Results by title
125 books match the query 'Migration' and 5 start with p
Pan-African Resonance
Music, Migration, and Everyday Practice in London and AccraAlison Okuda
Ohio University Press, 2026
As African and Caribbean nations gained independence from Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, many young musicians, students, and professionals crossed the Atlantic in search of new opportunities and built vibrant communities. Pan-African Resonance: Music, Migration, and Everyday Practice in London and Accra traces these journeys from Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Barbados, and Guyana, exploring how migrants practiced pan-Africanism through music across continents and generations. Drawing on musical recordings, newspapers, oral histories, and government documents from six countries, Alison Okuda demonstrates that pan-African solidarity thrived through the everyday creation and enjoyment of popular music. The book unfolds in two parts. Starting in the 1950s, it examines how Ghanaian highlife and Trinidadian calypso brought together musicians and young members of the independence generation, first in London and later in Accra. Even amid cultural tensions, Ghanaian and Caribbean communities expressed aspirations for freedom and unity in nightclubs, recording studios, private homes, and public streets. Before Ghana’s 1966 coup d’état, Ghanaians and diasporic Africans collaborated to shape an independent African-Atlantic world. Although the coup disrupted formal Pan-Africanist organizing, in the second part of the book Okuda shows that in the 1970s a new generation sustained dynamic networks of solidarity through highlife, reggae, and other popular styles—heard in recordings, radio broadcasts, live performances, and community events. Influenced by generational change and musical fluidity, African diasporic unity has remained central to popular music, migration, and politics in Ghana and the wider African-Atlantic world into the twenty-first century. Offering a rich interdisciplinary approach, Pan-African Resonance will appeal to readers interested in popular culture, transnational history, diaspora studies, and modern African history.
Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan
Locating the Good LifeElena Borisova
University College London, 2024
Tajikistan is one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan foregrounds the experiences of those who “stay put” in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. In this first book-length ethnography of migration in Tajikistan, Elena Borisova examines the role of mobility through historical and cultural ideas about the good life. She demonstrates how mobility becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral, and modern subjects. Addressing the complex relationship between the economic, imaginative, and moral aspects of (im)mobility, Borisova shows that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigating ethical personhood as it is a quest for economic resources.
This book is a beautifully crafted ethnographic account that reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship, and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person, and the family. It is a major contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centered on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. Highly readable, it will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia.
Peasantry in the Cheb City-State in the Late Middle Ages
Socioeconomic Mobility and MigrationTomáš Klír
Karolinum Press, 2024
The medieval peasantry represents a particularly compelling unknown for historians, as it holds the key to understanding both later economic growth and the surprising stagnation experienced in some European regions. Our current knowledge about the social structures and institutions of the medieval peasantry remains superficial, with almost nothing known about their real inner dynamics and demographic aspects. The present monograph confronts this issue head-on, taking advantage of previously neglected written sources from the Cheb city-state, which are unique in the European context. Drawing from this material, the book presents a remarkably detailed view of social mobility, migration, and the reproduction of social structures among the peasantry in the late Middle Ages while offering new perspectives on the mass abandonment of rural settlements during that period. It also identifies hitherto unknown mechanisms by which peasant communities responded to family demographic cycles and short-term economic fluctuations.
Planetarity from Below
Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and DiasporaEmily Yu Zong
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Through short stories, memoirs, speculative fiction, poetry, and documentary films, Zong unpacks a decolonial migrant ecopoetics, revealing a pluralist method of worldmaking—from Australia’s oceanic refugee camps, Indigenous Canadian land, and Chinese migrant worker sweatshops, to climate futures. These migrant ecologies imagine freedom “from below” not simply as individual survival or assimilation but as an unruly and contingent process of shared creativity with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology.
Shifting environmental ethics from individual morality to a political ecology of sustaining life in precarity, Zong introduces decolonial knowledges, imaginations, and praxes that help us expand justice and freedom beyond the human, asking how borderland subjectivities can open new possibilities for multispecies flourishing.
Polish Cities of Migration
The Migration Transition in Kalisz, Pila and PlockAnne White
University College London, 2024
Polish Cities of Migration analyzes Poland’s transition to become a “country of immigration.” Incorporating in-depth interviews with thirty-seven Polish returned migrants, seventy Ukrainians, and seventeen foreigners living in Kalisz, Plock, and Pila, the book explores two interconnected puzzles: how Poland’s migration transition is influenced by its current status as an emigration country, and why migrants are spreading out beyond the metropolises. It argues that migrants’ feelings of comfort in such locations are explained by network and lifestyle considerations, as well as the social acceptance of migration by former migrant Poles.