New article for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology by Kaja Jenssen Rathe (The Arctic University of Norway).
Kaja Jenssen Rathe – “Forever Foreigners: The Temporality of Immigrant Indebtedness”
JBSP (Received 04 Nov 2022, Accepted 17 Apr 2023, Published online: 27 Apr 2023). OPEN ACCESS
Abstract: In this article, I offer a critical phenomenological investigation of immigrant indebtedness, with special focus on its temporality. I understand immigrant indebtedness as a relation of debt where what is owed is gratitude, and which takes on a special meaning when the debtor in question is racially construed as immigrant. Understood as such, immigrant indebtedness has the power to function as a social structure that organizes, conditions and impacts people’s lives. By analysing writer and poet Sumaya Jirde Ali’s descriptions of immigrant indebtedness in dialogue with Marianne Gullestad, Alia Al-Saji and Maurizio Lazzarato, I argue that the harm of immigrant indebtedness becomes visible once we pay attention to its temporal structure—involving the permanence of the debt-relation, the freezing and distortion of the past, as well as their limiting effects on future and present.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2023.2205597
Kaja Jenssen Rathe, Institute for Philosophy and First Semester Studies, UiT The Arctic University of Norway Ringgold Standard Institution, Tromso, Norway
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