17,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The history of migration is deeply entangled with colonialism. To this day, colonial logics continue to shape the dynamics of migration as well as the responses of states to those arriving at their borders. And yet migration studies has been surprisingly slow to engage with colonial histories in making sense of migratory phenomena today. This book starts from the premise that colonial histories should be central to migration studies and explores what it would mean to really take that seriously. To engage with this task, Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner argue that scholars need not forge new theories but must learn from and be inspired by the wealth of literature that already exists across the world. Providing a range of inspiring and challenging perspectives on migration, the authors' aim is to demonstrate what paying attention to colonialism, through using the tools offered by postcolonial, decolonial and related scholarship, can offer those studying international migration today. Offering a vital intervention in the field, this important book asks scholars and students of migration to explore the histories and continuities of colonialism in order to better understand the present.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 473
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Ähnliche
Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Gurminder K. Bhambra
1 Introduction
Migration studies and colonialism
The growing call to ‘decolonize’ the social sciences
Does migration studies need to think about colonialism?
Postcolonialism, decoloniality and Third World approaches to international law
Structure of the book
2 Time and Space: Migration and Modernity
Introduction
Problematizing the concept of modernity in the social sciences
Eurocentrism
North, South, East and West in colonial modernity
Modernity, migration and development
Can Eurocentrism be overcome?
Conclusion
3 ‘Race’ and Racism in International Migration
Introduction
Empire and the invention of race
Knowledge, modernity and huMan
Race, violence and slavery
Racism’s two registers: biology and culture
Race, movement and immigration
Conclusion
4 Putting Sovereignty, Citizenship and Migration in Dialogue with Past and Present Colonialisms
Introduction
Connected histories, connected sociologies
Migration as decolonization
Indigenous sovereignty and immigration
No borders?
Conclusion
5 Deconstructing Forced Migration, Rethinking Asylum
Introduction
Asylum is a human right: postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on ‘man’ and ‘human’
The myth of difference and the silencing of colonialism
Man and human as a colonial construct
Uprooting: deconstructing forced migration
Necropolitics: governing the uprooted through death
Conclusion
6 Towards a Colonial Account of Security and Borders
Introduction
Terrorism and race
Anti-Muslim racism as ‘bio-cultural’
Colonial rule and security
Towards a global account of security and borders
Securitization in the Global South
Postcolonial borders (in Palestine)
Decolonizing borders
Political violence and terror
Conclusions
7 Gender, Sexuality, Colonialism … and Migration
Introduction
Gender and sexuality in migration studies
Intersectionality
Decolonial feminism: the coloniality of gender
Ungendering and anti-blackness
Queer-of-colour critique
Conclusion
8 Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Introduction
Pages
iii
iv
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
Migration Studies and Colonialism
Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner 2021
The right of Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4293-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4294-9(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mayblin, Lucy, author. | Turner, Joe B., author.
Title: Migration studies and colonialism / Lucy Mayblin & Joe Turner.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Why colonial histories are crucial to understanding migration today”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022233 (print) | LCCN 2020022234 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542932 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542949 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509542956 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. | Postcolonialism--Social aspects. | Imperialism--History.
Classification: LCC JV6033 .M39 2021 (print) | LCC JV6033 (ebook) | DDC 304.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022233
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022234
Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Sabon
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britian by TJ International Limited
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Gurminder K. Bhambra, Thom Davies, Katie Bales, Arshad Isakjee, Sara de Jong and Marcia Vera Espinoza for their helpful and constructive feedback and for generously reading parts of/the whole manuscript. Thanks also to the organizers and participants of the ‘Colonial Mobilities’ workshop at Linneaus University Sweden in summer 2019 for their inspiration, especially Aurora Vergara Figueroa, E. Tendayi Achiume, Peo Hansen , Debbie Samaniego and Gunlog Fur. Thank you to our friends, families and partners for their patience and support whilst we completed the book. Lastly, we remain indebted to the scholarship, social movements and ongoing struggles that shape this book and that we hope we have done justice to.
