SEMINAR PLAN

Race, Precarity, and Privilege: Migration in a Global Context is an intensive, inclusive, and interdisciplinary seminar hosted by the Global Migration Initiative launched at UC Santa Barbara in 2019. Through this Sawyer Seminar, we hope to build, expand, and strengthen the intellectual community of scholars working across a range of regions, all devoted to the study of global migration. The structure of our Sawyer Seminar foregrounds the structural, cultural, racial, and ethnic dimensions of global migration. Our seminar will bring authors, visual artists, humanities scholars, social scientists, and public intellectuals together to consider the ways that white supremacy and the legacies of colonialism and capitalism have established racial and ethnic classification schemes that continue to shape the global immigration experience.  The post-colonial global migration experience cannot be understood without a nuanced analysis of aesthetics, cultural representations, transnational labor regimes, late capitalism, and ongoing proxy wars in Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Europe. 

We selected our three sites -- California, South Korea, and France -- because they illuminate the post-colonial migration experience in distinctive ways. For example, modern California history began with the arrival of European settlers who imposed white supremacy in state law, while also shaping federal law in clear white supremacist directions. California representatives pushed for the Chinese Exclusion Acts in Congress, and they approved the Alien Land Laws to restrict property ownership against “aliens ineligible for citizenship.”  By 1970, however, all of these rules had been repealed, and California now draws an incredibly diverse array of immigrants from all over the world, from some of the most affluent and skilled migrants from Asia, Africa, and Europe to the poorest people in the Americas.  In France, the descendants of France’s former colonies have migrated in significant numbers, they now form a very large diasporic population throughout that country, and right-wing politicians have deplored their arrival.  Some of the most hateful, racist right-wing political parties in Europe are now French, and in this way, France offers an illuminating site to study a European nation and its post-colonial migration patterns.  In South Korea, we can see Western “neo-colonialism”-- the United States does not hold South Korea as a colony, but the presence of the Americans since 1945 has been gigantic and unmistakable.  In its laws, particularly around immigration and citizenship, and in its civil society, especially among its growing population of Christians, South Korea’s recent history suggests that white supremacist practices and forms of exclusion can appear in key sites in East Asia.   

There is a need for more interdisciplinary dialogue and discussion of global migration because this interdisciplinary field remains, to a large extent, segregated by area and significant debates occurring within area studies such as South Asian Studies or European Studies or Latin American Studies do not travel across ‘regions’ or disciplines. There are patterned forms of migration that involve post-colonial legacies - such as who is likely to hold dual passports or the most valuable passports in terms of transnational mobility (see Andrucki 2013; van Houten, 2013;  Twine & Gardener, 2013).