anthropologist, geographer, social theorist, social critic
Nicholas De Genova
BOOKS
Recent Book in Spanish translation (2021):
Europa / Crisis: Nuevas Palabras Claves en“la Crisis” en y de “Europa”
(co-edited with Martina Tazzioli)
(Los Libros de la Catarata -- Madrid, Spain)
* * * Original, in English: click here
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Professor De Genova is currently completing three new monographs.
One is an academic title: The Migrant Metropolis.
The second, Crossing the Line: A Memoir of Free Speech duringWartime,
and the third, Whiteness: A Matter of Life and Death: A Kind of Memoir ,
address questions of political urgency for a broader public.
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Professor De Genova has also co-edited a new volume (with Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Gustavo Dias, and Eduardo Domenech), forthcoming from Duke University Press:
The Borders of America:
Migration, Control, and Resistance across Latin America and the Caribbean
Another new book project (co-edited with Daniel Morales) is also under review:
Border Abolitionism: Migrant Struggles and the Law
The Borders of "Europe":
Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering
(Duke University Press, 2017)
“This compelling, illuminating book puts matters of migration and borders at the center of debates regarding what (and where) Europe is and should be, while raising powerful questions on associated issues of race and the colonial-like relations that scar the contemporary world. Myriad forms of violence, particularly the growing global death toll among illegalized people ‘on the move’—with Europe at its grisly epicenter—make The Borders of "Europe" necessary and timely. In deeply interrogating mobility, increasing state efforts to exclude those officially deemed as unwanted, and the refusal of so many to submit to them, the volume speaks to matters and an audience far beyond Europe. This is a book of truly global importance.”
— Joseph Nevins, author of
Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary
“Developing an original and innovative approach to the study of migration to Europe, this volume promises to be a key text in the fields of refugee and migration studies, border studies, European studies, as well as studies of technology and governmentality. A brilliant and timely book.”
— Yael Navaro, author of
The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity
“The Borders of ‘Europe’ casts a critically reversed gaze on an exclusionary political and cultural construct and on the constricting artificiality of national borders as well as on the challenge posed to them by the evasive autonomy of migration.
De Genova, the architect of a project here instantiated in the work of former students and associates, has developed an approach that ‘unsettles and destabilizes “Europe” as an object of knowledge’…. Offering a critical response to the metastatic racism that conflates migrants and refugees with terrorists, the book challenges the affectation of injured innocence ... that often accompan[ies] the denial of inherited complicity in the violence of colonialism.”
— Michael Herzfeld,
past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and
author of Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe
“This collection of original research provides a rich and valuable addition to the literature on migration and borders in contemporary Europe. It will be of interest to scholars and students working on migration issues in Europe and beyond.”
— John Solomos, co-editor of
the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies
“The contributions … give ‘flesh and blood’ to the ‘European Question’ through political, legal, social and economic analyses that are emboldened by careful anthropological and/or sociological research. Overall, the contributions put forward insightful arguments into how ‘Europe’ and ‘European-ness’ are (re)imagined, de/stabilised, challenged and reinforced by the ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ peoples inside, outside and on the border of ‘Europe’. Therefore, the book does not comfort the reader by providing convenient answers to the challenging questions of the time; instead, it demonstrates how ‘fractured’‘Europe’ and ‘European- ness’ are, and this in contrast to the efforts of ‘sovereign European institutions’ to convince us of the opposite…. De Genova’s edited collection is an impeccable addition to migration literature in a transdisciplinary and critical way.”
— Ali Bilgic, author of
Rethinking Security in the Age of Migration
Roma Migrants
in the European Union:
Un/Free Mobility
co-edited with Can Yildiz
(Routledge, 2019)
This book situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe, focusing on questions about Europe, "European-ness," and "EU-ropean" citizenship through the critical lens of Roma racialization, marginalization, securitization, and criminalization, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of "Europe."
Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of "Europe," the contributions to this collection are concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the socio-political formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma people living and working outside of their nation-states of "origin" or ostensible citizenship, the book seeks to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialization of both Roma migrants and migrants in general.
Showcasing political, economic, legal, and socio-historical criticism, this book will be of interest to those studying race and racialization in Europe, mobility and migration into and within Europe, and those studying the mobility of the Roma people in particular. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Social Identities.
The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement
co-edited with Nathalie Peutz
(Duke University Press, 2010)
“The Deportation Regime is an important and timely book, both for theory and for politics. A series of well-written case studies (from across the world) accompanied by a smart Theoretical Overview by Nicholas De Genova, the collection urges us to see the undocumented migrant/sans papiers/deportable alien/stateless citizen as paradigmatic of our time, as norm rather than exception, and thus as constitutive of sovereignty and the political today.”
-- Charles Piot, author of
Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa
“This valuable collection of essays treating deportation as a distinct form of state social control shows convincingly that deportation demands more specific attention from social theorists. The ethnographically rich and theoretically informed essays provide fascinating case studies on the functioning of the deportation regime in different national settings.”
-- Linda Bosniak, author of
The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership
[The Deportation Regime] marks an important development in the study of deportation, as well as making a significant contribution to the literatures on migration, citizenship, and sovereignty.... This collection is truly impressive. It demonstrates the importance of deportation as a mechanism for producing citizenship and alienage, nations, states, and territories in both theory and practice.... There is much to be done, and this book outlines an emerging research agenda.
-- Bridget Anderson, author of
Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour, and
Us and Them?: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control
"[This volume] seeks to help us understand why 'the deportation regime' has become the dominant lens through which undocumented migration is seen.... De Genova's chapter is a masterful overview of what he defines as the 'deportation regime', and ... provides an incisive account of the intersections between debates about sovereignty, space, and freedom of movement....