Foreword: On the Beginnings of Migration: Europe and Colonialism
Recent years have seen much attention, media and political, given to the movement of people. This is especially the case in terms of the extraordinary movements precipitated by war, famine and the ravages of global warming that have produced refugees in seemingly greater numbers. They have also produced hostile responses with the building of walls and fences, the denial of aid and solidarity and changes to citizenship laws which have often turned citizens into migrants to be policed even more harshly. Global crises related to the movement of populations recur with relative regularity, and yet each is presented as unprecedented, reproducing the idea of crisis in the process. This occurs not just in media representations and political debate but also in academic accounts of migration, which often use similar framings in their analyses. In this superb new book, Migration Studies and Colonialism, Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner contest the idea of the unprecedentedness of the movement of peoples and seek to locate both contemporary migrations and our understandings of migration in the historical contexts that produce them.
Our modern world has been significantly shaped by historical processes and structures that have been in place from the late fifteenth century onwards. These have shaped our institutions and our understandings. We can use the figure of Columbus and his voyages to stand for the beginning of these processes and structures and how they have been understood within Europe. As Locke wrote in the late seventeenth century, ‘in the beginning all the World was America’. That is, in their discovery of the Americas, Europeans believed that they were encountering earlier versions of themselves. This laid the groundwork for particular understandings of hierarchies among and between populations across the world. If those peoples encountered by early European travellers were effectively understood as being their ancestors, then Europeans could both show them the (predetermined) future and be unconcerned about their elimination. The first justifies the belief in ‘development’; the second suggests that the disappearance of other cultures, peoples, is not a consequence of European actions but a quasi-natural phenomenon.
Columbus, and the Europeans who followed him across the subsequent centuries, are often presented as heroic figures – as travellers and pioneers. They are seen to move in what has been called the age of free migration when, apparently, there were no obstacles to movement. Traders, merchants, travellers, mendicants and explorers had long criss-crossed the globe, encountering new cultures, trading with them and learning the ways of others. The population movements from Europe to the New World and beyond coalesced, over four centuries, into a phenomenon that was markedly different from these other quotidian movements and encounters. This is because European movement was linked to colonial settlement which was central to the displacement, dispossession and elimination of populations across the globe. It was also central to the creation of the global inequalities and injustices that mark the worlds we share in common and that are the basis of contemporary movements of peoples. Without understanding the histories that produced these inequalities, we are unlikely to understand contemporary movements.
Taking Columbus, and the Americas, as the beginning is not the same as taking him, or them, as the origin. As Said (1995 [1978]) argues, whereas the idea of ‘origin’ presupposes that which develops from it, that of a ‘beginning’ is developed as a complex of connections which allows for construction and reconstruction. Columbus is not the origin of what followed but can be seen as one of the beginnings of the processes and structures that have shaped the modern world. Acknowledging beginnings permits shifts in perspective and understandings of knowledge by taking different points of departure. Events, in this view, are best understood as located in, and constitutive of, particular historical interconnections. Columbus, then, is an event in a world of events which together brought into being our modern world.
Christopher Columbus, born in the Italian city-state of Genoa, patronized by the Spanish Crown of Castile, landed in the islands of what we now know as the Caribbean, searching for a direct route to the treasures of the Indies. His exploratory voyages in the late fifteenth century opened up an entire continent to European populations who travelled in increasing numbers to the New World. Some were in search of adventure, others fleeing poverty, famine, religious persecution and economic disadvantage. Whatever their motives, the decades and centuries subsequent to Columbus’s ‘discovery’ were marked by the subjugation and elimination of indigenous populations and the extraction and appropriation of their resources and land (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).
In the journal Nature, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin note that the arrival of Europeans in the lands that would come to be known as the Americas – lands which had been known by their pre-existing (and continuing) inhabitants as Turtle Island and Abya Yala – ‘led to the largest human population replacement in the past 13,000 years’ (2015: 174). They suggest that the continent had had a population of around 61 million prior to European contact and that this ‘rapidly declined to a minimum of about 6 million people by 1650 via exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine’ (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 175). In this way, Abya Yala was gradually, although not without resistance, transformed into the Americas.
If subsequent waves of Europeans – and across the nineteenth century this involved around sixty million Europeans (Miege 1993) – found these lands to be available to them, then this ought not to be regarded as a natural fact but a social and political fact that requires further analysis. It is a fact that should be central to all subsequent discussion of the movement of peoples, to all discussions constituting migration studies. As I have argued elsewhere, migration is a movement of people across political boundaries, and migrants are people who live in societies other than their own, but according to the rules and norms of the societies of which they come to be a part (Bhambra 2019). Within this understanding of migration, those who do not, en masse, live according to the rules and norms of the societies of the lands they come to are not migrants. They are better understood as colonial settlers and colonial settlers are not migrants, even if much of the scholarship on migration describes them as such. Failing to acknowledge the ways in which colonial histories are the context for the consolidation of particular patterns of European movement and the ways in which these come to be the reasons for subsequent movements is problematic to the extent that we are interested in effective solutions to the problems of global inequality.
