Literature in a Time of Migration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Active Components ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
New Imperialism ◽  
Timely Reminder

Literature in a Time of Migration rethinks British fiction in the light of new practices of human mobility that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it confronts the paradox that at a time at which transnational human movement occurred globally, on a scale before unknown, British fiction appears to turn inward to tell stories of local places, in which stability and rootedness are rewarded. On the contrary, Literature in a Time of Migration reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement. Works by canonical writers (Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and George Eliot), and other popular contemporaries (Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas Martin Wheeler), examine issues that overlap with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration, which they also helped to shape. Debates concerning, for example, assisted emigration, ‘forced’ and ‘free’ migration, colonization, settlement, and the removal of native peoples, figure in complex ways in fictions. Read alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and enthusiasts, fictional texts reveal a sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within British cultural heritage.

The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Knowledge Age

The language of flowers is typically dismissed as a subgenre of botany books that, while popular, had little if any influence on the material culture of Victorian life. This article challenges this assumption by situating the genre within the context of the professionalisation of botany at mid-century to show how efforts to change attitudes towards botany from a fashionable pastime for the gentler sex to a utilitarian practice in service of humanity contributed to the revitalisation and popularity of the language of flowers. While scientific botanists sought to know flowers physiologically and morphologically in the spirit of progress and truth, practitioners of the language of flowers – written primarily for and by women – celebrated uncertainty and relied on floral codes to curtail knowing in order to extend the realm of play. The struggle for floral authority was centred in botanical discourses – both scientific and amateur – but extended as well into narrative fiction. Turning to works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I show how Victorian writers expected a certain degree of floral literacy from their readers and used floral codes strategically in their fiction as subtexts for practitioners of the language of flowers. These three writers, I argue, took a stand in the gender struggle over floral authority by creating scientific botanists who are so obsessed with dissecting plants to reveal their secrets and know their ‘life truths’ that they become farsighted in matters of romantic love and unable to read the most obvious and surface of floral codes. The consequences of the dismissal of the superficial are in some cases quite disastrous.

Novel Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.

scholarly journals Variation in human mobility and its impact on the risk of future COVID-19 outbreaks in Taiwan

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meng-Chun Chang ◽  
Rebecca Kahn ◽  
Yu-An Li ◽  
Cheng-Sheng Lee ◽  
Caroline O. Buckee ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Disease Surveillance ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Disease Spread ◽  
Spatial Spread ◽  
Movement Data ◽  
Intercity Travel ◽  
Travel Restrictions ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Background As COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, understanding how patterns of human mobility and connectivity affect outbreak dynamics, especially before outbreaks establish locally, is critical for informing response efforts. In Taiwan, most cases to date were imported or linked to imported cases. Methods In collaboration with Facebook Data for Good, we characterized changes in movement patterns in Taiwan since February 2020, and built metapopulation models that incorporate human movement data to identify the high risk areas of disease spread and assess the potential effects of local travel restrictions in Taiwan. Results We found that mobility changed with the number of local cases in Taiwan in the past few months. For each city, we identified the most highly connected areas that may serve as sources of importation during an outbreak. We showed that the risk of an outbreak in Taiwan is enhanced if initial infections occur around holidays. Intracity travel reductions have a higher impact on the risk of an outbreak than intercity travel reductions, while intercity travel reductions can narrow the scope of the outbreak and help target resources. The timing, duration, and level of travel reduction together determine the impact of travel reductions on the number of infections, and multiple combinations of these can result in similar impact. Conclusions To prepare for the potential spread within Taiwan, we utilized Facebook’s aggregated and anonymized movement and colocation data to identify cities with higher risk of infection and regional importation. We developed an interactive application that allows users to vary inputs and assumptions and shows the spatial spread of the disease and the impact of intercity and intracity travel reduction under different initial conditions. Our results can be used readily if local transmission occurs in Taiwan after relaxation of border control, providing important insights into future disease surveillance and policies for travel restrictions.

Migration, Displacement, and Dispossession

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Glick Schiller
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Human Migration ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Population Mobility ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Migration Regimes

