Mobility and Travel - Ong & Clifford

In Aiwha Ong’s Flexible Citizenship, the flexibility that certain modern subject are forced to posess as a result of new geographical and social positioning can be related to the “flexibility” that is attributed to modern capitalist accumulation. Rather, the idea of flexible citizenship allows subjects to respond fluidly to changing political and economic activity (6). Even though Ong articulates a fluidity tied to flexible citizenship, Ong makes clear that these practices and exchanges are within structures of meaning surrounding class, nationality, gender, etc., a different grounding than Bhabha acts of production “in the beyond.” Aiwha Ong focus on the relation between the identity production of such flexible citizens and their role within capitalist systems of exchange and circulation offer a different way to think about the space of negotiation, not simply at the “level of culture”. Rather, Ong pushes the construction of narratives and the study of such relations, such as migration studies in relation to the nation and looks at the ways in which “hybrid subject” becomes mobilized. For example, Ong argues that the efforts of poor exploited immigrants of exported labor become racialized proletarian others, participating in the “nation-building” project of the United States.

"Poor immigrants are thus converted from being minorities to be assimilated into the host society into being some kind of universalized lower-class subjects who attain subaltern vindication both from struggling against racism in the United States and from transcending class and political barriers in their home countries" (9).

In the case of the United States, Ong notes that such mobilizations of the migrant figure not only produce an new idea of subjectivity for migrant groups, but also positions them in a very different way from other constructions of race based on mobility (9). This argument is provocative in that it brings to light the relationship between the migrant and other marginalized races in United States culture and the role of mobility in such constructions. How does flexibility work for or against the figure of the migrant in nationalist discourse? If, as Ong argues, their mobility is converted to a universalized proletarian in the field of migration studies, then in what ways does it work in the opposite way, the immigration seen as a threat because of their very mobility? Ong’s model at a more fundamental level, allows for an engagement with the ways in which such individuals accumulate, move and are displaced.  At another level, Ong’s analysis of the flexible subject under late capitalism allows for an account the power systems of class stratification and other societal barriers that affect mobile and non-mobile subjects. What allows some to cross and others not? How do certain societal structures prevent the movement and migration of individuals? This point is important not only as a way to think about the (im)permeability of borders based on societal stratification based on race, class, gender and sexuality, but also in relation to those who frequently cross borders for travel and leisure. The border, as such, becomes articulated and means vastly different things.  Although the positioning of the flexible subject within systems of capital and circulation, the ways in which laborers are articulated within society and the national discourse also becomes important in thinking about these subjects at the level of representation and rights.

            James Clifford takes this complex negotiation between cultures and their global histories of colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, exploration and tourism in his book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, and looks at the mobility of such subjects. Adding to Ong’s discussion of the power of mobile and non-mobile subjects, Clifford further argues that it is also a matter of travelers’ movement under strong cultural, political and economic conditions, confronting these issues as an anthropological problematic. For Clifford, culture lies at the sites of dwelling and travel, or more broadly, in the relationship between movement and stasis. The relationship between movement and stasis, both physically, in terms of literal displacement and migration, as well as culturally produced  (the ways in which subjects are stuck within a representational essentialism or anthropological space), is one of tension. The relation and subsequent tension between movement and stasis are what’s most at stake in “borderzones” or lands, as conditions allowing/disallowing such movement and the ways in which subjects negotiate those zones.

            Using a model of “dwelling in travel” and “travel in dwelling,” travel is foregrounded as a cultural practice, as transnational routes of travel and displacement produce different knowledge traditions, cultural expression and the emergence of diasporic and migrant cultures (35). Clifford takes this relationship and using it as a mean of looking at the inside/outside of such relations in terms of how anthropology can and should approach such situation. Fieldwork can no longer solely look at the centers, villages and intensive fieldwork when these societies are transnational and global connected in the negotiation of external relationships. Clifford calls for new representation means and strategies, writing,

 “ We need to think comparatively about the distinct routes/roots of tribes, barrios, favellas, immigrant neighborhoods --- embattled histories with crucial community “insides” and regulated traveling ‘outsides’ (Clifford 36).

Clifford offers the theory of shifting locations, allowing one to take into account the many ways in which borders are formed and imposed upon individuals, both physically and otherwise. Clifford uses Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of a “contact zone” as a means to think about the space of such encounters. The argument that locations are “multiple, conjunctural and cross-cutting,” avoids the traps of a guaranteed shared experience or collectivity, while simultaneously opening up sites of “alliance building”, or Bhabha ideas concerning “political negotiation” (Clifford 87).

            Returning to Flexible Citizenship, Ong brings the discussion of such spaces back to the still important role of the state. For in the ways that the tensions and disjuncture are present at the borders of culture and nation, oppressive structures and border-crossing flows, Ong argues that “the nation-state -- along with its juridical-legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality, and war-making capacities – continues to define, discipline, control, and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence" (15). Even though the differences of stasis of movement are productive in the ways in which such oppressed groups are studied and articulated, Ong allows for a bridge to think about the ways that individuals are positioned and controlled within state apparatuses and capitalist structures.

            In a further engagement with Clifford, Aiwha Ong offers a reading Clifford’s project as one that “attempts to shape their own cosmopolitan intellectual commitment” (13). Ong draws on Clifford’s project in order to think critically about the relationship between the diasporan subject and the cosmopolitan intellectual. Because Clifford uses the idea of “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in traveling,” which is a very compelling idea, he is able to take in diverse subjects with specific histories and a range of cultural practices. This grouping can also be seen in a variety of other work dealing with such spaces of cultural difference and mobility.  The kind of move made by Clifford can also be seen in other works such as Marc Augé’s Non-Places, where travelers, both cosmopolitan citizens and displaced people cohabit a space of transition and temporaneity or in Appadurai’s “Sovereignty without Territory: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” where the multiple identifications that communities possess form translocalities not rooted in the nation-state, a locality that both cosmopolitan citizens and marginalized subject inhabitants. What is the relation between the two figures and how do they affect one another? Put differently, if certain mechanisms of power enable or disable mobility, then how are the diverse populations within these transnational systems shaped by the relations of global inequality? As both the cosmopolitan citizen and marginalized mobile subject are articulated at both the global and local level, how can we think about the ways in which they engage in the production of one another?