Culture as politics in contemporary migration contexts: the in/visibilization of power relations
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES(2023)
Abstract
In the 1990s, an essentialist, bounded understanding of culture delimiting (ethno-national) groups based on allegedly discrete sets of natural characteristics came to structure politics in North Atlantic migration contexts, justifying migrant exclusion or celebrating inclusion. Yet, how this idea of "culture-as-defining-attribute" works among people situated in everyday life remains understudied. We develop an analytical framework centred on discursive repertoires, sources of relational meaning-production, anchored in historical contexts, and embedded in power. Analyzing 125 essays written by Toronto and Neuchatel undergraduate students, we demonstrate that using culture-as-defining-attribute results in an in/visibilization of power relations. Toronto students hypervisibilize a positively inflected conviviality across multicultural diversity, while invisibilizing racism and settler colonialism. Neuchatel students visibilize the production of migranticized others, invisibilizing nativism and non-migrant/white structural privileges. We end with a plea for context-specific analysis of culture-as-defining-attribute and a deeper understanding of in/visibilization as a significant "missing link" in current analyses of culture and ex/inclusion.
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Key words
Uses of culture,migranticization,racialization,nativism,discursive repertoires,invisibilization
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