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HCAS Symposium “Citizenship and Migration” — Helsinki, Collegium for Advanced Studies, 22-24/10/2014

HCAS Symposium: Citizenship and Migration
22-24 October 2014

Organizers: Katrien De Graeve, Katariina Mäkinen & Riikka Rossi
Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Fabianinkatu 24 A, Seminar Room 136, Ground Floor

In the last decade, citizenship has emerged as a vibrant area of research for scholars across a wide range of fields. In the context of increasingly diverse societies and immigration, there has been a heated debate on how citizenship should be conceptualized. Feminist scholars have been deeply involved in this debate, criticizing traditional citizenship models for failing to take into account ‘the politics of difference’. A plethora of notions have been developed, such as cultural citizenship, multicultural citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship, bodily citizenship and intimate citizenship as a way of moving beyond conventional notions of citizenship and trying to grasp some of the multilayered-ness and complexity of people’s attachments to places and communities. Moreover, citizenship has been defined as not merely a status, but also as encompassing actual practices of participation (both in the public and the private sphere), identity work, and feelings of belonging.

This three-day symposium aims to explore recent advance of research on (contemporary or historical) migrations that starts from critical understandings of citizenship. It will feature talks by prominent scholars from various geographical locations and different disciplines, addressing the conference themes from a variety of theoretical angles. Wednesday the 22th will include a panel discussion with writers and activists, which specifically focuses on questions of citizenship in contemporary Finnish society and culture.

Programme

Day 1 : Wednesday 22nd October 2014

  • 12.45-13.30: Registration & opening of the symposium
  • 13.30-14.30: Jasbir Puar (Rutgers University, USA): Crip nationalism: from narrative prosthesis to disaster capitalism
  • 14.30-15.00: Discussion
  • 15.00-15.30: Break
  • 15.30-17.30: Panel discussion: Finnishness revised moderator: Miikka Pyykkönen (University of Jyväskylä) Panelists: TBA

Day 2 : Thursday 23th October 2014

  • 08.45-09.15: Registration
  • 09.15-10.15: Rinaldo Walcott (University of Toronto, Canada): The long emancipation: anti- blackness, settlement and the problem of nation
  • 10.15-10:45: Discussion
  • 10.45-11.15: Break
  • 11.15-13.15 : Slot 1
    11.15: Karel Arnaut (University of Leuven, Belgium)
    Complexities of citizenship as practice: a critique of ‘super-diversity’
  • 11.45: TBA
    Title TBA
    12.15: Discussant: Mulki Al-Sharmani (University of Helsinki) 12.30-13.15: Discussion
  • 13.15-14.15: Lunch break
  • 14.15-16.15: Slot 2
    14.15: Peter Geschiere (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
    Autochthony, citizenship and exclusion: the cultural turn in politics of belonging in Africa and Europe
  • 14.45: Diana Mulinari (University of Lund, Sweden)
    Caring Racism. Exploring the intersection of race and gender among the Sweden Democrats?
  • 15.15: Discussant: Sarah Green (University of Helsinki)
  • 15.30-16:15: Discussion
  • 16.15-16.45: Break
  • 16.45-18:45: Slot 3
  • 16.45: Anne-Marie Fortier (Lancaster University, UK)
    Life in the waiting room: citizenship, nationality, and the psychic lives of social policy
  • 17.15: Bridget Byrne (The University of Manchester, UK)
    ‘Say it like you mean it’. Rituals of citizenship and narratives of nation
  • 17.45: Discussant: Peggy Watson (HCAS)
  • 18.00-18:45: Discussion

