In his essay ‘Butterfly Crossings’, anthropologist Anand Pandian observes how the monarch butterfly, Danaus Plexippus, gradually became a symbol in the protests in North America for the rights of undocumented migrants who try to cross the border between Mexico and the United States: ‘Monarchs are celebrated for their migration. But it isn’t simply how far they go, year after year; there’s also the astonishing fact of their convergence, their ability to find each other at a time when national borders govern the movement of individual human bodies so forcefully, disrupting family ties and relationships.’[i] Pandian’s definition of migration as ‘a bedrock reality of earthly life, whether human or otherwise’[ii] easily becomes a starting point to reflect on migration in critical posthumanist terms. I employ the term ‘critical posthumanism’ throughout in the entry, referring to Stefan Herbrechter’s entry in this Genealogy where he defines it as ‘the contemporary social discourse […] which negotiates the pressing contemporary question of what it means to be human under the conditions of globalization, technoscience, late capitalism and climate change’.[iii] ‘Critical’ also stands before ‘posthumanism’ to bear in mind that humanism is not rejected tout court but is observed critically, to defend and possibly reinvent ‘some humanist values and methodologies’.[iv] The turn to critical posthumanism stems from the need to take a step away from what we have so far been considering the human, to reconceive it as part and parcel of the world in which it is embedded. Critical posthumanism, hence, can help in the understanding of migration as an integral part of human and nonhuman life on earth. Only by taking a critical distance from humanism can we return to it with a renewed and reinvigorated conception of what it means to be human in the 21st century, a conception that includes marginalised communities and people on the move. Accordingly, approaching migration from a critical posthumanist perspective can offer new insights on a plethora of issues that are closely related to migration discourses in our contemporary world. In that spirit, this entry focuses on the socio-cultural debate on migration in the Global North.
Public discourses on migration are often imbued with anti-migration sentiments which are rooted in racist and colonial ideologies. These discourses often convey dehumanising views of people on the move, by neglecting their personal narratives and their experiences of migration. Under the critical posthumanist lens and studied in continuity with the work done by postcolonial scholars, migration overcomes the unitary idea of Vitruvian Man and rejects stasis and fixity in favour of movement and commingling. The movement that migration entails, and that stories of migration bring about, can further foster dialogue with ‘philosophical, legal, and cultural traditions beyond the West’.[v] Critical posthumanism offers a more inclusive take on humanist values that can benefit studies on migration and refresh our understanding of what it means to be human today. As Simone Bignall aptly states, posthumanism ‘promotes a relational conceptualization of the human as culturally embedded and materially embodied, constitutively connected with diverse environmental agencies and nonhuman others’.[vi]
For instance, the frequently heard appeal towards of ‘giving voice’ to migrants is employed with good intentions by policy makers and NGO representatives. However, it seems to imply that people on the move do not already possess a voice, and hence risks placing even humanitarian discourses around migration within an exclusivist ethics that does not envision agency for people on the move.[vii] Tom Western’s compelling study on the sounds of migration in the city of Athens aptly offers a vivid example of how ‘migration [is] a sonic phenomenon’ and emphasises ‘the disruptive potential of sound in representing displacement’[viii]. Western also criticises the use of ‘“refugee voices” to stimulate sympathy’ and observes how ‘the idea of “giving voice” to the voiceless […] is discursive sleight of hand. The notion that people can now speak for themselves is a construct that gives a platform only to those able to make their personal experiences legible to a mainstream audience through use of dominant narratives and devices’ [ix]. In other words, stories of migration and the voices of people on the move are increasingly being heard, but Western wonders if this is simply due to the ways in which we allow these stories to be heard, following master narratives which are conveyed through canonical narrative strategies that involve linearity, reliability, and causality.[x]
Critical posthumanism comes to help if we start to think of migrant voices and narrative agency in terms of relationality. In particular, ‘posthumanism troubles the question of agency […] retaining possibilities for minoritized groups to assert agency and bear witness’ and also, to tell one’s story without adhering to canonical formal expectations.[xi] Relationality, likewise, proves to be a productive element to better reconceptualise the way we talk about migration as it heavily relies on interconnectedness and materiality. One practical example may be thinking about the process a migrant person has to go through to obtain the refugee status. One of the most immediate requirements they have to fulfil is to provide the authorities in charge with a coherent, fixed, and congruous narrative that has the purpose of explaining why and how they are there, where and what they have fled from, and why they need protection. As such, for some people on the move, telling their story is a question of life and death, and often forces them to comply with certain narrative templates offered by a specific socio-legislative context – e.g. by the police office, the court. This process of presenting a coherent story also relies on and is challenged by the relations with other people and the role that they play in their lives as well as in the process of obtaining such vital documents. Conceiving of the self as in constant becoming and having multiple belongings, understanding the construction of the self as in relation to and entangled with other human and nonhuman entities as proposed by Rosi Braidotti through her investigation of posthuman subjectivity can offer a new framework around which personal stories of migration are understood in socio-legislative contexts.[xii]
