Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In contrast to transnational corporate capitalism, migrant transnationalism
is regarded as 'transnationalism from below' (Portes et al. 1999), a term dis-
closing two emphases. First, it implies a level of active agency among migrants,
in contrast to the economistic language of labour flows that has prevailed in
the globalisation and world cities literature (Smith 2001). Second, there is
also a sense of migrants as transgressors, undercutting the authority of the
state in their movements and flexible use of citizenship (Ong 1999), or their
participation in cross-border non-governmental organisations that operate as
transnational advocacy groups (Smith 2001). Indeed some cultural theorists
have romanticized the hybrid identities of migrants for providing a cosmo-
politan in-betweenness with a superior position for adapting to a globalizing
world, though Mitchell (1997a) has deflated some of the excess from this
discourse on hybridity.
While transnationalism presents a fundamentally geographical imagina-
tion of here, there, across, and between, the use of spatial terms, such as
social field or social space, transnational circuits or cross-border spatialities,
has often been metaphorical and loosely defined. An important theoretical
objective of this topic is to carry forward the beginnings made by geogra-
phers in burrowing more fully into the concrete places and imagined spaces
of transnationalism.
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This specificity is all the more necessary because glo-
balization theory, in presenting an alternate 'transnationalism from above',
commonly evokes abstract spaces of flows and networks that comprise
'a system of variable geometry and dematerialized geography' (Castells
1996: 359). Such abstract spaces, in Castells' influential thinking, have pre-
vailed over the empirical 'spaces of places' that include particular nations,
cities and neighbourhoods (Murray 2006). Transnationalism from above
alludes to electronic communications and dramatic real decreases in trans-
portation costs that have achieved time-space compression in a shrinking
world, minimizing it seems the effects of distance and the play of geography
for global economic actors. The footloose transnational corporation has also
benefited from the growth of free trade and the reduction of national pro-
tectionism to rove globally. The transgression of borders means the weaken-
ing of the nation state, encouraging a post-national argument wishing 'to
make a decisive break with state-centrism' (Sklair 2001:16).
All of this leads to a distinctive conceptual geography. As Michelle Huang
(2004: 2) has observed, 'The utopia of globalization is a flexible, fluid and
mobile space, an open space that knows no boundaries.' She cites Henri
Lefebvre's (1979: 293) characterization of space under capitalism: 'Capitalist
and neocapitalist space is a space of quantification and growing homogene-
ity, a merchandized space where all the elements are exchangeable and thus
interchangeable… Economic space and political space thus converge toward
the elimination of all differences.' In this scenario we approach political
economy's international level playing field, the 'flat world' thesis popularized
