The Migrant Metropolis
The Migrant Metropolis
Participants in this conference will examine how urban spaces in the modern United States have been built and re-built by the movement of people. The conference will focus on the impact of migration and immigration on the networks of cities, suburbs, and hinterlands long central to organizing American life. The metropolis is fashioned not just by powerful interests, clear-cut "push" and "pull" factors, and resultant population changes. Equally formative are the varieties of aspirational politics, commercial activity, and cultural production that accompany migration and community building.
Presentations and discussions will revisit traditional questions about assimilation, the role of racial or ethnic identity, and the formal (legal) politics of belonging by introducing a range of new vantage points, including: regional, borderland, and transnational community-building; the spatial politics of metropolitan inclusion and exclusion; the political economy of policing and incarceration; and global circuits of intellectual and cultural production. Scholars will examine how metropolitan spaces have historically served as catalysts for changing ideas about citizenship, for acceptable uses of state power, and for ongoing processes of racial formation. The Migrant Metropolis will foster conversations about the ways that urbanized sites are not simply places but also processes, integral to shaping political, economic, and cultural life in the modern United States.
The Migrant Metropolis is being organized by Wendy Cheng (Arizona State), Nathan Connolly (Johns Hopkins), David Freund (University of Maryland), Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (University of Michigan), Ana Rosas (University of California, Irvine), and Andrew Wiese (San Diego State).
Please visit the Center for the History of the New America for more information.