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Homeland Heroes: Migrants and Soldiers in the Neoliberal Era
Author(s) -
Brigden Noelle Kateri,
Vogt Wendy A.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12115
Subject(s) - neoliberalism (international relations) , militarization , homeland , political economy , nationalism , context (archaeology) , the imaginary , politics , political science , subjectivity , sociology , capital (architecture) , counterintuitive , law , geography , psychology , philosophy , archaeology , epistemology , psychotherapist
This paper examines the dynamic relationship between neoliberalism and nationalism through the counterintuitive comparison of journeys travelled by US citizens as they enlist in the military and by unauthorized Central Americans as they migrate to the United States. We argue that, however different the context and content of their decisions and their lives, Central American migrants and US soldiers are both connected within a larger political economy. We complicate the idea of migrants and soldiers as purely rational economic actors, but we also reject the idea, imputed onto migrants and soldiers by neoliberal states, that they are naturally nationalistic actors. Migrants and soldiers embody a neoliberal subjectivity produced through processes of violence, capital accumulation and militarization. Yet, as we examine throughout this paper, their construction as homeland heroes within the national imaginary masks the ways their labor and their mobility serve the institutionalization of neoliberal statecraft.