Where we start from, and which histories and epistemologies we acknowledge, will profoundly shape our understandings. This is the central premise of this vitally important book. Mayblin and Turner start from an understanding that the field of migration studies is poorer – in terms of both intellectual coherence and policy applications – if it does not take colonial histories seriously. While they do not suggest that colonialism explains everything about migration, they do argue that migration can rarely be adequately understood without taking it into account. While there is plenty of literature at this nexus, in a global context, it does not often form the basis of migration studies as it is generally conceived in Europe or the United States. Mayblin and Turner ask those of us located in migration studies who have not addressed the histories of colonialism to consider what difference would be made to our understandings if we were to do so. It is urgent that this call be answered.
Gurminder K. Bhambra, University of Sussex
1Introduction
Migration studies and colonialism
Between 1600 and 1950, the vast majority of mobile subjects (what some might now call ‘economic migrants’) originated in Europe and sought their fortunes on other continents. An estimated 62 million people – settlers, labourers, colonials, imperialists, invaders – moved around European empires in the period 1800–1950 (Miège 1993). Indeed, colonialism was characterized by conquest, exploitation and domination through migration. From the massive forced migrations of the triangular slave trade and circuits of indenture to the almost unfettered mobility of many (but not all) white Europeans within their various empires, from the large-scale population displacements which the turbulence of decolonization gave rise to to the migration of people from the former colonies to the former metropoles in the mid- to late twentieth century, the history of migration globally is very much entangled with colonialism. It should be unsurprising to us, then, that patterns of mobility and immobility today follow these colonial-era logics in what Steffen Mau and colleagues call ‘the global mobility divide’ (Mau et al 2015). Or that border regimes effectively amount to ‘multilateral projects for the regional containment of Third World persons beyond the First World’ (Achiume 2019: 1515). And yet, when consulting the indexes of a selection of key texts of migration studies today, it is very rare to find any mention of colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization. If the absence of empire as a relevant context to migration studies is a surprise, so too is the general lack of interest in the legacies and continuities of colonialism for contemporary migration governance and the experiences of ‘migrants’ and ‘hosts’ today.
This book starts from the premise that colonial histories should be central to migration studies. We argue that colonialism is so fundamental to contemporary migrations, mobilities, immobilities, receptions and social dynamics that it is certainly not something that should only be of concern to scholars of colour, indigenous scholars and/or those working in formerly colonized countries. Our overarching aim is to explore what it would mean (acknowledging that it will not in fact mean one thing but many) to take seriously the centring of colonialism in researching migration, not through forging new theories but through learning from, and being inspired by, the wealth of literature that already exists in the world to engage with this task.
Migration studies is of course a diverse multidisciplinary field. Yet even critical migration studies has tended, according to Tudor (2018: 1065), ‘to forget about postcolonial racism and racialization and instead promoted an understanding of migration that is disconnected from postcolonial analysis’. Gayatri Spivak (1999) calls this type of silencing ‘sanctioned ignorance’. Sanctioned ignorance is not necessarily an issue of individual malice but is an institutionalized way of thinking about the world which operates to foreclose particular types of analysis or considerations from entering into the debate. One of the enabling factors of this type of silencing is the real urgency of contemporary issues and ‘crises’ relating to migration. Certainly, presentism is engendered within the field as every year brings new crises, displacements and patterns of migration and new politicians and laws seeking to control it. The present is, it seems, always new.
This underlying framework of ‘the unprecedented present’ within migration studies and migration policy making does not lend itself to a deep engagement with history. Nevertheless, a sense of history does quietly frame most analyses of the present. We see this in claims to ‘unprecedentedness’ itself – the common assumption that because a phenomenon is highly visible, contested and difficult to administratively manage, nothing like this has happened before. Because the world’s population is growing all the time, even if the percentage of people that migrate always stays the same, each year will see unprecedented numbers of migrants crossing borders. But that isn’t quite the same as ‘nothing like this has ever happened before’. More explicit nods to history appear in the context sections of books or articles which briefly explain how rights emerged, or how things have changed since previous periods, before moving on to the topic at hand. Sometimes these contexts mention colonialism but most often not.
