Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations

Reviews / Votes

"In modernity, from the transatlantic slave trade to today, the 'migration' of Black people is incommensurable with that of others. As Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations argues and demonstrates, reckoning with antiblackness and Blackness fundamentally destabilizes conventional histories, categories, meanings, and politics. Wide-ranging yet penetrating, the book's theoretical, empirical, and literary analyses pose a bracing challenge to all academics, policymakers, and activists concerned with mobility."-Moon-Kie Jung, Coeditor of Antiblackness and author of Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present "The editors and contributors to this volume give migration studies a much-needed shake-up. Theoretically rich and analytically tight, its wide-ranging chapters probe and expose the unacknowledged extent to which antiblackness shapes the way we think and talk about the movement of people. Rather than just implicating the usual suspects, Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations calls on well-meaning humanitarians-scholars, activists, and the like-to wipe the smudge of antiblackness from our lens. This is a bold and important book."-Jamie Longazel, Associate Professor of Law and Society at John Jay College, affiliated faculty in the International Migration Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and coeditor of Migration and Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas (Temple) "This critique of antiblackness upends existing assumptions and presents important new directions for scholarly inquiry in immigration law.... The book offers profound resistance to what has been labeled the 'mobility bias' and the linear progress narrative of migration. It is also a forceful reminder of the importance of interrogating silences around blackness and mobility, and of the powerful fruits of that inquiry."-Jotwell