Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 645)

Anthropologists have increasingly noted that immigrants live their lives across borders and maintain close ties to home, even when their countries of origin and settlement are geographically distant. Forging links at a variety of levels--familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political--these immigrants maintain a high level of involvement in both their home and host societies. To describe this new way of life, some social scientists have begun to use the term "transnational." In this volume, a noted group of researchers explores the implications of this new global phenomenon.The authors begin by linking the emergence of transnationalism to changes in the global economy, especially the extensive penetration of capital into the third world. They suggest the transnational lives of contemporary migrants call into question the bounded conceptualizations of race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism which pervade both social science and popular thinking. They then discuss the construction of migrants' transnational identity, exploring transformations of class practices and racial categories, as well the restructuring of women's and men's lives in the deployment of cultural capital. Finally, they examine the relationship between transnational populations and nation states as well as the challenge posed to nationalism by the existence of these transnational populations.Contributors: Lambros Comitas, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, Cristina Blanc-Szanton, Roger Rouse, Johanna Lessinger, Eurenia Georges, Carolle Charles, Aihwa Ong, Bela Feldman-Bianco, Rosina Wiltshire, Karen Richman, Barry Goldberg, Delmos Jones, Palmira Rios, Gerald Sider, Constance R. Sutton, and Antonio Lauria-Perricelli.