Full Description
Pakistani migrant families in Denmark find themselves in a specific ethno-national, post-9/11 environment where Muslim immigrants are subjected to processes of non-recognition, exclusion and securitization. This ethnographic study explores how, why, and at what costs notions of relatedness, identity, and belonging are being renegotiated within local families and transnational kinship networks. Each entry point concerns the destructive-productive constitution of family life, where neglected responsibilities, obligations, and trust lead not only to broken relationships, but also, and inevitably, to the innovative creation of new ones. By connecting the micro-politics of the migrant family with the macro-politics of the nation state and global conjunctures in general, the book argues that securitization and suspicion—launched in the name of "integration"—escalate internal community dynamics and processes of family upheaval in unpredicted ways.
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. Introduction
PART I: HISTORIES
Chapter 2. Macro-perspectives: the usual suspects
Chapter 3. Micro-perspectives: contested notions of improvements
PART II: MARRIAGES
Chapter 4. Between preferences: love marriages as symbolic mobility
Chapter 5. Welfare-state nomads in the borderlands of Sweden and Denmark
Chapter 6. 'The Danish family' and 'the aliens'
PART III: HOMELANDS
Chapter 7. Pakistan-Denmark: back and forth
Chapter 8. An imagined return: negotiations of identity and belonging
Chapter 9. The Kashmir earthquake: dynamics of intensive transnationalism
PART IV: AFFLICTIONS
Chapter 10. In-laws and outlaws: suspicions of local and transnational sorcery
Chapter 11. Demonic migrations: the re-enchantment of middle-class life
Chapter 12. Conclusion: family upheaval
References
Glossary
