21. Feb 2024, by Sabine Netz: 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.

Published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2307778

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Cite as: Netz, Sabine. 2024. “‘Citizenship as Incorporated beyond’ – Challenging National Citizen–Migrant Categorisations with Transnational (Post)Colonial Relations of Incorporating Agrifood.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, February, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2307778.