With the contemporary turn toward models of transnationalism, globalization, diaspora, and border studies that map more varied trajectories of migration, scholars have begun to rethink many of the foundational concepts of immigration scholarship, including static or place-bound ideas of culture, community, nation, race, gender, identity, and settlement. Much of this rethinking challenges concepts that are framed by trajectories of evolutionary development within the boundaries of the nation-state. Instead, newer work attends to contradiction, relationality, and back-and-forth dynamics and strives to undo conceptual binaries, theorize liminal positions, and resituate the border as a contact zone. These studies rethink immigrant agency and resistance by connecting material conditions to subject-formation processes, while also emphasizing multiple, interlocking inequalities at various scales.

This is an excerpt from Eithne Luibhéid’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (pp. 129-130).