Day 3 : Friday 24th October 2014 10.00-10.30: Registration

  • 10.30-11.30: Meyda Yeğenoğlu (Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey) : Nations contaminated: archives of citizenship, history and memory
    11.30-12.00: Discussion
  • 12.00-13.00: Lunch break
  • 13.00 – 15:00: Slot 4
    13.00: Olli Löytty (University of Turku)
    Welcome to Finnish literature! Hassan Blasim and the politics of belonging
  • 13.30: Anu Koivunen (Stockholm University, Sweden)
    Redistributing Shame: Accented Affects in New Narratives about Sweden Finns
  • 14.00: Discussant: Riikka Rossi (University of Helsinki)
    14.15-15.00: Discussion
  • 15.00-15.30: Break
  • 15.30-17.30: Slot 5
  • 15.30: Maijastina Kahlos (University of Helsinki)
    How become a Roman citizen and how to remain one? Reconsidering Romanness
  •  15.45-16.00: Discussion
  • 16.00: Sarah Bracke (Free University Brussels (VUB) & Ghent University, Belgium; Harvard University, USA) (video conference)
  • Sexism and the Spectre of the Arab Man. The Case of Belgium’s New Law Against Sexism
  • 16.30: Discussant: Katrien De Graeve (Ghent University, Belgium)
  • 16.45-17.30: Discussion

Please register by email to Kirsi.Reyes-Anastacio@helsinki.fi. Registration for this event is required but free of charge. The registration link will open on September 10th and will be posted on our event’s webpage. The deadline to register is October 13th.

For more information, please contact the organizers: katrien.degraeve@ugent.be; katariina.z.makinen@helsinki.fi & riikka.rossi@helsinki.fi

Programm : HCAS Symposium-Citizenship&Migration

SPEAKERS

Jasbir Puar is associate professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University (USA). She has also been a visiting lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. A redacted version of Terrorist Assemblages has been translated into French as Homonationalisme. Politiques Queers après le 11 Semptembre (Editions Amsterdam, 2012). Puar’s forthcoming monograph, Affective Politics: States of Debility and Capacity (Duke University Press 2014) takes up the questions of disability in the context of theories of bodily assemblages that trouble intersectional identity frames.

Rinaldo Walcott is an Associate Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE, as well as the Graduate Program in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. His teaching and research is in the area of black diaspora cultural studies and postcolonial studies with an emphasis on questions of sexuality, gender, nation, citizenship and multiculturalism. From 2002-2007 Rinaldo held the Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies where his research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust. Rinaldo Walcott is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insonmiac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003); he is also the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000). As well he is the Co-editor with Roy Moodley of Counselling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the Work of Clemment Vontress in Clinical Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2010). Currently, Walcott is completing Black Diaspora Faggotry: Readings Frames Limits, which is under-contract to Duke University Press. Additionally he is co-editing with Dina Georgis and Katherine McKittrick No Language Is Neutral: Essays on Dionne Brand forthcoming. As an interdisciplinary black studies scholar he has published in a wide range of venues. His articles have appeared in journals and books, as well as popular venues like newspapers and magazines, as well as other kinds of media.

Meyda Yeğenoğlu is professor of cultural studies and sociology at Istanbul Bilgi University. She has published widely on postcolonialism, orientalism, Islam, secularism and religion, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, Europe, globalization and migrancy. Her work crosses disciplinary boundaries and brings different strands of thought such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis and postcolonial into productive rendezvous with each other. She is the author of Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Islam, Migrancy and Hospitality in Europe (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012). She has received her Ph.D from University of California, Santa Cruz. She has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, Oberlin College, Rutgers University, New York University, University of Vienna and Oxford University. Her areas of specialty are Post- structuralist Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Globalization and Migrancy, Orientalism, Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, Secularism and Religious Identity, Islam and neoliberal governance. Her articles are published in various journals such as:Race and Ethnic Relations; Culture and Religion; Philosophy and Social Criticism, Inscriptions; Radical Philosophy; Postmodern Culture; Toplum ve Bilim; Defter; Dipnot and Doğu-Batı and in various collections such as: Feminist Postcolonial Theory; Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse; Nineteenth Centruy Literature Criticism; Religion and Gender; Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory; Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies; State, Religion and Secularization; Feminism and Hospitality; At the Limits of Justice: Women of Color Theorize Terror.