The Deportation Regime ... is a must read book."
-- John Solomos, co-editor of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies
“[I]t is astonishing how little attention is paid by political scientists to the ways that states limit, regulate and restrict the freedom of movement of millions of people … through attempts to control borders through policies of detention and incarceration…. Thanks to Nicholas De Genova, Nathalie Peutz, and Duke University Press, social scientists now have, in The Deportation Regime, an urgently needed compendium providing copious information and analysis of deportation regimes in Europe, the Americas, North Africa, and the Middle East.… the editors did a fabulous job of selecting fourteen extremely well-written and illuminating essays that nicely complement each other.”
-- Jacqueline Stevens, author of States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals
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Winner
2011 Bronze Award, Past Presidents' Book Awards, Association for Borderlands Studies
Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians
Remaking the United States
(Duke University Press, 2006)
“Racial Transformations is a unique volume that marvelously engages the intersection of Asian American and Latino Studies and helps us grasp the distinct patterns of racialization among groups considered neither white nor black.”
-- Michael Omi, co-author of
Racial Formation in the United States
“This collection marks an important intervention in the history and historiography of ‘race,’ ethnicity, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. The essays offer important and provocative rationales for thinking through these complex issues from a broader comparative and critical perspective.”
-- David Gutiérrez, author of
Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and
the Politics of Ethnicity
“Nicholas De Genova’s edited volume, Racial Transformations, is the first book-length publication to engage in a sustained and critical dialogue across Latino and Asian American studies . . . . Racial Transformations offers fascinating glimpses into the complex and often diverse trajectories of immigrant groups in the United States. De Genova’s collection is an original, well-documented, and thought-provoking intervention.”
--Jorge Duany, author of
Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and
the United States
Working the Bounderies:
Race, Space and "Illegality" in
Mexican Chicago
(Duke University Press, 2005)
“In this stunning ethnographic achievement, the Mexican workers of Chicago reinvent the city, the labor process, the United States, and 'our America' as a whole: a region that knows no borders. But at the same time the nation-state, the systems of law and politics, and their working lives encumber them. Working the Boundaries shows how much agency and insight are built into the realities of immigration, how limited and self-defeating are the core politics of U.S. nationalism and racism, and how powerful a weapon ethnography can be in the fight for freedom and justice. Nicholas De Genova has produced a book of great insight and beauty. Highly recommended!”
-- Howard Winant, author of
The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II, and
Racial Formation in the United States
“This arresting work of anthropology, American studies and ethnic studies will be of great interest to historians of labor, of race, of transnationalism and empire, of cities and of migration. Steeped in theory … the book is avowedly interested in large ideas … but at the same time, it is rooted in telling and textured details drawn from extended ethnographic field work. Working the Boundaries shows how the staking out of an identity that is neither black nor white can generate searing critiques of the United States racial system even as it also can leave some aspects of antiblack racism and the valorization of whiteness intact. A splendid, learned and spirited study, Working the Boundaries deserves the widest possible readership inside and outside of the academy.”
-- David Roediger, author of
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, and
The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History
“Solidly researched and decolonized ethnographic accounts [such as De Genova's] typically produce a knowledge structure akin to that which I am here seeking to establish directly.... Geographical theory... helps release political energies and the political imagination to examine afresh the whole issue of the most adequate form of territorial organization of human societies to meet socio-ecological aims. It poses key questions head on and so helps us ... [identify] the requisite tools to reconstruct places in an entirely different image. The mere concept of a Mexican Chicago is, for example, one place to start.... [There is] a crisis of place construction in the contemporary world system, one in which a narrow absolute definition of a place dubbed a state makes less and less sense. This crisis is rendered explicit in the work of De Genova.”
-- David Harvey, author of
The Limits to Capital; The New Imperialism; and
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(quoted from: Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, pp. 268-73)
“The [2006] mobilization of migrants … has opened up a confrontation fraught with consequences for the future of democracy in the United States. De Genova’s book helps us see with greater precision what is at stake. He shows how the long history of policies for controlling Mexican migration to the United States has in fact created a general condition of ‘deportability’ for migrant workers. Identifying "an active process of inclusion through the illegalization’ of migrants," De Genova formulates a thesis that is useful to examine even in the rather different context of Europe.”
-- Sandro Mezzadra, co-author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
"Nicholas De Genova’s brilliant … theoretically sophisticated anthropological study … serves as a critical link between Chicano/a, Latin American, and American studies."
-- Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, editor of
Beyond la Frontera: The History of Mexico-U.S. Migration,and
Global Latin(o) Americanos: Transoceanic Diasporas and Regional Migrations
"Nicholas De Genova has written an important counter-narrative [using] inductive reasoning to redefine or broaden concepts such as race, space, and 'illegality'."
-- Rodolfo Acuña, author of Occupied America: A History of Chicanos
Winner
2006 Book Award, Association for Latina and Latino Anthropologists
Winner
2007 C.L. R. James Book Award, Working-Class Studies Association
Finalist
2005 C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems
Latino Crossings:
Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship
co-authored with Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas
(Routledge, 2003)
“Latino Crossings is a fascinating ethnographic narrative of urban Latinos seeking to understand their racial place and space in these fast-changing United States of America.”
-- Neil Foley,
author of
The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture
“This is a path-breaking book that compares how Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in Chicago live in relation to being differently placed by racism and citizenship.”
-- Renato Rosaldo,
author of Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis