Grounding the transnational: multiple forms of mobility and mobility of forms

Transnationalism and the condition of transnationality

Transnationalism has always been associated with individuals on the move.The term was first used in the early 1900s to resist rationalistic models within classical frameworks of international migration and highlight the existence of cultural ties between

Embedded transnationality 171 migrants and their home countries (Quayson & Daswani, 2013, p. 12). Usage of the term then disappeared for several decades, before re-emerging in the early 1990s as a reaction to, and critique of, some of the practices in migration studies scholarship, which were highlighted in the previous section — in particular, the focuses on settlement and assimilation. Seminal work, in what later came to be known as the field of ‘transnational migration’, stated that a new type of migrant experience was emerging — one in which the lives of migrants were not sharply segmented between host and home societies (Basch et ah, 1994, p. 5).This early research suggested that migrants were forging and sustaining ‘multi-stranded’ social relations and simultaneously linking societies of origin and settlement — it was this process that was termed ‘transnationalism’, and a ‘transnational analytical framework’ emerged soon after.

Crucially for the understanding of transnationalism, Basch et al. (1994) pointed out the need to distinguish transnationalism as a sociocultural phenomenon (sets of practices and processes), and transnationalism as an analytical framework (or a scholarly research agenda). As a process, ‘migrant transnationalism’ as Vertovec (2009) calls it, is an evolving and multidimensional set of assemblages comprised of the interactions between localised practices, individual and collective strategies, and global flows of human and non-human things. As an analytical framework, transnationalism was intended as a critical tool to understand the lived experiences of those whose actions and behaviours challenged previous conflations of geography, space, and social identity (Basch et ah, 1994, p. 8). Indeed, the challenges posed by this analytical framework to previous ways of thinking about individuals on the move contributed greatly to the contemporary understanding of different forms of mobility, so it is no coincidence that a huge body of literature about transnational migration (from several disciplines in social sciences and humanities) has been built on top of the arguments of Basch et al.