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Karel Arnaut is associate professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre (IMMRC), University of Leuven, Belgium. Previously, Arnaut was teaching at the Department of African Languages and Cultures (Ghent University) and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen. The main focus of his previous research was on student and youth movements, social participation, and transformations of the public sphere in Côte d’Ivoire (West-Africa) as well as on postcolonial dynamics in connection with the public image, the societal position and the diasporic identities of Africa(ns) in Belgium and Europe. He is also editor of the journal African Diaspora. Arnaut’s present research focuses on representations and articulations of cultural and sociolinguistic ‘superdiversity’ in city-based, migration-driven contexts in European- African transnational spaces. He is co-editor of Language and Superdiversity (Routledge) and author of Writing along the margins: literacy and agency in a West African city (Multilingual Matters).

Sarah Bracke is a Research Associate at RHEA (Center for Gender and Diversity) at the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussels) and Associate Professor of Sociology at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research attends to questions of agency and subjectivity, as well as gender, racialization, and sexuality, in relation to religion and the secular. She has published widely on these topics in journals such as the European Journals of Women’s Studies; Theory, Culture & Society; Feminist Review; Religion and Gender; and the Journal of Muslims in Europe. She co-authored a book on multiculturalism in Flanders and is currently finishing a book manuscript on understandings of agency and sexual difference within a Catholic renewal movement. During the academic year 2014-15 she is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, where she is working on a project that explores how gender and sexuality are central to the “Muslim Question” as it emerges in Western Europe today.

Bridget Byrne is a senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Her main research interests are in the areas of citizenship, race and gender. Her book: White Lives. The Interplay of ‘race’, class and gender in everyday life (Routledge 2006) considered the construction of white identity in Britain, looking at the experience of white mothers of young children in two areas of London. This also

involved examining the changing constructions of British and English national identities. Bridget has also (working with Carla deTona) examined parental approaches to secondary school choice in order to explore the ways in which space and locality impact on identity, in particular through research on the racialised and classed nature of school catchment areas. Bridget’s book Making Citizens: Public Rituals, Celebrations and Contestations of Citizenship, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in the autumn of 2014. Bridget is co-investigator in CoDE (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity and Inequality), based at the University of Manchester.

Anne-Marie Fortier is Reader in Social and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University. The overarching question that connects her work concerns the relationship between individual subjectivities, and wider cultural, social and political formations. More specifically, her research examines processes of subject formation in relation to community and governing practices that seek to stabilise collective identities in the face of migration. She has explored these processes in contexts such as migrant community formation; multiculturalism, cohesion and integration; queer diasporas; national genetic genealogies; and, currently, the citizenship naturalisation process (funded by the British Academy). In addition to numerous journal articles, she is the author of Migrant Belongings (Berg 2000) and Multicultural Horizons (Routledge 2008), and co-editor of Uprootings/Regroundings (Berg 2003). For publications on her current project, see ‘What’s the big deal? Naturalisation and the politics of desire’, Citizenship Studies, 17(6-7): 697-711.

Peter Geschiere is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and co-editor of the journal ETHNOGRAPHY (with SAGE). Since 1971 he undertook historical-anthropological field-work in various parts of Cameroon and elsewhere in West Africa. He published extensively on issues of citizenship, belonging and exclusion (see, for instance, his 2009 book with University of Chicago Press, Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe). Another central topic in his work is the relation between witchcraft and politics in Africa and elsewhere (see his 1997 book The Modernity of Witchcraft with University of Virginia Press, and ther 2013 book on Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust – Africa in Comparison, with University of Chicago Press). During the last decade he acted as supervisor (aanvrager) for a project Islam in Africa – Globalization and Moving Frontiers for the NWO program The Future of the Religious Past; and a co-initiator (mede-aanvrager) for a project on The Culturalization of Citizenship – the Netherlands in Comparative Perspective for the NWO programme Cultural Dynamics. Recent publications include an article on ‘Homophobic Africa? – Towards a More Nuanced View’ (with Patrick Awondo and Graeme Reid [Human Rights Watch], African Studies Review 55,3 [2012]); and ‘Religion’s Others: Jean Comaroff on Religion and Society’- in a special issue of the journal Religion and Society (2012,3) on Jean Comaroff’s impact on the anthropology of religion). From 2002 till 2012 he was board member and later also chair of the award jury of the Prince Claus Fund on culture and development.