Debates about migration, whether led by politicians or scholars, often approach migration as a relatively new challenge and categorize it as a “destabilizing force,” ignoring the fact that the world’s past and present has been built by human movement. Humans have always migrated. Individual and population mobility as well as settlement are part of humans’ shared history. To integrate migration into an understanding of humans’ shared past, present, and emerging possible futures, several concepts prove useful including migration regime, displacement, dispossession, conjuncture, colonization, border-making, nationalism, and racialization. Deployed together, these concepts identify moments in human history in which migration has been understood to be part of the human experience and when, where, and how migrants have been stigmatized, and those who move defined as culturally or biologically inferior. By coupling the concept of migration regimes with an analysis of changing modes of dispossession and displacement over millennia, scholars can illuminate the intersection of the economic and political transformations of governance structures as well as the varying concepts of “the migrant” and “nonmigrant,” and “native” and “foreigner.” Anti-immigrant ideologies preclude discussion of the broader economic and political restructurings that underlie both increased human movement and anti-migrant sentiments. They also deflect attention from a set of questions that are at the heart of the anthropology of migration: Why do people leave familiar terrains, family, and friends? How do they manage to move and settle elsewhere? How do they relate to the life they left behind? These are questions that can equally be asked of people who move to another region of a country or travel across political boundaries. To answer these questions migration scholars have explored the linkages between forms of human mobility and processes of dispossession, displacement, and resettlement. In these investigations, social networks prove to be central to mobility and settlement. Since the 15th century, changing Western theories about human migration and the origins of political and social boundaries reflected transformations in political economy. Globe-spanning migration regimes used violent force, border formation and dissolution, documents, surveillance, and criminalization to allow the migration of some and disallow the movement or settlement of others. During that period, marked initially by colonialism and slavery, and then by nation state building and anticolonial struggles, migration scholars including the anthropologists took varying positions on the significance of mobility and stasis in human life. By the beginning of the 21st century, the accumulation of capital by dispossession emerged as a process increasingly central to a historical conjuncture marked by both heightened migration and anti-immigrant nationalism. Political struggles for social and environmental justice began to merge with movements in support of migration. This political climate shaped a new engaged anthropology of migration.

scholarly journals Estimating infection-related human mobility networks based on time series data of COVID-19 infection in Japan

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tetsuya Yamada ◽  
Shoi Shi
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Time Series Data ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Emerging Infectious Diseases ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Disease Spread ◽  
Series Data ◽  
Data Infrastructure

Comprehensive and evidence-based countermeasures against emerging infectious diseases have become increasingly important in recent years. COVID-19 and many other infectious diseases are spread by human movement and contact, but complex transportation networks in 21 century make it difficult to predict disease spread in rapidly changing situations. It is especially challenging to estimate the network of infection transmission in the countries that the traffic and human movement data infrastructure is not yet developed. In this study, we devised a method to estimate the network of transmission of COVID-19 from the time series data of its infection and applied it to determine its spread across areas in Japan. We incorporated the effects of soft lockdowns, such as the declaration of a state of emergency, and changes in the infection network due to government-sponsored travel promotion, and predicted the spread of infection using the Tokyo Olympics as a model. The models used in this study are available online, and our data-driven infection network models are scalable, whether it be at the level of a city, town, country, or continent, and applicable anywhere in the world, as long as the time-series data of infections per region is available. These estimations of effective distance and the depiction of infectious disease networks based on actual infection data are expected to be useful in devising data-driven countermeasures against emerging infectious diseases worldwide.

scholarly journals Introduction to Symposium on Framing Global Migration Law – Part II

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 134-135
Author(s):  
Jaya Ramji-Nogales ◽  
Peter J. Spiro
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Control Approach ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Economic Migration ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
Migration Law

Part I of this symposium on framing global migration law introduced broad conceptual parameters of a new field, looking back to its international law roots and forward to a new orientation beyond the strictures of refugee law. Part II looks to situate global migration law along a range of theoretical dimensions. Jacqueline Bhabha establishes the continuities of human movement in a historical context, modern and premodern. Far from representing a radical departure, the current migration “crisis” is consistent with massive migrations over the ages. Tendayi Achiume considers migration through the lens of colonization and decolonization. Out-migration from Europe was a core economic element of the colonization project; Achiume suggests that contemporary migration from former dependencies to metropolitan powers will correct co-dependencies that continue to advantage postcolonial powers. Focusing Achiume's lens on the problem of human trafficking, Janie Chuang complicates the binary depictions of economic migration that underpin contemporary international law. She suggests that global migration law's grounding in a migrant-centered perspective could help state actors to understand the structural causes of modern-day exploitation, enabling a shift from a crime control approach to a human mobility paradigm.

The local structures of human mobility in Chicago

2020 ◽  
pp. 239980832094953
Author(s):  
James Saxon
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Property Crime ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Routine Activity Theory ◽  
Social Capital Theory ◽  
Routine Activity ◽  
Local Network ◽  
Capital Theory ◽  
Jane Jacobs

A large literature establishes the role of mobility in the maintenance of neighborhood social structures. Jane Jacobs famously argued that social capital is maintained through “cross-use of space,” and James Coleman formalized its dependence on the “closure” of human interactions. Since many of these interactions entail human movement, neighborhoods with higher social capital should be distinguishable by more cohesive mobility networks. I observe the mobility of Chicago residents through a large dataset of smartphone users. I construct a neighborhood-level mobility network for the city and characterize neighborhoods according to their local graph structure. Neighborhoods that are well integrated with their surroundings have higher income and educational attainment. Consistent with social capital theory and routine activity theory in criminology, higher local network integration independently predicts lower levels of violent and property crime. The methodologies presented provide a meaningful, replicable, and inexpensive approach to the structural measurement of neighborhood networks and social structure.

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