We think that sanctioned ignorance of histories of colonialism, and of the wide-ranging debates around the legacies of colonialism in the present, within migration studies is a problem. First, because ignoring vast swathes of human history leaves us with theories which are inadequate to the task of making sense of the present. Second, because without acknowledging these histories, the common usage of dehumanizing phrases associated with racial science such as the animalistic ‘migrant stocks’ and the disaster-like migrant ‘flows’, ‘mass influxes’ and ‘waves’ can appear objective rather than historically and culturally emergent. Third, it facilitates the denial of ongoing colonialisms in the present, and in doing so silences struggles for justice.
While, at the time of writing this book, it is common to attend a migration studies conference and fail to find a single paper that mentions colonialism (or indeed ‘race’), questions of mobility and ‘migration’ have been taken up by those working beyond the field of migration studies, in postcolonial, decolonial and related intellectual projects. From the start, postcolonialism, decoloniality, indigenous studies, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and many other projects have been interested in migrations, diasporas, conquests and hybrid transnational identities, and the power relations that they gave rise to on multiple spatial scales. This means that there already exists a substantial body of work which presents concepts and frameworks for analysing migration in the (post/neo-)colonial present. Much of this work in postcolonial studies has been in the arts and humanities but it is ripe for application to social scientific phenomena. Other areas of scholarship such as decoloniality and TWAIL have more directly engaged with social scientific questions. Indeed, there are numerous bodies of work across the social sciences internationally which both address migration and place colonialism at the centre of their analyses. Yet the core of migration studies, which is highly influential in international policy-making circles, appears to remain largely unaffected by this work.
This book responds to this disconnect. Its purpose is not to spend endless pages critiquing migration studies as it is articulated in hegemonic journals, conferences, policy fora and textbooks in the Global North. Rather, our aim is to demonstrate what paying attention to colonialism through using the tools offered by postcolonial, decolonial and related scholarship can offer those studying international migration today. We do not present a new grand theory or claim that every single thing that people want to research can be explained with reference to colonialism. What we do offer is a range of inspiring and challenging perspectives on migration that are less often seen in influential migration studies research centres in Europe and North America, not least because students are so often asking us for reading lists along these lines. We also, by extension, suggest that in raising the colonial question, those engaging in research on migration may then need to consider the politics of knowledge production – the underlying assumptions, categories and concepts – which they rely on within this academic field.
While literatures already exist which should make ignoring colonialism seem like a bizarre and naive omission, these literatures seem still to be inaccessible, or unimportant, to many. This book seeks to showcase some of this work for people who research migration and yet never encounter such perspectives. If you are well versed in these debates, the issues that we discuss will doubtless seem obvious. Indeed, we are ‘white’ academics working in British higher education institutions and for this reason our perspectives are of course particular and limited, and undoubtedly readers will spot omissions and parochialisms throughout the book. Whilst we have sought to frame our discussion of the literature and examples in a global manner, we still broadly rely upon the legacy of intellectual projects from the Americas (North and South), with engagements from scholars from Asian and African traditions. For those not familiar with these literatures, we hope that this book will raise questions such as how broadly postcolonial and decolonial perspectives might change the kinds of research questions that we ask in migration studies, as well as the ways in which we analyse our data. Do such perspectives allow us to frame our research in terms that accord with the interests of policy makers? No. Are such perspectives policy friendly in the current terms of debate on migration? Rarely. If, and how, these perspectives can therefore be used in challenging migration policy, as most critical work hopes to do, is a topic for contemplation in the coming years. This volume, we hope, will spark discussion as part of what some have termed the ‘postcolonial turn’ in migration studies (Koh 2015; Tudor 2018). Our aim is not that you cite this book, but that in the future you cite some of the scholars discussed within it.
