Aida Makoto: Notes from an Apathetic Continent

Following the huge success of Murakami Takashi’s (b. 1962) Superat movement, Japanese contemporary art since 2000 has been mostly represented internationally by Murakami and artists associated with his style, such as Nara Yoshitomo (b. 1959) (see Chapter 38). The dominant fame of Super-at art poses an issue about the rival claims of Aida Makoto (b. 1965) who, in Japan, is often mentioned as the most representative artist to emerge during the 1990s. Edgy, erratic, and extraordinarily diverse in his production, Aida is often seen by even his most fervent admirers as an artist for domestic consumption only, too complex in his self-referential Japaneseness (Yamashita 2012). Yet his oeuvre deserves close attention, as it taps into live-often quite unpalatable-aspects of Japanese popular culture, articulating ambiguous commentary on attitudes, events, and politics well beyond Superat’s more commercial and exportable style

The limits of liberalism, and the limits of critique

Book Review Symposium on Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Contro

Intégration: 12 propositions (Integration: 12 Proposals)

Developing the critique of notions of the “integration of immigrants”, twelve propositions are advanced to diagnose the methodological nationalism of mainstream approaches. The concept of “integration” contains assumptions about the nature and functioning of modern society which, in a post-industrial and post-colonial context, are falsely trapped within the normative bounds of thinking for the nation-state. An alternate empirical operationalisation is suggested that would render traditional types of assimilation and integration research obsolete

Brexit: a requiem for the post-national society?

The 'fourth freedom' of freedom of movement of persons – somewhat misleadingly labelled 'European citizenship' – lay at the normative heart of the European project. Although sceptics have often suggested it was part of the building of a European fortress, or even a last gasp of elite European colonial privilege, the essential point of EU freedom of movement was its revolutionary introduction of a regionally expansive non-discrimination by nationality, going well beyond established abstract notions of 'personhood' and human rights on which other global egalitarian movements depend. For sure, it had been battered by roll back in national courts, suspension of Schengen, and new external borderings, well before the Brexit vote. Yet the practice of the fourth freedom in terms of everyday transactions and interactions struck at the heart of the core of the modern Hobbesian nation state: its sovereignty to decide on the boundaries of its own, increasingly de-territorialised population, which was also its power to shore up the most potent source of global inequalities – the birthright lottery which protects the 'wealth of nations' and the privileges of democratic 'peoples' from the unbounded effects of de-territorialised mobilities. As we are also seeing – and hearing among many ostensibly progressive academic voices – the putatively egalitarian voice of people's democracy can be used to further bolster the shrinkage of moral community within the nation state. The essay takes upon itself to evaluate what is being lost normatively in terms of the return of the national – methodologically as much as politically – as the slow motion car crash of Brexit happens and after it takes place

Integration: twelve propositions after Schinkel

By way of a commentary on Willem Schinkel’s ‘Against “immigrant integration”: For an end to neocolonial knowledge production’ in this volume, I propose twelve propositions in order to rethink the academic use of the concept “integration” in contemporary migration studies. The notion of “immigration integration” is deeply embedded in a methodological nationalism found throughout mainstream research and policy making on “immigration” that reproduces a colonial, nation-state centred vision of society sustained by global inequalities. The article broadly shares Schinkel’s arguments, while suggesting specific operationalisations which could advance a more autonomous social scientific understanding of how the categorisation of international migration and mobilities is used by nation-states to sustain particular orders and hierarchies of social power

The fourth freedom: Theories of migration and mobilities in 'neo-liberal' Europe

The article challenges the orthodoxy of current critical readings of the European crisis that discuss the failings of the EU in terms of the triumph of ‘neo-liberalism’. Defending instead a liberal view on international migration, which stresses the potentially positive economic, political and cultural benefits of market-driven forces enabling movements across borders, it details the various ways in which European regional integration has enabled the withdrawal of state control and restriction on certain forms of external and internal migration. This implementation of liberal ideas on the freedom of movement of persons has largely been of benefit to migrants, and both receiving and sending societies alike. These ideas are now threatened by democratic retrenchment. It is Britain, often held up as a negative example of ‘neo-liberalism’, which has proven to be the member state that most fulfils the EU’s core adherence to principles of mobile, open, nondiscriminatory labour markets. On this question, and despite its current antiimmigration politics, it offers a positive example of how Europe as a whole could benefit from more not less liberalization

EVERYDAY EUROPE AND TOMORROW’S EUROPE: is there a future for Social Transnationalism? A response to readers.

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Commentary: A Citizenship without Social Rights? EU Freedom of Movement and Changing Access to Welfare Rights

Despite not being grounded in the classic nation‐building dynamic of citizenship identified by T.H.Marshall, EU citizenship offers social rights and welfare protection to non‐nationals on a principle of non‐discrimination. We narrate a creeping process of retrenchment by which European member states have used policy strategies to undermine this principle, by transforming the unique idea of free movement of persons in the EU to just another form of “immigration” which can be subject to selectivity and exclusion. As Europe’s multiple recent crises have unfolded, political resources were found to effect this transformation tangibly via reshaping access to welfare for EU citizens. Focusing on the cases of the UK and Germany, we discuss how, despite their distinctive welfare regimes and labour market systems, these two countries have led the way toward a dismantling of non‐discrimination for EU citizens and effectively the end of the anomalous ‘post‐national’ dimension of European citizenship

EU children in Brexit Britain: re‐negotiating belonging in nationalist times

© 2019 The Authors. International Migration © 2019 IOM This article contributes to debates on identification, home and belonging by focusing on EU children in Brexit times. The article combines attention to the emotional and affective side of integration with a focus on the effects of the discursive practices of the state on these processes. The article explores how Italian children and their parents navigate the increasingly neo-assimilationist pressures in Britain. Specifically, it looks at children's ways of accommodating their parents’ values of mobility, multilingualism and transnationalism with the revived nationalist logic now dominant. The article argues for renewed scrutiny into the role of public discourses on migrants’ experiences, which illuminate the redrawing of the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion at moments of crisis