Maijastina Kahlos is a historian and classicist (University of Helsinki). She was research fellow in Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies 2011-2014 and works currently as research fellow in the Centre of Excellence ‘Reason and Religious Recognition’, funded by the Academy of Finland. Her research interests broadly include late Roman history, the religions in the Roman Empire, Christianization of the Empire, and Roman everyday life. She has published the monographs Vettius Agorius Praetextatus: Senatorial Life in Between (2002), Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures, c. 360-430 (2007) and Forbearance and Compulsion: Rhetoric of Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity (2009). She has edited a volume The Faces of the other: Religious Rivalry and Ethnic Encounters in the later Roman world (2012). She studies Roman citizenship as part of her current

research project Alienation, Accommodation, Adaptation: Imperial and Ecclesiastical Discourses and Religious Dissenters in the Late Roman Empire in 370-450.

Anu Koivunen is Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She has written on Finnish cinema and television history and feminist film theory, and she currently conducts research on Moving Experiences: Affective Turns in Cinema and Media Studies and on Vulnerability: Rethinking Representation, Politics and Materialism. Recent publications include “Uncanny motions: facing death, morphing life” in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 35:2 (Spring 2013); “Force of Affects, Weight of Histories in Love is a Treasure (2002)”, in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Body Imagery and Feminist Politics, edited by Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), “Talking heads, imagined communities: Steam of Life and the affective politics of intimate documentary” (Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 2:2/2012), ”Yes We Can? The Promises of Affect for Queer Scholarship” (Lambda Nordica, 3-4/2010) and ”An Affective Turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory”, in Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences, edited by Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen (Routledge, 2010).

Olli Löytty (University of Turku) has published many articles and a handful of monographs on representation of otherness in particular and on cultural encounters in general. He has analysed the ways in which Finnishness has been depicted in relation to foreign cultures, especially Africa. In his postdoctoral project ”Ethnic characters, strange settings and transnational crossings in Finnish literature” (2011-2013) he focused on the representations of cultural minorities and the so-called migration literature. In 2012-2013 he led a research project “Transnationalism in Finnish literary culture”. Presently he is working in a project called “Multilingualism in contemporary literature in Finland”. In his essay collections Maltillinen hutu (a moderate Hutu, 2008) and Kulttuurin sekakäyttäjät (culture users, 2011) Löytty considers interaction and mixing between cultures. In 2014, Löytty published Sinfoniaanisin terveisin (with symphonic regards), written jointly with Minna Lindgren, in which he explores a culture that is totally alien to him – Western classical music.

Diana Mulinari is a sociologist, holding a position as professor at the department of Gender Studies, University of Lund. Her research has developed in a critical dialogue with feminist and other theoretical and methodological contributions that make a strong case for emancipatory social science. Her scholarship centres on issues of gender, inequality and visions of gender justice (and resistance to these visions). Questions of colonial legacies, Global North /Global South relations (with special focus on Latin America) and racism as well as the diversified forms of resistance and organisation to old and new forms of power have stayed with her through all the work she has done. Her research has developed in a critical dialogue with feminist and other theoretical and methodological contributions that make a strong case for emancipatory social science. See: 
Rätzhel, N., Mulinari, D. and Tellefson, A. (2014). Transnational corporations from the standpoint of workers. Thrown Together. Working Apart. Palgrave. Mulinari, D. (2012) “Birth work. Suffering rituals in late modernity. A case study from a birth clinic.” (ed) Lisa Käll. Dimensions of Pain. Humanities and Social Science Perspectives. Routledge. New York and London. Mulinari, D. and Neergaard, A. (2012) “Violence, racism and the political arena: a Scandinavian Dilemma” in NORA. Journal of Feminist and Gender Research. Vol. 20, 1: 12-18

