Concept

Our interest is not to approach immigration as a process for identity formation, and solidification. Quite the contrary, for us immigration is an example par excellence of coexisting identities impacting each other, collectively engaging in a process of perpetual change and refashioning. Immigration demands our reevaluation of concepts such as that of human rights, which Giorgio Agamben argues was really conceived as the ever-disappearing concept of the citizen. How do we re-imagine the concept of the human in a way that it does not presuppose the citizen, in a way that it does not erase the experience of the immigrant? How do we reimagine the concept of rights in a way that it does not presuppose the citizen. How do we reimagine the concept of rights and materiality, going beyond Spinoza. And following Judith Butler, what lives count and what lives are made invisible? How do we conceptualize an ethical understanding of the human that is vulnerable to others who are not recognized as human/citizens? How do we conceptualize an ethics that moves beyond the human. How is immigrant labor justified in language that speaks of biopolitics, welfare, and governmentality? And when it comes to identity politics, how can we move beyond the territorialized and rigid formation of identities to speak instead of unfolding identities engaged in multiple, simultaneous processes of collective becoming, as Gilles Deleuze argued? Are we not only entangled/enmeshed with each other but also involved in multiple processes of innovation and reinvention that are impacted by others around us? Are we part of a multiple, collective process of perpetual motion, always unfolding, as collective groups that are constantly reinventing and reenergizing each other through art and political engagement? And, how is this subjectivity in the making that Rosi Braidotti speaks of conjoined by immigration flows?