@article{THESIS,
      recid = {3254},
      author = {Berhanu, Feven },
      title = {Embedded Life: Black Movement and Arrival},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {M.A.},
      address = {2021-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {This thesis undertakes a dominantly narrated dissonance  between Blackness and notions of place, citizenship, and  arrival in migration discourse by exploring ways to  conceive of Black migration without reliance upon empire  and the nation-state. Embedded Life is an imaginative  conceptualization of Black movement that attempts to listen  and join in on deeply embedded desires, dreams, and  insistences for Black life that are vibrant yet buried  underneath outer conceptions and impositions of arrival  centered migration discourse (which is narrowed here as the  attainment of citizenship, a sense of nationhood, and  financial mobility as a result of migration). It argues the  possibility that Black movement is mistranslated,  misarticulated, and wrongly situated within discourses of  migration which fixate on arrival within borders  (especially western borders) by situating accounts of  contemporary Black migration within a larger breadth of  Black movement. It attempts a departure from “arrival  narratives,” in which Black movement is believed to end or  finish upon admission and entry into the state, and seeks  to disrupt teleologies related to arrival which suggest  firstly that contemporary Black migration is unrelated to  the forced movement of stolen African peoples through the  Middle Passage, and secondly that Black migration is solely  a matter of desired arrival within nation-state and empire.   Drawing upon both Migration studies and Black studies, as  well as sociological, historical, and personal accounts of  Black migration, this thesis contends with the  impossibilities of arrival for Black migrants, and  delineates how expressions of desires for life from Black  migrants (which are incorporated and selectively used  within arrival narratives) are too easily conflated with a  life maintained by the state and its borders, rather than  held with consideration that perhaps more indeterminate and  alternate figurations of life are being brought forth in  Black migrancy. Embedded life is introduced as a  theoretical framework that attends to the insistences and  formulations of Black life that are strategically  mis-narrated in the context of Black migration, and urges  toward sensing rather than explicating Black movements'  gestures for a life outside of borders and the state, a  life that is more-than-arrival. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3254},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3254},
}