‘Citizenship as incorporated beyond’ – Challenging national citizen–migrant categorisations with transnational (post)colonial relations of incorporating agrifood

ABSTRACT

Migrant activists in Bremen, Germany, challenge classifications of people as national citizens or migrants by highlighting the (post)colonial and capitalist relations that have contributed and continue to contribute to this citizen–migrant divide. Based on ethnographic research and using the relational–ontological tools of material semiotics, I concretise these alternative-knowledge claims by tracing two of many entanglements (1) between the EUropean border regime, the exploitation of migrant labour in the agrifood industry, and the enactment of European citizens and companies and (2) with the (post)colonial histories underpinning these exploitative relations. First, I argue that citizen bodies and migrants’ labouring bodies are intimately related in bodily, fleshy ways. Moreover, corporations that pay taxes for national states are materially related to transnational, (post)colonial migrant labour. Second, I contribute to the literature that challenges the notion of independent individual national citizens or states. Considering citizenship–migrant categorisation based on those agrifood relations, I conceptualise ‘citizenship as incorporated beyond’. This means that national citizens and body politics such as Germany have been and continue to be brought into being by incorporating (i.e. eating, embodying, forming a corporate body, black boxing), among others, (relations of) agrifood from beyond their ‘national’ bodies and borders.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• migrant classifications
• material semiotics
• postcolonial relations
• agrifood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Youth welfare services assess the ages of migrants in interviews. In some Federal states, they send migrants for forensic age estimations (Netz 2019; 2020).

2 The deportation was carried out in accordance with EUropean Dublin regulations which state that an asylum request by an adult migrant must be processed by the first EU country that the migrant entered.

3 After procuring funding from the German Research Foundation, I am part of the community of well-fed researchers profiting from the ‘business’ of migration research (Cabot 2019). My funding came from public money and therefore also from the taxes mentioned in this article. While I build a middle-class career through writing on categorisations of migrants and citizens, many of my migranticised interlocutors work in the low-wage sector, in farms, logistics, food delivery, and care. In many cases, I – a white, German citizen – supported my migrant interlocutors in the daily labyrinth of the EU border regime by, for example, providing consultation contacts and translation. I became friends with some interlocutors, sometimes sharing political commitments.

4 Of course, those two approaches also differ in many ways. I cannot compare both in detail here and only refer to Marxist aspects needed for this mainly material semiotic analysis. For an excellent exploration of material semiotics in relation to Marxist philosophy, see Beetz 2016.

5 Despite attempting to prevent that with this sentence, my depiction of Robert risks reproducing the image of ‘the suffering refugee’. Robert’s personality by far exceeds this cliché. I am painfully aware of the problem that I cannot depict the loving, hurting, struggling, knowledgeable, and ambivalent richness of him in this article. I attempt to do so in my dissertation.

6 Each could be analytically unpacked – for example, soil is certainly ‘multiple’, too.

7 Not all German citizens and people living in Germany are well fed; poor Germans (Pfeiffer, Ritter, and Oestreicher 2015) and refugees in camps experience hunger and food poverty.

8 Scipio managed all these companies. I refer to them as ‘Bremen’s fruit trade company’. The company later became Atlanta AG and eventually became the largest fruit importer in Germany. Today, it is part of Greenyard Co., a global fruit and vegetable company with a yearly turnover of 4.4 Billion Euros (Greenyard 2022).

9 For an analysis of the violent political economy of bananas, see Bourgois 1989.