The growing call to ‘decolonize’ the social sciences
Recent years have seen the intensification and spread of calls to ‘decolonize the university’ and it would not be appropriate to write a book on the theme of migration studies and colonialism without discussing this agenda. While ‘decolonizing’ is a highly contested issue, the content and praxis of which is unresolved, at its heart is an agreement that we put colonialism and its legacies and continuities at the heart of our understanding of the contemporary world (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi 2016). Academia is an important site of knowledge production and, as Dalia Gebrial argues, ‘consecration’. She goes on:
It has the power to decide which histories, knowledges and intellectual contributions are considered valuable and worthy of further critical attention and dissemination. This has knock-on effects: public discourse might seem far from the academy’s sphere of influence, but ‘common sense’ ideas worthy of knowledge do not come out of the blue, or removed from the context of power – and the university is a key shaping force in the discursive flux. (Gebrial 2018: 22)
Decolonization in this context includes, but is not limited to, renewed questioning, or uncovering, of the colonial origins of some of the core concepts of the social sciences (e.g. ‘modernity’, ‘development’, ‘capitalism’, ‘human rights’, ‘demography’); a focus on the Eurocentrism inherent to much social science research; and a critique of the ways in which contemporary research (and teaching) practices sometimes/often (depending on the field) reproduce colonial power relations.
There are disparate political and intellectual projects that all coalesce around these themes. The political projects have largely been student led and have particularly centred on ‘addressing issues of racial exclusion and racialized hierarchy within the university, including its teaching and research practices’ (Bhambra 2019: 1). ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ is widely seen as triggering a wider global movement. This campaign, based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, centred in part around a campaign in 2015 to have a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from a prominent location on campus (Gebrial 2018; Nyamnjoh 2016). Cecil Rhodes was a wealthy British businessman and politician, who was prime minister of the Cape Colony in the late 1800s, founded the colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and parts of Zambia) and was an ardent white supremacist who laid the legal groundwork for apartheid. Challenging his reification on campus was, for the students studying there, urgent and necessary in the post-apartheid context. ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ Cape Town drew the attention of students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. They too had a statue of Rhodes on campus and, as part of a much broader agenda of drawing attention to the colonial entanglements of the university, they campaigned for its removal (Gebrial 2018; Rhodes Must Fall Movement 2018). Of course, this is set within the context of a long history of anti-colonial movements in South Africa but also globally.
These explicitly de- and anti-colonial protest movements have been linked to other campus-based protests such as those against caste privilege at Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities in India, and Black Lives Matter on campuses in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018). Related to these disparate events is the broad-based campaign ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’. This student-led movement, often headed by students of colour, asks that teachers in higher education take a look at their reading lists and consider whether there are any scholars of colour on them at all. Where there are scholars of colour on reading lists, how many of them are present to offer core theory, as opposed to place-specific case studies? How many courses address questions of race, racism, colonialism or its ongoing legacies? These questions are most poignant when the courses under consideration cover topics such as international development or international migration. ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’ is a challenge: it should not be possible to teach a course on international development without putting colonialism and neo-colonialism centre stage, and the First World should not be the source of every theoretical perspective relating to the topic of poverty in the Third World. For us, the same is true for migration studies: it should not be possible to teach a course on migration without mentioning colonialism or having any discussion of ‘race’ and racism, and the First World should not be the source of every theoretical perspective relating to the topic of migration globally. The point is not necessarily to stop teaching Marx, Foucault, Agamben or Carens, it is to also make sure that you are teaching Fanon, Quijano, Wynter and Spivak alongside them, while also asking how colonialism frames the work of all of these scholars.
In light of the debates sketched out above, what does it mean to ‘decolonize’ a field of scholarship? Is such a task even meaningful or is it just paying lip service to a live political issue which is having a fashionable moment and tokenistically mentioning it while carrying on as normal? For Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, decolonizing in the university context involves the following activities:
it is a way of thinking about the world which takes colonialism, empire and racism as its empirical and discursive objects of study; it resituates these phenomena as key shaping forces of the contemporary world, in a context where their role has been systematically effaced from view … [then] it purports to offer alternative ways of thinking about the world and alternative forms of political praxis. (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018: 3)
This definition places emphasis on epistemology and on the underlying Eurocentric frameworks which cut across a lot of research that is undertaken in universities around the world (see also Alatas 2006; Amin 1988; Mignolo 2011a). It focuses on academic knowledge production and particularly on the sanctioned erasure of histories of colonialism and ongoing anti-colonial struggles from many (most) fields of study. It furthermore argues that the ways that we think about the world can lead to political praxis which seeks to change it.
