors, the framework of translocational belongings provides a rich theoretical tool for understanding inequality.’ - Tanzilya Oren, Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work
‘The book represents an outstanding contribution in addressing issues around gender, place and culture based on the re-examination of long-standing debates in social theory around concepts of equality/difference, racialization processes, feminism and social justice. It does not only provide for an acute theoretical analysis of those themes beyond simplistic and essentialist arguments, but it also provides heuristic tools for investigation including at policy level. It also presents a much needed analysis on how scholarship on intersectionality has developed in recent years and on the risks that it may be disjoined from the struggle for social justice while providing for sophisticated conceptual tools in this direction.’ – Erika Bernacchi, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
‘This book takes us on a complex journey of understanding of social boundaries, differences, and hierarchies that manifest through different forms of inequality and oppression in society. It provides us with deep insights into migrants'/migrant-citizens’ multi-level dilemmas around identity and belonging as well as shows us how by adopting a translocational intersectional framework, we can, to some extent, overcome the analytical impasse of intersectionality.’ - Sajia Ferdous, Gender, Work & Organization
