When American occupiers broke up the Japanese empire in the wake of World War II, approximately 1.7 million people departed Japan for various parts of Northeast Asia. The mass exodus was spearheaded ...by Koreans, many of whom chartered small fishing vessels to ship them back quickly to their liberated homeland, while wartime devastation hampered the return of Okinawans to their archipelago. By the time the officially endorsed repatriation program was inaugurated, however, increasing numbers of people began escaping US military rule in southern Korea and the Ryukyu Islands by smuggling themselves into occupied Japan.
How and why did these migrants move across borderlines newly drawn by American occupiers in the region? Their personal stories reveal what liberation and defeat meant to displaced peoples, and how the compounding challenges of their resettlement led to the expansion of smuggling networks. The consequent surge of unauthorized border-crossings spurred occupation authorities into forging exclusionary migration regulations. Through a comparative study of Korean and Okinawan experiences during the postwar occupation era, Matthew Augustine explores how their migrations shaped, and were in turn shaped by, American policies throughout the region.
This is the first comprehensive study of the dynamic and often contentious relationship between migrations and border controls in US-occupied Japan, Korea, and the Ryukyus, examining the American interlude in Northeast Asia as a closely integrated, regional history. The extent of cooperation and coordination among American occupiers, as well as their competing jurisdictions and interests, determined the mixed outcome of using repatriation and deportation as expedient tools for dismantling the Japanese empire. The heightening Cold War and deepening collaboration between the occupiers and local authorities coproduced stringent migration laws, generating new problems of how to distinguish South Koreans from North Koreans and “Ryukyuans” from Japanese. In occupied Japan, fears of communist infiltration and subversion merged with deep-seated discrimination, transforming erstwhile colonial subjects into “aliens” and “illegal aliens.” This transregional history explains the process by which Northeast Asia and its respective populations were remade between the fall of the Japanese empire and the rise of American hegemony.
"This collection brings together a variety of anthropological, historical and sociological case studies from Central Asia and the Caucasus to examine the concept of translocality. The chapters ...scrutinize the capacity of translocality to describe, in new ways, the multiple mobilities, exchange practices and globalizing processes that link places, people and institutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus with others in Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Illuminating translocality as a productive concept for studying cross‐regional connectivities and networks, this volume is an important contribution to a lively field of academic discourse. Following new directions in Area Studies, the chapters aim to overcome ‘territorial containers’ such as the nation‐state or local community, and instead emphasize the significance of processes of translation and negotiation for understanding how meaningful localities emerge beyond conventional boundaries. Structured by the four themes ‘crossing boundaries’, ‘travelling ideas’, ‘social and economic movements’ and ‘pious endeavours’, this volume proposes three conceptual approaches to translocality: firstly, to trace how it is embodied, narrated, virtualized or institutionalized within or in reference to physical or imagined localities; secondly, to understand locality as a relational concept rather than a geographically bounded unit; and thirdly, to consider cross‐border traders, travelling students, business people and refugees as examples of non-elite mobilities that provide alternative ways to think about what ‘global’ means today. Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas will be of interest to students and scholars of the anthropology, history and sociology of Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as for those interested in new approaches to Area Studies."
This article examines how bordering practices can play significant roles in liberating black diaspora formation from racial and historical positionings. Through the use of Brent Hayes Edwards' ...concept of décalage, I propose that the space of black immigrant can be negotiated, and when doing so, negotiation allows for new forms of belongings to be produced in transnational contexts. In understanding the construction of African diaspora identity as the production of décalage, I argue that The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears sunders its characters into individuals in a way they reshape their identities together through delaying their belonging in time and shifting positions in space. The article thus concludes that décalage is rooted in the borderscapes of black and white communities, as a space that helps characters generating new transnational identities.
The Border and Its Bodies examines the impact of migration from Central America and México to the United States on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. It explores the terrible toll ...migration takes on the bodies of migrants—those who cross the border and those who die along the way—and discusses the treatment of those bodies after their remains are discovered in the desert.
The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in this volume explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals, how that embodiment transcends the crossing of the line, and how it varies depending on subject positions and identity categories, especially race, class, and citizenship.
Timely and wide-ranging, this book brings into focus the traumatic and real impact the border can have on those who attempt to cross it, and it offers new perspectives on the effects for rural communities and ranchers. An intimate and profoundly human look at migration, The Border and Its Bodies reminds us of the elemental fact that the border touches us all.
