This collection of essays investigates the convergence between the postmodern politics of mobility and a politics of metaphor, a politics, in other words, in the context of which the production and displacement of meaning(s) constitute the major stakes. Ranging from discussions of re-territorialization, multiculturalism, “digisporas” and transnational politics and ethics, to September 11th, the Pentagon’s New Map, American legislation on Chinese immigration, Gianni Amelio’s film Lamerica, Keith Piper’s online installations and Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios, the collection aims to follow three different theoretical trajectories. First, it seeks to rethink our concepts of mobility in order to open them up to the complexity that structures the thoughts and practices of a global order. Second, it critically examines the privileged position of concepts and metaphors of mobility within postmodern theory. In juxtaposing conflictual theoretical formulations, the book sets out to present the competing responses that fuel academic debates around this issue. Finally, it evaluates the influence of our increasingly mobile conceptual frameworks and everyday experience on the redefinition of politics that is currently under way, especially in the context of Post-Marxist theory. Its hope is to contribute to the production of alternative political positions and practices that will address the conflicting desires for attachment and movement marking postmodernity.

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study investigates the ways in which European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on distinct forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, tourism, and refugee mobilities, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ayşe Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutluğ Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo. Challenging aesthetic as well as national, cultural, and political boundaries, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.

The Italian nation-state has been defined by practices of mobility. Tourists have flowed in from the era of the Grand Tour to the present, and Italians flowed out in massive numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Italians made up the largest voluntary emigration in recorded world history. As a bridge from Africa to Europe, Italy has more recently been a destination of choice for immigrants whose tragic stories of shipwreck and confinement are often in the news. This first-of-its-kind edited volume offers a critical accounting of those histories and practices, shedding new light on modern Italy as a flashpoint for mobilities as they relate to nationalism, imperialism, globalization, and consumer, leisure, and labor practices. The book’s eight essays reveal how a country often appreciated for what seems immutable - its classical and Renaissance patrimony - has in fact been shaped by movement and transit.

Migratory Settings proposes a shift in perspective from migration as movement from place to place to migration as installing movement within place. Migration not only takes place between places, but also has its effects on place, in place. In brief, we suggest a view on migration in which place is neither reified nor transcended, but 'thickened' as it becomes the setting of the variegated memories, imaginations, dreams, fantasies, nightmares, anticipations, and idealizations of both migrants and native inhabitants that experiences of migration bring into contact with each other. Migration makes place overdetermined, turning it into the mise-en-scène of different histories. Hence, movement does not lead to placelessness, but to the intensification and overdetermination of place, its 'heterotopicality.' At the same time, place does not unequivocally authenticate or validate knowledge, but, shot-through with the transnational and the transcultural, exceeds it ceaselessly. Our contributions take us to the migratory settings of a fictional exhibition; a staged political wedding; a walking tour in a museum; African appropriations of Shakespeare and Sophocles; Gollwitz, Germany; Calais, France; the body after a heart transplant; refugees' family portraiture; a garden in Vermont; the womb. With contributions by Mieke Bal, Maaike Bleeker, Paulina Aroch, Astrid van Weyenberg, Sarah de Mul, Annette Seidel Arpaci, Sudeep Dasgupta, Wim Staat, Maria Boletsi, Griselda Pollock, Alex Rotas, and Murat Aydemir.

The Politics of Mobility presents case studies of local transport policy-making and in-depth analysis of UK national transport policy in the period 1987-2000 to highlight how policy was promoted and resisted.

What role does ‘place’ have in a world marked by increased mobility on a global scale? What strategies are there for representing ‘place’ in the age of globalization? What is the relationship between ‘place’ and the varied mobilities of migrancy, tourism, travel and nomadism? These are some of the questions that run through the ten essays in this collection. The combined effect of these essays is to participate in the contemporary project of subjecting the links between place, mobility, identity, representation and practice to critical interdisciplinary scrutiny. Such notions are not the property of particular disciplines. In the era of globalization, transnationalism and readily acknowledged cultural hybridity these links are more important than ever. They are important because of the taken-for-grantedness of: the universal impact of globalization; the receding importance of place and the centrality of mobile identities. This taken-for-grantedness masks the ways place continues to be important and ways in which mobility is differentiated by race, gender, ethnicity, nationality and many other social markers. This book is a concerted attempt to stop taking for granted these themes of the age. Material discussed in the essays include the creation of cultural routes in Europe, the video’s of Fiona Tan, artistic and literary representations of the North African desert, the production of indigenous videos in Mexico, mobile forms of ethnography, the film Existenz, Jamaica Kincaid’s writing on gardens, the video representation of sex tourism and ways of imagining the global. Authors include: Tim Cresswell, Ginette Verstraete, Ernst van Alphen, Ursula Biemann, Laurel C. Smith, Nick Couldry, Isabel Hoving, Renée van de Vall, Inge E. Boer and Kevin Hetherington.

Increasingly, everyday living and practices depend on how mobility (and immobility) is articulated through the ever-present influence of a range of physical and virtual infrastructures. This book focuses in particular on the 'political' dimension of mobility and immobility, which plays a key role in establishing patterns of proximity in real and virtual co-presence. Proximity is seen as the result of choices, negotiations and practices carried out in different settings. Drawing from different literature streams (Sociology, Organization Studies and Science and Technology Studies), this book analyses patterns of mobility in relation to new possibilities of organizing space, time, and proximity to others. Different phenomena - from memorial sites to migration, from urban mobility to mobile work - are analysed, illustrating different types of proximity through mobility and immobility. In doing so, this book offers a cross-cultural and innovative theoretical framing of issues linked to mobility, through the link with immobility and proximity.