Introduction In line with long-standing debates in diverse disciplines, over the past few years scholars have increasingly argued that redressing the Eurocentrism of migration studies requires a commitment to a “decentering of global North knowledge
The Ontological Turn
Taking Different Worlds Seriously
Andrew Pickering
. This example, like many others, is very straightforward, and I want to generalize from it. The world—humans, nonhumans, and whatever—just is an indefinite multiplicity of performative entities endlessly becoming in decentered and emergent dances of
Kudzai Matereke
. By foregrounding new forms of mobility in the African context, the articles under consideration attempt to decenter Western-centric articulations of mobility. Decentering is unavoidably a way of clearing or creating space. The object’s continued
Reclaiming the streets
Black urban insurgency and antisocial security in twenty-first-century Philadelphia
Jeff Maskovsky
a new urban securitization and surveillance regime that I call the regime of antisocial security. This regime is grafting onto the racialized urban post-welfarism and the carceral turn of the late twentieth century a decentered surveillance and
Traveling “Back” to India
Globalization as Imperialism in Pico Iyer's Video Night in Kathmandu
Malini Johar Schueller
This article teases out the complex intersections between Pico Iyer's Video Night in Kathmandu as an Orientalist travel narrative and as a treatise on the cultural flows of globalization by analyzing the politics of Iyer's adoption of a migrant, cosmopolitan persona as well as his conscious attempt to rewrite the gendered hierarchies of imperialism. It examines the unspoken privileges of whiteness and Westernness in Iyer's adoption of a decentered persona that struggles to overcome (particularly in his chapter on India) being interpellated as “Indian.” The larger purpose of the essay is to interrogate the rhetoric of cultural globalization as beyond the hierarchies of imperialism.
Images of Transgression
Teyyam in Malabar
Dinesan Vadakkiniyil
This article focuses on Muttappan and the practice of teyyam in Kerala, South India. The growing power and increasing presence of this ritual practice and its transition from traditional sacred spaces into modern public spheres, including cyberspace, are analyzed in order to understand its inner dynamics and potentialities. Engaged with the quotidian aspects of human existence, the male divinity Muttappan-teyyam is a being of the moment who overcomes any bounding or hierarchizing force in his path. I argue that Muttappan's modernity has a decentering and destabilizing fluidity that appeals to all social classes. The ritual practice has put the arts and the state at odds, with the latter co-opting it to serve the state's purposes through tourism and spectacles that encourage national solidarity.
Rosa E. Ficek, Shanshan Lan, Walter Gam Nkwi, Sarah Walker, and Paula Soto Villagrán
Decentering the State in Automobility Regimes
Kurt Beck, Gabriel Klaeger, and Michael Stasik, eds., The Making of an African Road (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 278 pp., 34 illustrations, $78 (paperback)
Understanding Globalization from Below in China
Gordon Mathews, with Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang, The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 256 pp., $27.50 (paperback)
Rethinking Mobility and Innovation: African Perspectives
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, ed., What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 256 pp., 25 black-and-white illustrations, $36 (paperback)
When Is a Crisis Not a Crisis? The Illegalization of Mobility in Europe
Nicholas De Genova, ed., The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 376 pp., $27.95 (paperback)
City, Mobility, and Insecurity: A Mobile Ethnography of Beirut
Kristin V. Monroe, The Insecure City: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 204 pp., 7 photographs, $27.95 (paperback)
Editorial
Mobility Studies, a Transdisciplinary Field
Dagmar Schäfer
engineering as much as the arts and humanities and continue to publish cutting-edge articles from a humanities perspective, decentering the vehicle, the nation, and even history. At this point, we envisage going for an even broader horizon—and thinking beyond
Beyond the Individual Body
Spinoza's Radical Enactivism and You Were Never Really Here
Francesco Sticchi
while they clean cutlery. Again, at first glance it may seem that the film is deliberately preventing and countering any possibility for an embodied interaction with Joe, because of his constant elliptical and decentered configuration. However, if we
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Mette Louise Berg, and Johanna Waters
opposite of “the North.” As noted by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley (2018: 22) , “Decoloniality demands a de-centering of global North knowledge through opening up spaces in Northern publications and through genuine collaborations in knowledge production