This article arises from a collaboration between an art historian and a curator in forming an exhibition of work by artist Sally Madge, drawn from a long-accumulated collection of artworks and ...related materials existing in her basement studio, thereafter housed in a storage container on the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne in the North of England. The text is located within evolving discourses on both the curatorial and educational 'turns' in exhibition making and knowledge production, and perceptions of the gallery as a place of shared social and self-determined generative engagement. Emphasising relational interconnectedness, the curation underlines a border-crossing collapsing of categories and hierarchies. The nature of Madge's own practice and the liminal sites she worked in throughout her life reflect a parallel artistic, political and ecological concern for creatively crossing and defying borders and boundaries. What emerges is a dialogue between artist, curator and art historian on questions of transformation and re-representation through the relations between site, studio, archive and gallery.
This book examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has engendered a new and challenging environment in which borders drawn around people, places, and social structures have hardened and new ones have ...emerged. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, borders closed or became unwelcoming at the international, national, sub-national, and local levels. Debate persists as to whether those countries and territories that tightly managed their borders, like New Zealand, Australia, or Hong Kong, got it ‘right’ compared to those that did not. Without doubt, a majority of those who suffered and died throughout the pandemic have been those from vulnerable populations. Yet on the other hand, efforts taken to manage the spread of the disease, such as through border management, have also disproportionately affected those who are most vulnerable. How then is the right balance to be struck, acknowledging, too, the economic and other imperatives that may dissuade governments from taking public health steps? This book considers how international organizations, countries, and institutions within those countries should conceive of, and manage, borders as the world continues to struggle with COVID-19 and prepares for the next pandemic. Engaging a range of international, and sub-national, examples, the book thematizes the main issues at stake in the control and management of borders in the interests of public health. This book will be of considerable interest to academics in the fields of health law, anthropology, economics, history, medicine, public health, and political science, as well as policymakers and public health planners at national and sub-national levels.
More than a year after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, the U.S.A. and Mexico rank first and fourth, respectively, with regard to the number of deaths. From March ...2020, nonessential travelers were not allowed to cross the border into the U.S.A. from Mexico via international land ports of entry, which resulted in a more than 50% decrease in the number of people crossing the border. However, border communities still face a higher number of cases and faster community spread compared with those without international land ports of entry. This paper established an econometric model to understand the effects of cross-border mobility and other socioeconomic parameters on the speed of spread. The model was developed at the U.S. county level using data from all 3,141 counties in the U.S.A. Additionally, a follow-up U.S. county comparative analysis was developed to examine the significance of having a border crossing between the U.S.A. and Mexico for U.S. counties. The findings of the analysis revealed that the variables having a significant effect are as follows: population density; number of people per household; population in the 15–65 age group; median household income; mask use; number of visits to transit stations; number of visits to workplace; overall mobility; and having a border crossing to Mexico within county limits. The comparative analysis found that U.S. counties with border crossings have an average of 123 cases per 1,000 population whereas their counterparts without border crossings only have 90 cases per 1,000 population.
•Tourists' border-crossing experiences are conceptualised as a critical gap.•Borders are the intersection of liminal, ethical, and othering processes.•The under-represented voices of non-Western ...tourists should be heard.•More humane and dignified approaches to border policing should be adopted.
This article studies the life-stories and identity narratives of Turks of Western Thrace (Greece) focusing on the role of the Turkish–Greek border and its changing permeability. It suggests that ...people who have strong attachments to both sides of a national border experience spatial liminality and the border is a place of passage between not only territories, but also lived identities. For young Turks of Western Thrace, travelling to Turkey to work or study is an established strategy that is intertwined with major life events. Drawing on ride-along interviews and focusing on five participants, who travelled to Turkey during the Cyprus crisis, the article identifies the disciplinary power of bordering on identities and life-stories. By examining how different individuals dealt with this power, and how their circumstances affected the outcomes, it explores the tensions between agency and structure, state power and resistance, and categorisation and liminality during life-planning and identity construction.
What happens to migrants after they are deported from the United States and dropped off at the Mexican border, often hundreds if not thousands of miles from their hometowns? In this eye-opening work, ...Jeremy Slack foregrounds the voices and experiences of Mexican deportees, who frequently become targets of extreme forms of violence, including migrant massacres, upon their return to Mexico. Navigating the complex world of the border, Slack investigates how the high-profile drug war has led to more than two hundred thousand deaths in Mexico, and how many deportees, stranded and vulnerable in unfamiliar cities, have become fodder for drug cartel struggles. Like no other book before it, Deported to Death reshapes debates on the long-term impact of border enforcement and illustrates the complex decisions migrants must make about whether to attempt the return to an often dangerous life in Mexico or face increasingly harsh punishment in the United States.
