Abstract
This chapter is an exploration into what I call the migration imaginary and how it informs practices of inclusion and exclusion. Migration has become a key issue at the heart of political debates in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Europe (and elsewhere). In this chapter, I consider how idea(l)s of national identity, cohesion, and futures are shaped through migration imaginaries.
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Notes
- 1.
I have used “horizons” elsewhere (2000) to capture the grounded and imagined aspects of imagining practices. My thinking is still developing on the matter and here, I return to the notion of imaginaries drawing on Jackie Stacey’s use of the term in its psychoanalytic tradition. As she states, “While the imagination [in its philosophical and aesthetic traditions] refers to patterns of emotional and artistic connectivity, the imaginary refers to the fears and desires organizing a particular repertoire of fantasies that have a deeper, often indirect, set of cultural investments and associations” (2010: 11).
- 2.
The ideology of British federalism is founded on particularism rather than the universalism of French republicanism. France insists on the assimilation to a singular culture, and the embrace of a shared language, history, and political ideology. In Britain “there is no expectation that immigrants should ever become good Englishmen, Scotsmen or Welshmen, although they are expected to be loyal and law-abiding citizens. The differences of immigrants are therefore taken for granted, and the main concern is to make sure that immigrants cause as little damage as possible to the ‘British way of life’” (Melotti 1997: 79).
- 3.
The Wellcome Trust is the largest funding body for medical research in Britain. It is also associated with the international pharmaceutical company Wellcome.
- 4.
People of the British Isles website http://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/ [last accessed 19/04/2010].
- 5.
My thanks to Cynthia Weber for drawing my attention to this point.
- 6.
To get a flavour of the documentary, see http://www.wagtv.com/programme/Face-Of-Britain-303.html?filter=type_Series (last accessed 09.02.2012).
- 7.
http://www.conseil-etat.fr/ce/jurispd/index_ac_ld0820.shtml [accessed 24/07/08].
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Fortier, AM. (2012). The Migration Imaginary and the Politics of Personhood. In: Messer, M., Schroeder, R., Wodak, R. (eds) Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0950-2_3
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