Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

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2. Migration, Temporality and Capitalism: A Brief Introduction

   • Pauline Gardiner Barber, Winnie Lem

   Pages 1-19

3. Chronotopes of Migration Scholarship: Challenges of Contemporaneity and Historical Conjuncture

   • Ayşe Çağlar

   Pages 21-41

4. The Timescape of Post-WWII Caribbean Migration to Britain: Historical Heterogeneity as Challenge and Opportunity

   • Karen Fog Olwig

   Pages 43-61

5. Time at Sea, Time on Land: Temporal Horizons of Rescue and Refuge in the Mediterranean and Europe

   • Naor Ben-Yehoyada

   Pages 63-79

6. Conjunctural Reversals, Capital Accumulation and Family Adjustments in Chinese Trans-Pacific Migration

   • Anne-Christine Trémon

   Pages 81-102

7. Migrating for a Better Future: ‘Lost Time’ and Its Social Consequences Among Young Somali Migrants

   • Anja Simonsen

   Pages 103-121

8. “Wait, and While You Wait, Work”: On the Reproduction of Precarious Labor in Liminal Spaces

   • Catherine Bryan

   Pages 123-139

9. Migration Across Intersecting Temporalities: Venezuelan Migrants and ‘Readiness’ in Montreal

   • Turid Fånes Sætermo

   Pages 141-159

10. The Entanglements of Neoliberal Temporalities and Class Politics in Philippine Migration to Canada

    • Pauline Gardiner Barber

    Pages 161-184

11. The Dialectics of Uneven Spatial-Temporal Development: Migrants and Reproduction in Late Capitalism

    • Winnie Lem

    Pages 185-206

12. Back Matter

    Pages 207-215

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Bringing together a range of illustrative case studies coupled with fresh theoretical insights, this volume is one of the first to address the complexities and contradictions in the relationship between migration, time, and capitalism. While temporal reckoning has long fascinated anthropologists, few studies have sought to confront how capitalism fetishizes time in the production of global inequalities—historically and in the contemporary world. As it explores how the agendas of capitalism condition migration in Europe, North America, and Oceania, this collection also examines temporality as a feature of migrants’ experiences to ultimately provide a theoretically robust and ethnographically informed investigation of migration and temporality within a framework defined by the political economy of capitalism.  

• capitalism
• neoliberalism
• migration
• temporal scales
• spatial mobilities
• temporal forces
• capitalist transformation
• capital accumulation
• global inequalities
• political economy
• refugees
• displaced persons
• dispossession
• temporal designation
• global labor
• ethnographic
• disposable workers
• deportees
• citizenship

"This volume explores an extraordinarily timely and theoretical issue in the study of migration: how the temporalities that mark the lives of migrants can be related to recent contemporary transformations in capitalism, and to changes in capitalist states in the direction of neoliberalism, within the discourse of the ‘free market.’ At a time when it is precisely the temporality of contemporary capitalism – will the current stasis and “new normal” of worldwide deflation stabilize or will it lead to major crisis, and how soon and with what rhythms? – the authors deal in a theoretically sophisticated way with the temporality of capitalism as it affects, and is affected, by transnational migration and the lives of migrants. The collection of essays as a whole examines new case studies within this context, and brings new concepts to the debates around the relationship between transnational migration and the political-economic conditions that constrain it." (Don Nonini, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

• Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

  Pauline Gardiner Barber

• Champlain College, Trent University, Toronto, ON, Canada

  Winnie Lem

Pauline Gardiner Barber is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, Canada. 

Winnie Lem is Professor of International Development Studies at Trent University, Canada.

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