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Article published In:
Language, Epistemology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production
Edited by Alfonso Del Percio, Patricia Baquedano-López, Miguel Pérez-Milans and Cécile B. Vigouroux
[Language, Culture and Society 3:2] 2021
► pp. 180–200
Special issue articles

Towards a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration

| University of California Berkeley

The hegemonic production of knowledge on (im)migration from the geopolitical and epistemic location of the United States has made legible and knowable a particular conception of (im)migration shaping in turn how (im)migrant subjects are made and remade. As a corpus these dominant conceptions of (im)migration are legible through a dominant discourse that has, in the particular case of the U.S., contributed to a racialized (im)migrant personhood and to the study of outsiders coming in to settle. In a two-pronged approach the piece (a) shows the settler colonial logics embedded in (im)migration discourse while (b) simultaneously enacting work of (re)imagining by putting in conversation the work on discourse and racialization within the contexts of (im)migration with Indigenous scholars’ work on borders, settlement, and sovereignty. As such the goals are to disrupt the naturalized ways whereby the racialized (im)migrant and (im)migration are conceptualized within the U.S. context and to offer an aperture for a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration. These initial and fragmentary dialogic exchanges offer a potential path towards a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration that does not reproduce settler colonial logics while sustaining the coexistence of antagonisms and tensions in our quotidian interactions needed to live with the discomfort of contradictions.

Keywords: (im)migration discourse, settler colonialism, whiteness, knowledge-production, epistemology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Towards a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration
    • 2.1Unmarked whiteness, racialized transgression & settler colonial relations
  • 3.Concluding thoughts
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.20019.gav
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