Miikka Pyykkönen (PhD) is lecturer in Master’s program in cultural policy at the University of Jyväskylä and docent in sociology at the University of Helsinki. He is specialized in politics of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, civil society, Foucauldian methodology and analytics of power, history of governance of ethnic minorities, and European and Finnish immigration policies. His recent

publications have dealt with transformations of cultural policy, theoretical conception of civil society, historical governance of the Roma and Sami in Finland and immigrant associations in Finland.

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ABSTRACTS
Karel Arnaut: Complexities of citizenship as practice: a critique of ‘super-diversity’

Heir to the critical discourses of transnationalism and intersectionality, the concept of super- diversity systematically interrogates state-centredness, rejects the still popular concept of ‘integration’, and refigures migration-driven societal transformation and diversity in terms of polycentricity and multiscalarity . This paper engages in a critical exercise of exploring how super-diversity can contribute to the ongoing attempts to rethink citizenship under conditions of globalization.

After outlining this exploration, citizenship under super-diversity is argued to be conceptualised as practical and political. This double take on the complexities of citizenship is further explored by looking into three clusters of practices which have been described as acts and sites of citizenship: (a) precarious labour conceptualized by Lee (2006) as tactical citizenship and expanded upon by Landau and Freemantle (2009) ‘tactical cosmopolitism’ (b) grassroots public action and affirmation conceptualised by Holston (2009) as ‘insurgent citizenship’, and, most importantly ‘mothering’ reconceptualised as citizenship practice by Erel (2011).

Sarah Bracke: Sexism and the Spectre of the Arab Man. The Case of Belgium’s New Law Against Sexism

This contribution is part of a larger project tracing how Western Europe’s ‘Muslim question’ brings to the fore a set of already existing contradictions with respect to the ‘sexual orders’ inscribed into liberal democratic political regimes of Western European nation states, and impacts these orders. The overarching research question of the project inquires about the ways in which questions of gender, sexual difference and sexuality in Western Europe are impacted and (re)shaped by ‘the Muslim question’? This paper explores a particular case-study in Belgium, that concerns contemporary processes of ethnicization of violence against women, in which the figure of the Muslim/Arab men (with religion and ethnicity consistently conflated) is central. Following the documentary Femme de le Rue (2012) that shows and frames sexual harassment of a young white woman in the streets of a predominantly migrant, and specifically Arab, neighbourhood in Brussels, a public debate on sexual harassment in the streets and more broadly sexism broke lose in Belgium. This debate culminated into a new law that criminalizes sexism. The paper investigates the redefinition of sexism that emerges within the contours of this law and situates this understanding of sexism in the context of the ‘gendered governmentalization’ of Islam (Amir-Moazami 2011) in Belgium.

Bridget Byrne: ‘Say it like you mean it’. Rituals of citizenship and narratives of nation

Citizenship ceremonies have been practiced for at least a century in the United States and Canada, and for 50 years in Australia, with more recent introductions in Europe in the last decade or so as part of a series of changes to countries’ citizenship regimes. This paper will explore what citizenship ceremonies – the rituals created to ‘make’ new citizens – can tell us

about understandings of citizenship and the nation. Coming from an empirical study of three countries in Europe and the US, Canada and Australia, the paper asks who is being held up as the welcomed citizen and who is excluded in these public events. What does it mean to ‘welcome’ a new citizen and how is migration and national history imagined in these events? These questions become increasingly urgent in the context of securitisation and given current debates about the withdrawal of citizenship from suspected ‘extremists’.