Moreover, critical posthumanism in its bond with environmental theory aims at ‘stress[ing] the link between the humanistic emphasis on Man as the measure of all things and the domination and exploitation of nature,’[xiii] offering useful tools through which policy makers may finally define and implement the notion of climate refugee, which still lacks a proper legal and official definition.[xiv] Being aware of climate displacement in legal and political terms puts pressure to act towards welcoming and protecting people affected and displaced by anthropogenic climate change. What is more, despite the fact that critical posthumanism is primarily interested in healing planet Earth, the debate around migration to other planets does exist and is becoming more and more prominent, with private companies developing their own projects and spaceships to bring the human species onto other planets. For instance, transhumanist tycoon Elon Musk, with his Space X project, aims to ‘make humanity interplanetary’, as stated on the home page of his company – a sentence that eerily echoes Donald Trump’s election slogan ‘Make America Great Again’.[xv] A posthumanist approach to migration can – and should – contribute to this debate. It should be questioning how and why we intend to make humanity interplanetary. And, most importantly perhaps, it should demand to clarify what humanity? And at what cost for the environment and for the nonhuman inhabitants of planet earth?[xvi]
Another productive way in which critical posthumanism can intervene in the socio-political debate on migration in the Global North is by offering its take on technology. Indeed, videocalls, and more broadly, ICTs – Information and Communication Technologies – have already been increasingly impacting the lives of people on the move in striking ways, even before the pandemic, and they are also the main means through which we learn of and understand migration. Their relevance in migration has also triggered controversial debates: images of refugees disembarking from NGO boats with their smartphones have often sparked xenophobic outrage on social media and press, not taking into account, among other things, the significance that such devices have for someone who is fleeing their country through dangerous and unpredictable journeys.[xvii] ICTs are considered among the crucial factors that have contributed to the increase of migration processes and even facilitated it as they allow ‘migrants to maintain closer and cheaper contact with their homeland in a manner that was not possible in the past’.[xviii] Maintaining contact impacts on the perceived distance from the homeland as well as from its people. That distance seems reduced, and easier to handle also from an emotional point of view.
Without a doubt, thinking of technology in relation to migration immediately rekindles the dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ technology.[xix] It is possible to differentiate between technologies of surveillance, such as drones or face recognition software, which are part and parcel of today’s surveillance culture, and technologies of connection, such as messaging or social media apps, which put people distant from one another in contact. As a technology of connection, smartphones may allow for smoother communication between people on the move and their relatives back home or in the country of arrival. They may help preserve the connection to one’s origins and can also be used to call for help in situations of emergency. At the same time, this connection is itself fallible if it is not supported by a stable infrastructural system, or by economic conditions that allow one to possess and use smartphones. However, in order to understand technology in the context of migration, we need to overcome this binary and focus on the interconnection between humans and technology. At this point, N. Katherine Hayles’s theory of cognitive assemblages helps. Hayles draws on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which looks at human agents and nonhuman objects and processes as existing within a web of relations. From this, she theorises cognitive assemblages as systems that take into consideration ‘human conscious decisions, human nonconscious […] and the technical cognitive nonconscious of the computer algorithms, processors, and database’, the most basic example of which would be the internet or other ICTs.[xx] Hayles states that humans and technological devices form stable communication nodes and, as a consequence, they are interconnected and affect each other ‘with interactions occurring across the full range of human cognition’.[xxi] The notion of cognitive assemblages is a productive one in the context of migration, because it helps us think of technologies as agential. Hence it avoids the assumption that ‘agency and consequently decisional power lie entirely with humans without considering the effects of technical mediation’.[xxii] Reconsidering technology as something inextricably linked to the human, as something that acts with the human – as part of a cognitive assemblage, then – can help us see beyond the mere dualistic distinction, a shift that must include reconceiving the complexity of contemporary migratory phenomena as embedded in a thick network of advanced technologies that affect and modulate our understandings of distance and communication.
