Residence Roma - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 216

is most useful for reading the senegalese dwelling practices devised at Residence
Roma, distinct cultural forms, set against each other dialogically, intermix but
do not merge.
Rather than hybridity understood as a condition of radical disjunction and
unstable in-between-ness, my idea of hybridity shares common elements with
a definition of transnational space as a process of deterritorialization of people
and goods but also as a reterritorialization in another place. emphasis on the
specific context of reterritorialization shows that globalization does not neces-
sarily entail the disappearance of place; rather, it is very much a process that
involves locality and new ways of settlement (Jackson et al. 2004). transnational
migration studies analyze migrations as part of the broader phenomenon of glo-
balization: “The recent use of the adjective 'transnational' in the social sciences
and cultural studies draws together the various meanings of the word so that the
restructuring of capital globally is seen as linked to the diminished significance
of national boundaries in the production and distribution of objects, ideas, and
people” (schiller et al. 1995, 49). Contrary to previous views of past immigra-
tions, in which immigrant settlements were often understood as an incorpora-
tion and transformation of immigrants and their communities, followed by a
decline of the immigrant's ethnicity and cultural distinctiveness, transnational
migration studies allow for a new understanding of the immigrant's continuous
and uninterrupted involvement in cross-border activities and exchange between
the country of origin and the host country. These contacts, which often involve
family networks, extend to the larger sphere of economic, political, and social
relations (Gowricharn 2009).
multiple factors affect contemporary transnational migrations, including
the new technologies of transportation and communication facilitating sus-
tained and multiple contacts with the countries of origin. transnational affilia-
tions also represent “a response to the fact that in a global economy contempo-
rary migrants have found full incorporation in the countries within which they
resettle either not possible or not desirable” (schiller et al. 1995, 52). The creation
of sustained and constant links with the homeland implies the transformation of
the cultural forms of the country of origin and a reelaboration of the idea of inte-
gration within the destination country. in a similar vein, the algerian sociologist
abdemalek sayad has repeatedly warned against the temptations of looking at
migrations from the ethnocentric and partial perspective of the host country.
a migrant is, in his view, always caught in the dialectical relationship between
departure and arrival: emigration and immigration are complementary aspects
of the same phenomenon and cannot be separated. his analysis, based on the al-
gerian experience in france, sheds light on the complex layering of motivations
and multiple influences implicated in the process of adaptation to the destination
country. sayad's critique of the practice of “integration” stems from his realiza-
tion that, behind this politically coded word, lay the power relations that often