Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations

Revisioning Migrants and Mobilities through the Critique of Antiblackness

Edited by Philip Kretsedemas and Jamella N. Gow

Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations uses reflections on the Black experience to consider the “unasked question of blackness” in modern migration and movement. The editors and contributors use the lens of Black Studies to show how migration—compelled by force or suggestion, from the transatlantic African slave trade to the Great Migration and the current refugee crisis—has been structured to reinforce white supremacy.

Focusing on antiblackness in immigration and examining restrictions on freedom of movement and on settling alike, chapters address how Black im/mobility operates and how it can be distinguished from that of the migrant and the colonial settler, as well as from the transgressive mobilities of Indigenous populations. Looking at blackness, borders and border practices, and displacement, Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations investigates racialized boundaries that determine immigration policy, citizenship, legality, and inclusion. Additional chapters analyze communities, such as the Haitian diaspora in Miami, antiblackness in the context of Australian migration, and explore literary representations of justice, slavery and Black feminist consciousness.

Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations uses (anti)blackness to rethink the way we understand borders, immigrant identity, barriers to integration, and the dynamics of migrant exclusion, while also providing an understanding of “otherness” for Black populations across nationalities.

Contributors: Maya Hislop, P. Khalil Saucier, Hyacinth Udah, Paula von Gleich, Tryon P. Woods, and the editors

About the Author(s)

Philip Kretsedemas was Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston from 2005-2022, and is the author of Black Interdictions: Haitian Refugees and Antiblack Racism on the High Seas. He is currently the Managing Director of Research, Evaluation and Data Analytics for the Acacia Center for Justice.

Jamella N. Gow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College.

In the Series

Studies in Transgression

Studies in Transgression, edited by David C. Brotherton, publishes books at the intersection of sociology and critical criminology. This series challenges the normative conventions of the broader study of crime to produce a fuller accounting of a society’s responsibilities for and complicity in the threats and wrongdoing that come to be seen as police-able crimes. The series examines behaviors understood as transgressive by looking at the cultural assumptions that contextualize that reading and the structural factors that underlie those behaviors. Books in the series will examine marginal lifestyles and their relationship to crime around the Unites States and the globe. Perspective authors should contact the series edtior David C. Brotherton or Temple University Press Editor Ryan Mulligan to discuss their work in progress for inclusion in the series.