Anne-Marie Fortier: Life in the waiting room: citizenship, nationality, and the psychic lives of social policy

The citizenship application process is a good site to explore ‘citizenship-in-the-making’, where foreigners are turned into ‘nationals’, and where the international migrant becomes a deserving resident with access to international mobility. Much has been written about the forms of inequalities reproduced in how different countries attribute citizenship. Less attention has been given to how the citizenship acquisition process is experienced by applicants and by the various agents of the state involved in the process. Drawing on a multi-sited study of the citizenship attribution process in England, this paper expands on Judith Butler’s theory of subjection in The Psychic Life of Power, to consider ‘the psychic lives of a social policy’. More specifically, I approach the procedure for allocating citizenship-related rights and nationality with the metaphor of a waiting room that brings together government agents (registrars), intermediaries (ESOL teachers), and immigrant-applicants. It is a social event and a social space where both agents of the state and applicants meet and engage from varying positions of power, inequality, and difference, but where they ‘are all implicated in a set of shared and divergent forces that bring [them] together and move [them] apart.’ (Povinelli 2011: 84). The paper argues, in line with Back et al. (2012), that new hierarchies of citizenship and deservedness are produced as a result of neo-liberal strategies of citizenship attribution designed as social intervention which ostensibly seek to redress the failures of multiculturalism and integration.

Peter Geschiere: Autochthony, citizenship and exclusion: the cultural turn in politics of belonging in Africa and Europe

My book Perils of Belonging – Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe(Univ. of Chicago Press 2009) started from my dismay that precisely at a time (roughly the post-cold- war moment) that the notion of autochthony was creating havoc in several parts of Africa (Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Congo/Rwanda), the Flemish and the Dutch embraced it as a challenging slogan in their struggles over immigration and integration. In general it is striking that since about 2000 ‘autochthony’ has become a buzzword, also in English where it was rarely used earlier on – might be characteristic for the ‘global conjuncture’ of belonging that marks our supposedly globalizing world. Surprising in all this is that almost everywhere the notion seems to acquire great mobilizing force despite deep differences in context and implications. In this presentation I want to focus on certain inherent contradictions –notably between the promise of basic security (how can one belong more that if one is born from the soil itself?) and the practice of great uncertainty (Stephen Jackson speaks for Congo of ‘nervous languages’). The example of classical Athens, the cradle of autochthony thinking, can illustrate how this apparent security is haunted by the fear of being exposed as a fake autochthon. Striking in the recent comeback of autochthony discourse is the ambiguous role of culture and

cultural differences as central to the new politics of belonging. Issues of sex and gender are becoming crucial for citizenship and exclusion, be it in strikingly different ways.

Maijastina Kahlos: How to become a Roman citizen and how to remain one? The frontiers of Romanness

According to one of the foundational myths of the ancient Romans, Romulus made the city of Rome an asylum for refugees and welcomed all sorts of newcomers inside its walls. In the 2nd century CE, as the Romans had already held the entire Mediterranean area in their iron embrace for centuries, a Greek orator Aelius Aristides celebrated the Roman power with a similar ethos: “Rome has never rejected anyone; on the contrary, this city receives men from all countries just as the soil of the earth welcomes all men”. This ethos of asylum is even more remarkable when it is compared with the foundational myths of many Greek poleis, for instance, the myth of autochthonous origin of Athenians. Despite the ethos of asylum and eloquent orators who cherished the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship, not all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire had the status of citizen. Who was regarded as a Roman citizen? What were the criteria for becoming Roman citizen? How did these criteria change in the course of centuries? During the expansion of the Empire in the republican period, to gain citizenship as a mark of membership of the Roman community meant abandoning one’s former lifestyle and embracing a new one. As the Roman power in the Mediterranean was consolidated during the early imperial period (1st-2nd centuries CE), the strong conception of citizenship based on cultural criteria could not hold. The Roman power had to gain backing from the elite key groups in the conquered areas. Cultural criteria (such as the Latin language) became less emphasised, and the citizenship became to be more built around the display of loyalty to the ruling power. I will discuss the criteria of becoming Roman citizen and maintaining the privileges connected to the citizenship during the later Roman Empire (200-400 CE). I will focus on, first, the return of the cultural criteria, and second, the impact of immigration in Late Antiquity. 1) I will argue that defining Romanness in religious terms became more and more emphasized from the early 3rd century CE onwards. Being Roman was connected with the correct performance of religion. Defining a good and loyal Roman in terms of religion continued in the course of the Christianization of the Empire. 2) In regard to the Gothic immigration into the Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, I will discuss the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and offer a postcolonial reading of Roman ‘migration and accommodation policies’. We will have a closer look at one dramatic scene in which hundreds of Goth in their attempt to immigrate to the Empire were drowned in the border river Danube.

