The free flow of information and bodies across borders is an increasing trend so pervasive that the word citizen has betrayed its etymological roots by going "global" to give us the now famous, global citizen. In the era of globalization Susan Ossman turns her anthropological study to the lives and journeys of serial migrants.
Travel and mobility are increasingly easy for many people: yet “immigrants” are perceived as a major political problem the world over. Notions of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism have developed to account for emerging forms of political and social consciousness, but how are these “perspectives” produced by actual experiences of travel or migration and the diverse social and institutional arrangements people on the move encounter?
Writers like the border-straddling V.S. Naipul, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, and Junot Díaz encourage us to think about these questions. Similarly intrigued by stories of immigration and perplexed by how they rarely jibed with theoretical accounts of the global nomad or cosmopolitan, Susan Ossman chose not to focus on any ethnic group or metropolitan site in her research but instead, on serial migrants. She found that people who have lived in several countries not only have fascinating stories, but tell them in a similar manner. Although their backgrounds and the places they have lived are remarkably diverse their shared experience of being immigrants and then immigrating again leads them to have a lot in common; it also distinguishes them from others, be they those who never migrate, immigrants or the kinds of frequent travelers and global nomads portrayed in images that seek to represent globalization.
When Moving Matters was published last year it set in motion a new paradigm for research on mobility, but it also inspired artists, actors, writers and musicians whose lives have stretched across countries and continents to join in Moving Matters: A Traveling Workshop. Taking Ossman’s book as a point of departure, they progressively develop artworks in venues across the world, as though retracing their experiences of serial migration.
The following video is a brief sampler of the recent workshop at the Pavillion Vendome in Clichy, France:
To learn more about the Traveling Workshop visit movingmattersworkshops.com
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