There have been challenges to this perspective in recent years which must be acknowledged here. The most well-known intervention has been from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), who are interested in decolonization in the field of education studies within the context of settler colonialism. Their point is that in settler-colonial states such as Canada, decolonization should always refer to the relinquishing of stolen land to indigenous peoples, and that ‘until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism’. They argue that:
curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. (Tuck and Yang 2012: 19)
When they write about decolonization, then, they ‘are not offering it as a metaphor’ or ‘an approximation of other experiences of oppression’. Decolonization, for Tuck and Yang, ‘is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym’ (2012: 3). University-based intellectual and pedagogic activities are, for Tuck and Yang, ‘white moves to innocence’, which allow settlers to feel better about the horrors of settler colonialism without actually doing anything practical to change it since to do so would involve (at a minimum) a loss of privilege.
This is an important intervention and decolonization of intellectual thought should not be simply another ‘move to innocence’ which assuages ‘white guilt’. We need to sit with the discomforts which their intervention may give rise to and take them seriously in approaching our own work. Building critical consciousness should always, necessarily, lead to action in the contexts and varying positions of power that we occupy. Nevertheless, we concur with Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu (2018) in that we do not take the position that struggles against colonialism are only about settler-colonial dispossessions of land. Colonialism was/is not only a series of settler projects, it also entailed slavery and slave trading, commercial imperialism and direct rule (to name but three examples). It was furthermore accompanied by a whole host of legitimating intellectual projects, in which many universities in former metropoles played a central role, as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ so aptly demonstrates. With Bhambra and colleagues, we take colonialism as a global project and acknowledge the role of universities, academic knowledge and disciplines as key sites through which colonialism – its moral justifications, racial theories and Orientalist imaginaries – was produced. These different projects require different, but related, responses in different contexts. We take this position, undoubtedly, as a consequence of our location in the British context and acknowledge that any blind spots on the specificity and structures of settler colonialism may be a consequence of this position.
But we also do not subscribe to the idea that all intellectual work to reveal systems of colonial knowledge should be viewed as moves towards (white) innocence (although this remains an active risk that we should be reflexive about). This is in part because intellectual work should never be the only work that we do, but also because knowledge production has long been an important part of colonizing and decolonizing work; thinking and acting are interconnected. What is of particular concern to us as scholars interested in migration is the extent to which colonial perspectives in many ways continue to dominate scholarly output and teaching in the contemporary period, as the ‘Why Is My Curriculum White’ and other projects of ‘decolonizing the university’ have so clearly shown. While this book engages with some theoretical work which challenges migration studies as it is currently articulated in the Global North, then, the perspectives discussed are not simply ‘add-ons’ to be included while the core stays the same. Instead, taking such interventions seriously upends much of what we think we know about migration.
But bearing in mind Tuck and Yang’s (2012) intervention, it is important also to state again that the intellectual sphere cannot and should not be the only sphere in which we seek to enact change. We may observe, therefore, that migration studies has tended as it has emerged to be a predominantly ‘white’ field and this may not be unrelated to the fact that the colonial past and its legacies and continuities, including a focus on race, have not been central to migration studies projects, textbooks or the agendas of research centres. Those who have provided answers to the question what would it mean to make colonialism central to how we understand migration are rarely self-declared ‘migration scholars’. We need, then, to reflect on (and act to change) structural hierarchies in higher education which are themselves connected to the legacies of colonialism, as other critics of the project have argued, at the same time as thinking about our intellectual commitments. This will include recognizing structural racisms – racial and ethnic inequalities (and silences and absences) in terms of student attainment and staff appointments and promotions. It is also to recognize that as migration studies has a historical relationship to policy making, the type of knowledge produced by scholars and taught to students does shape (if not often in a direct way) material conditions and policies. Challenging the intellectual foundations of the field is always part of broader struggles which are not always, or only, ‘academic’.
Sitting with the unease and tension around calls to decolonize which Tuck and Yang articulate, we have decided to not call this book ‘decolonizing migration studies’. However, we see this work as connecting with activities encapsulated in decolonizing agendas within ‘the university’ as an institution, a site of power relations and a place for the validation of knowledge claims. We also need to recognize our privilege within the existing systems of power and political economy which made the writing of this book possible. We are both white ‘cis’-gender scholars, with relatively secure positions in elite institutions, and this has shaped our ability to write this book, perhaps over other people systematically marginalized within, or excluded from, the academy. This is important to acknowledge. But challenging the colonial and racialized systems of academic knowledge (in this case on migration) is not simply a job for people of colour. Nor should centring colonialism be a niche research interest; it is a fundamental reorientation which is often/always contested, incomplete and imperfect, a work in progress and everyone’s responsibility. With this in mind, we hope this book will form part of broader conversations, challenges and critiques which we openly welcome and encourage.