Anu Koivunen: Redistributing Shame: Accented Affects in New Narratives about Sweden Finns

This paper examines the contemporary revisiting and reimagining of the histories and memories Finnish migrants in Sweden. Since 2000, a new generation of children and grandchildren of the Great Migration in the 1960s and 1970s have entered the public arena in Sweden, articulating new narratives in pop music, literature, theatre and film. While these “third generation” Sweden Finnish artists themselves embody success stories of migration, enjoying Swedish mainstream audiences’ appreciation and positive publicity, the new narratives are nevertheless essentially stories about living with shame. Focusing here on the

two highly acclaimed and popular novels (Svinalängorna by Susanna Alakoski, 2006, and Ingenbarnsland by Eija Hetekivi Olsson, 2012), Tanja Lorentzon’s Royal Dramatic Theatre monologue Mormors svarta ögon (2010) as well as the film adaptation of Svinalängorna, Beyond, from 2012 and a Finnish-Swedish documentary Ingen riktig finne – Laulu koti-ikävästä by Mika Ronkainen (2012), this paper investigates the articulations and operations of shame in the new cultural imaginary about Sweden Finns. Discussing how different artworks mobilize past histories of shame, revisiting affective legacies (Koivunen 2012), paper discusses the complexity of shame as both a negative and productive affect. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) shame is examined “at once deconstitutive and foundational” for identity formation, and in any case a key constituent of Sweden Finnish migrant belongings (Fortier 2000). In this paper, Hamid Naficy’s (2001) notion of ‘accented cinema’ is suggested as a way of theorizing the intercultural, transnational and cross-generational dialogues about immigration engendered in these new artworks.

Olli Löytty: Welcome to Finnish literature! Hassan Blasim and the Politics of Belonging

Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi refugee living in Finland who writes in Arabic. Although he surely is not the first writer who has moved from one country to another and who writes in a language that is not understood by the majority of the residents of the country s/he lives, he is inevitably an outsider in a classification system that is based on distinctive national literatures. However, writers like Blasim not only pose a threat to the national order of literatures – when literatures are understood as more or less homogenous constellations in which one nation, culture and language converge – but also open new ways to understand the relations between places, identities and literatures. Blasim’s short stories circulate around the globe both in original Arabic as well as in translations. Blasim’s first channel to publish has been the Internet, and the readers are scattered all around the Arabic speaking world. Two collections of his short stories, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009) and The Iraqi Christ (2013), have been translated to several languages, also to Finnish, and an American edition of his texts, The Corpse Exhibition, was published by Penguin (USA) in 2014. The case of Blasim illustrates how the movement of people and the dissemination of texts through media and technological channels affect the linguistic and regional entities as well as the national literary fields. Although the reception of Blasim’s texts has been laudatory internationally—he was described by The Guardian as “perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive”—he has been relatively unknown in Finland. However, his recent success (especially the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize he won in 2014) has been covered extensively in the Finnish media. This presentation sketches the precarious position of Blasim’s texts in the nationally delimited literary field of Finland and discusses the mechanisms used to include or exclude Blasim into “Finnish literature”.

