This dossier emerges as an initiative of its coordinators and editors –Lai Sai Acón Chan and Ronald Soto-Quirós– who are interested in international migrations and collaborate jointly on a project to recover the historical memory of Chinese migrations in Costa Rica (PREMEHCHI for its acronym in Spanish). This project is led by an international multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Costa Rica, the UNED (Costa Rica), the multidisciplinary team on Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula of the Université Bordeaux Montaigne (Bordeaux, France) and the University of Minnesota Morris. PREMEHCHI is based at the University of Costa Rica (San José, Costa Rica)[1].
The dossier of this issue of Diálogos, a journal of the Department of History and the Graduate Program in History of the State University of Maringá (UEM) is a first effort to publish bilingual versions of the same article (English and Spanish or Portuguese) in order to achieve greater internationalization and facilitate the dissemination of knowledge. In this particular case, the dossier focuses on the phenomenon of international migration –or international human mobility – addressed from the perspective of scholars specializing in a wide array of disciplines (history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, cinema, and others), from different geographical locations (Costa Rica, Honduras, United States, France and Spain) and in a wide chronological span (XIX-XXI centuries).
In this sense, our dossier is organized in four main axes. The first axis is concerned about historical cases of human mobilities considered as international transcontinental diasporas, their relationship with biopower devices, the different strategies of individuals in receiving countries and the representations that were generated around migrant individuals or populations. A second part analyzes human mobilities and their incidence and relationship in the generation of identity, national and homogenizing narratives and the possible institutional biopolitical control tools that are generated. A third section of the dossier specifically addresses the issue of continental intraregional human mobility with historical interpretation, but highlighting very contemporary cases, thus official speeches, biopower mechanisms and subjectivities involved are re-analyzed. Finally, the last section focuses on representations in the visual arts (film and television) of different types of human mobility and in very diverse geographical and chronological spaces.
[1] For more information about this PREMEHCHI project, check http://premehchi.ucr.ac.cr/
Published:
2020-03-04