[i] Anand Pandian. ‘Butterfly Crossings.’ Environmental Humanities, 14.2 (2022): 438–56, p. 477. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712500.
[ii] Pandian, ‘Crossings’, p. 440.
[iii] See the entry on ‘Critical Posthumanism’ in this Genealogy.
[iv] Herbrechter. ‘Critical Posthumanism’.
[v] Simone Bignall, ‘Colonial Humanism, Alter-Humanism and Ex-Colonialism’, in Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, ed. by Stefan Herbrechter and others (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 295–316, p. 310.
[vi] Bignall, ‘Colonial Humanism’, p. 310.
[vii] For the definition of exclusivist ethicsm see Janina Loh, ‘Posthumanism and Ethics’, in Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, ed. by Stefan Herbrechter and others (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2022), pp. 1–23, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1_34-2.
[viii] Tom Western, ‘Listening with Displacement’, Migration and Society, 3.1 (2020): 194–309, doi:10.3167/arms.2020.030128.
[ix] Western, ‘Listening’, p. 303.
[x] See also the entry on ‘Narrative’ in this Genealogy.
[xi] Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido, and Linda M. Hess, ‘Introduction: Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene’, in Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, ed. by Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido, and Linda M. Hess (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 1–19, (p. 4).
[xii] I talk more extensively about the issue of narrative agency and migration employing the notion of narrative subjectivity in Simona Adinolfi, ‘Reconsidering Identity Formation Processes in Fictions of Migration: Narrative Subjectivity in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine’, in Mobility, Agency, Kinship, ed. by Lea Espinoza Garrido, Carolin Gebauer and Julia Wewior, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature 2024), pp. 33–55, doi:10.1007/978-3-031-60754-7_2.
[xiii] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 48.
[xiv] Ben De Bruyn, ‘The Great Displacement: Reading Migration Fiction at the End of the World’, Humanities, 9.1 (2020): 2 , doi:10.3390/h9010025.
[xv] See SpaceX main website: https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/mars/.
[xvi] See also Francesca Ferrando, ‘Why Space Migration Must Be Posthuman’, in The Ethics of Space Exploration, ed. by James S. J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2016), pp. 137–52, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-39827-3_10.
[xvii] James O’Malley, ‘Surprised That Syrian Refugees Have Smartphones? Sorry to Break This to You, but You’re an Idiot’, Independent <https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/surprised-that-syrian-refugees-have-smartphones-well-sorry-to-break-this-to-you-but-you-re-an-idiot-10489719.html> [accessed 23 August 2023].
[xviii] Michele Reis, ‘Theorizing Diaspora: Perspectives on “Classical” and “Contemporary” Diaspora’, International Migration, 42.2 (2004): 41–60, p. 48, doi:10.1111/j.0020-7985.2004.00280.x.
[xix] See also the entry on ‘Technological and Posthumanist Zones’ in this Genealogy where R. L. Rutsky talks about ‘dystopian’ and ‘utopian’ views of technology.
[xx] N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions’, Critical Inquiry 43.1 (2016):32–55, p.39).
[xxi] Hayles, ‘Cognitive Assemblages’, p. 33.
[xxii] Hayles, ‘Cognitive Assemblages’, p. 35.