Preface: Stuck in Motion?

Abstract

In this special section we rethink the role of movement and stasis in an age of globalization from an existential perspective. We suggest that this theoretical avenue is particularly well suited to move beyond the dualistic binaries that have haunted much writing on mobilities. Rather than fixating movement and stasis into two opposite poles, this perspective allows us to productively work with the overlaps and paradoxes as they appear in the everyday, thereby carving out a dialectics of im/mobility. We argue that exploring the interplay of movement and stasis has become particularly important in the current global political climate, where the mobilities of people and groups deemed troublesome are violently cut short or obstructed in ways that keep them “stuck” in continuous loops of “motion”. By zooming in on the vectorial metaphors migrants and refugees seemingly stuck in immovable conditions deploy to make sense of their situations, we conceptualize both the existential orientation of migratory projects and the wider social and political coordinates impinging on these inner quests for (forward) movement and/or stillness.

Waiting to Move On: Migration, Borderwork and Mobility Economies in Libya

“…The intersections of clandestine economies, which predate upon migrants' time and their bodies as commodities, and intimate economies, through which time is renewed and which reproduce mobile bodies, fosters new and much-needed conversations between recent anthropological writing on waiting and mobility (Ibañez Tirado 2019; Lems and Tošić 2019;Reeves 2019) and understandings of migration and 'bioeconomies' (Andersson 2018;Rose 2007) in fragmented state contexts. Focusing on the dynamics of waiting and borderwork brings migrants to the foreground as subjects, not just victims acted upon by biopolitical power (De Genova 2017).…”

“…I aim to understand how transnational bordering not only spatialises (De Genova 2017;Reeves 2014) but, in fragmented state contexts and along journeys, produces different dynamics of waiting. Studies of migration in anthropology have largely focused on the spatial rather than temporal aspect of mobility, and on fixed places at the beginning or end of a linear journey from A to B, while anthropological studies of time have neglected migration (for a discussion, see Lems and Tošić 2019;Reeves 2019). Bringing the temporal and spatial together, I look at waiting beyond being empty time and at mobility beyond linear movement.…”

“…An ethnography of waiting to move on in this context of fragmented state authority allows us to reach beyond the role of the law and state to migrants' experiences of movement and stillness, often missing from the otherwise rich scholarship on the wider EU borderlands (see Andersson 2014a;Bialasiewicz 2012;Cabot 2014;De Genova 2017). Highlighting waiting as a form of mobility rather than a passive activity builds on emerging work that moves beyond waiting as empty time (see Ibañez Tirado 2019;Lems and Tošić 2019;Reeves 2019). 2 This focus on migrants' journeys and experiences of mobility in a context of fragmented state authority reveals not only how waiting is spatialised beyond sites where it has typically been studied, but also how it is temporalised.…”

Possessed by a slave, not slavery

“…These crossroads of Self and Other (also appearing between interiority and exteriority in a process of 'infoldings' and 'outfoldings', as Espírito Santo terms them) are linked to notions and experiences of harnessing or blocking motion. They are, as Beliso-De Jesús aptly puts it, 'crucial nodes of adhesion and disarticulation (…) an important geographic spiritual locator, spatializing one's relationality with good and bad things that may come one's way, [nodes that are linked to] social-spiritual notions of travel' (2013: 712) that add 'perceptual religious dimensions to mobility' or, as Martin Holbraad frames it, 'motility' and 'directed motion' (see Holbraad 2007; see also Lems and Tošić 2019). What I have described, therefore, is not only Anastasios Panagiotopoulos limited to possessions by spirits of slaves, but refers, in one way or another, to a variety of entities met in the broader Afro-Cuban cosmos.…”

Waiting to Move On: Migration, Borderwork and Mobility Economies in Libya

“…I aim to understand how transnational bordering not only spatialises (De Genova 2017; Reeves 2014) but, in fragmented state contexts and along journeys, produces different dynamics of waiting. Studies of migration in anthropology have largely focused on the spatial rather than temporal aspect of mobility, and on fixed places at the beginning or end of a linear journey from A to B, while anthropological studies of time have neglected migration (for a discussion, see Lems and Tošić 2019;Reeves 2019). Bringing the temporal and spatial together, I look at waiting beyond being empty time and at mobility beyond linear movement.…”