Catherine Nolin - Transnational Ruptures: Gender and Forced Migration (Gender in a Global/Local World)

Transnational Ruptures: Gender and Forced Migration, by Catherine Nolin, is the ninth title to appear in the Ashgate series Gender in a Global/Local World. The series takes advantage of critically engaged new feminist and gender studies scholarship in the turn towards the global. This turn has produced an increased concern with the (gendered) impacts of globalization and contingent international processes. All volumes in this interdisciplinary series pose alternative, gendered questions to mainstream discussion of global processes and local responses.

This volume is no exception. Transnational Ruptures is truly a global/local project. It contributes to a further round of transnational migration scholarship, applying a transnational optic to refugee studies in particular (its theoretical innovation) and to the landscapes of refugees from Guatemala in particular (its methodological contribution). While the refugees in the study reside primarily in Canada, comparisons are drawn with regional migrants living in other contexts, particularly the United States. The comparisons are particularly revealing of how state policies structure transnational experiences, both in contexts of origin for those who remain behind and in the new locations where immigrants reside. Gender, as well as political violence, are shown to be central organizing principles of the refugee immigrant experience.

In demonstrating the relevance of transnationalism to refugee studies, Nolin takes us well beyond the temptation to conflate place with community and community with identity, a not uncommon feature in migration studies. Instead, with a geographers insistence on place making as a social and political process, the author charts a course through the rupturing and suturing of ties, both physical and material, social and personal, experienced by refugees whose migrations commence from political violence. Forced into exile, refugees are often unable to sustain the kinds of transnational connections to their places of origin that the new transnationalism literature describes for many immigrants. For example, remittances, now considered a definitive feature of many transnational migration flows, are less a feature of the transnational connections for the subjects in Nolins study, a finding that directs us back to the harsh realities of racialized labour markets and the persistent income gap experienced by new immigrants. Further, through careful attention to the spatialization of immigrants lives, the insight that refugee social spaces are not necessarily geographic, offers significant challenge to the literature on immigrant communities which can over-read geographic proximity as community. With this insight Nolins work follows on from Women Migration and Citizenship, edited by Tastsoglou and Dobrowolsky, its predecessor in this series, to contribute further detailed examples of the gender differentiated experiences of citizenship, here provided through heart-wrenching accounts of refugee social isolation. Methodologically, Nolins multi-scaled, multi-method, multi-sited, qualitative study, provides a model for interdisciplinary transnational studies, not only of refugees, but other immigrant populations as well. The study has significant implications for researchers and policy makers concerned with the problems and challenges confronting refugees and immigrants in an increasingly unequal yet globally connected world.