Introduction

Summary

This book approaches the burgeoning academic literature on migration and citizenship through the perspective of migrant activism. In migration and citizenship studies, the past 10 years or so have witnessed a surge of research on activism led by migrants themselves, including refugees, asylum seekers, and the undocumented, as well as their supporters (see, for example, Isin, 2002, 2005; Isin and Nielsen, 2008; McNevin, 2011; Nyers and Rygiel, 2012; Tyler and Marciniak, 2013; Johnson, 2014). Regardless of different empirical examples and methodological orientations, what unites these studies is their interest in the idea of citizenship: what new forms of citizenship identities have been generated through migrant activism? The fundamental premise of these studies is that citizenship is what people enact: it is no longer regarded as rights given by the state, but as something that people claim from the state through their activism. Citizenship is an embodiment of acts conducted by people who define, in their own terms, what it means to belong to the political community of the state. From this perspective, migrant activism can ultimately be regarded as a contested site of community making. The existing studies aim to offer an insight into how the boundary of community is challenged, reproduced, or redrawn anew, through different claims about who should be included in the community and in what ways.

While the objective of this book lies in the same direction as the existing studies, it takes a distinctively different approach to investigating the community-making process. I suggest that translation practices – or their absence – are a compelling place to examine activism in which migrant claims are communicated between people who use different languages. Based on ethnographic case studies of migrant activism in Japan, this book investigates how political claims for citizenship are made in a multilingual setting. To the best of my knowledge, this is a unique feature that has yet to be addressed in migration and citizenship studies. The existing research on migrant activism has predominantly used examples from countries such as Canada, France, the UK, and the US, where noncitizens and citizens usually have the ability to speak the same language, such as English and French, because of colonial ties or simply the global spread of the English language.