“From Distant Brother to Dangerous Animal"
Channel: Helsinki Collegium
Date: 2018-11-16

The international symposium "Politics of participation: Anthropological reflections on power and interaction" took place at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies on October 18-19, 2018

Panel 1: Scales of Participation and Community (Un)Belonging
Chair: Anssi Peräkylä, Professor, Sociology, University of Helsinki

Lynnette  Arnold, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University and Hilary Parsons Dick, Associate Professor, Historical and Political Studies, Arcadia University: “From Distant Brother to Dangerous Animal: A Transnational Participation Framework of Migrant Interpellation”

The social scientific interrogation of “participation” highlights its connection to the lessening of nation-state responsibility for social problems, which is a core feature of neoliberal regimes. This diminution emerges in dialogue with the production of imaginaries that interpellate individuals to participate in the nation by calling them to find the causes of social problems within themselves. Although such neoliberal imaginaries of participation are central to the global political economy, existing scholarship has concentrated on how they unfold within individual nation-states. In contrast, this paper focuses on the transnational construction of neoliberal imaginaries, examining how Salvadoran migrants are hailed to participate in the nation-state inside and across El Salvador and the United States. In both countries, there are long discursive histories that construct migrants as gendered and racialized characterological figures, from heroic “distant brothers” who lovingly care for their Salvadoran homeland to corrupting “animalistic criminals” who endanger the social fabric of the United States. While these positionings seem oppositional, they in fact work in tandem within a multiscalar transnational participation framework. Our paper elucidates the (re)production of this framework through the analysis of state-endorsed discourses about Salvadoran migrants in El Salvador and the U.S., showing that they articulate calls to participation that coopt migrants to the political economic interests of the state by positioning them as exceptional subjects, whether revered or demonized. Our analysis uses and scales up Goffman’s classical formulation of the participation framework to understand the processes of call and response that undergird interpellation. We trace how such calls and responses emerge not only in elite discourses of migration, but also in how migrants and non-migrant kin take up, reformulate, and resist such discourses. Through this, we show that talk and writing about migrants is a key site where the politics of participation is imagined and enacted.