Diana Mulinari: Caring Racism. Exploring the Intersection of Race and Gender among the Sweden Democrats

During the last twenty years there has been an upsurge in research on xenophobic populist parties mirroring the political successes of these parties in Western Europe and to some extent in Eastern Europe. There have been some studies emphasising the fact that women to a lesser degree than men vote and participate in these parties and that the women who do so are in general more conservative, and some interest also in the increasing number of female leaders. However, there are still very few studies analysing the worldview of women active in these

parties, and the role of gender as metaphor, identity and as policy within these parties. My focus is The Sweden Democrats (SD), a Swedish version of what mainstream scholarship on these parties defines as ERP (extreme right-wing parties or Populist Radical Right Parties) and that I prefer to classify as culturally racist parties. The SD has since the election of 2010 with 5,7 per cent of the votes been represented in the Swedish national parliament. There are a number of reasons that make Sweden and the racist party Sweden Democrats an interesting topic of study. While Sweden has been one of the European countries with most migrants it is not until 2010 that the SD entered the Parliament, challenging the notion of a correlation between migrants and the existence of the ERP:s . The second is the model character of Swedish migration policies from social democratic multiculturalism towards managed and circular migration linked to workfare. The third point is the link between the Swedish welfare model – a model in transition towards a neoliberal regime – and ambitious policies towards gender equality and “integration”. These points make it interesting to understand the establishment of the cultural racist party in the Swedish parliament and how this establishment poses difficult issues to notions of citizenship, nationhood and belonging. This I do by studying an often neglected group, women activists of these parties, from a theoretical location at the cross-roads between race critical studies and feminist scholarship on nationhood and nationalism.

Jasbir Puar: Crip Nationalism: From Narrative Prosthesis to Disaster Capitalism
Rinaldo Walcott: The Long Emancipation: anti-blackness, settlement and the problem of Nation

The paper will explore the ways in which logics of transatlantic slavery continue to shape black movement and thus black belonging globally. By situating the nation-state as central to the legacy of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife the paper unsettles settlement, citizenship and nation.

Meyda Yeğenoğlu: Nations Contaminated: Archives of Citizenship, History and Memory

Apologies offered to victims or to the descendants of victims of past wars and colonial atrocities are becoming politically global. This global trend of offering apology and the desire to redress the past for historical wrongs involves the acceptance of unjust relations between two nations or between a state and its minority citizens. However, it needs to be examined whether the recognition of past atrocities at the national level bring about or institute new national imaginaries that are capable of decentring the hegemonic accounts of history. Does acknowledgement of the repressed debt to otherness signal the birth of a new and cosmopolitan imaginary of citizenship, which has the potential to destabilize the sanctified status attributed to the notion of a unified and homogeneous national culture? This paper aims to revisit the memories and ghosts of the notion of national unity from the perspective of its margins, colonies and migrants and asks whether the practice of apology can conjure up new cosmopolitan citizenship from the murky archives of colonialism. It will also question the heritage of Judeo-Christian tradition in the act of apologizing as well the ethical dilemmas when forgiveness becomes a political response resembling the religious tradition of confession. Discussing how forgiveness is heterogeneous to the juridico-political field, it will discuss the ethics of forgiveness. It will suggest that acknowledging the irreparable nature of injustices is key for overcoming, what Jacques Derrida calls, “the tyranny of the logic of reciprocity” in building a cosmopolitan and more democratic notion of citizenship.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Chargé de diffusion scientifique (9 septembre 2014). HCAS Symposium “Citizenship and Migration” — Helsinki, Collegium for Advanced Studies, 22-24/10/2014. IISMM. Consulté le 15 mars 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/pyj9


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