Does migration studies need to think about colonialism?
As the discussion above indicated, ‘decolonizing’ is a highly contested agenda. But the idea that colonialism should be an important part of how we make sense of the present is, surely, less contentious, particularly in contexts where it has been elided. Recent years have seen a growing number of scholars arguing for greater acknowledgement of colonial histories and their legacies for contemporary migration issues. For example, Mains et al. (2013: 132) observe that ‘despite the material links between colonialism, postcolonialism and migration, social scientists in general have been slow to address this intersection’ (see also McIlwaine 2008, cited in Mains et al. 2013). Tudor (2018) and De Genova (2018) specifically articulate this lack of attention in terms of a neglect of postcolonial racism and racialization, and observe that there is a strong sense in the field that to speak of racism is either to be racist, or (relatedly) that such observations are (or should be) the exclusive interest of scholars of colour (see also El-Tayeb 2011; Boulila 2019; Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015; Michel 2015; Walia 2014). Rivera-Salgado (1999) noted twenty years ago that race and ethnicity are ‘frequently either ignored or treated as a consequence of migration flows and considered to be a problem “here” not “there”’, but this pattern has not significantly shifted. Certainly any increased recognition of ethnicity rarely also then understands ideas of racial or ethnic difference to be rooted in long-standing practices and processes of colonialism (see Hall 1978 for more on this).
The interconnectedness of migration studies as a project of university institutions, with migration management as a project of national and international policy-making institutions, is relevant here. Because migration scholars do not only speak to each other and have esoteric intellectual discussions about the dynamics of migration, they are also invited into these national and international policy-making fora. The language of migration scholarship and that of migration governance are therefore deeply entangled and interdependent. Institutions such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its non-refugee, migration-focused sister organization, the IOM (International Organization for Migration), are key players in this relationship and themselves emerged from colonialism. The UNHCR was founded to support European refugees exclusively following the Second World War because the colonial and settler-colonial powers did not want people of colour to have full access to human rights (Mayblin 2017). Its remit expanded as a consequence of the demands and activities of movements for decolonization. The IOM, meanwhile, was founded to settle Europeans (at a time when Europe was thought to be overpopulated) in Africa (at a time when African countries were not thought of as sovereign nations) (Hansen and Jonsson 2014).
Bridget Anderson (2019: 2) has suggested that ‘perhaps we are experiencing not an “age of migration” but an age of migration research’ (emphasis in original). Studies of migration first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Gabaccia (2014) argues that in the United States studies of migration were primarily based in social anthropology and revolved around the application of ‘assimiliationist theory’ to different social groups who were deemed ‘immigrants’ (see Fitzgerald 2014). When we tend to speak of the institutionalization of migration studies as a ‘field’, we are referring to the period after the Second World War when states and international organizations began funding research on migration and refugees. The development of migration studies thus presents an interesting example of a ‘state science’ (Gabaccia 2014). Whilst interdisciplinary, the field grew around the demands of states and the international community to track and account for the movement of people ‘globally’ (Donato and Gabaccia 2015). But, more specifically, this was concerned with the mobility of people from the Global South to the Global North in periods of decolonization and under what would later be called ‘globalization’ and the further entrenchment and expansion of neo-liberal capitalism. The provision for this type of research grew in the United States and in Europe, in the latter under the emergent funding landscape of the European Union (EU) and within a broader biopolitical interest in the cost and benefits of migration, demographics and population management (for example, see the establishment of Osnabrück’s Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) in 1991).
This history of course shapes the field today. Whilst it would be a mistake to see all migration studies as overdetermined by the need to create policy-relevant research and to produce research that maps onto the interests of states and international organizations for the capture of funds, these factors strongly shape what constitutes appropriate knowledge and determines research agendas across migration studies (see Hatton 2018 on the United Kingdom and German context). To Scholten (2018), the dangers of this ‘co-production’ of knowledge have led to migration scholars reproducing forms of methodological nationalism and reifying state concepts such as ‘integration’, ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘migrant versus citizen’ divide (also see de Genova 2013). Whilst more ‘critical’ intellectual projects have shaped the field in terms of engagement with theories of ‘transnationalism’ throughout the 1990s (see Blanc-Szanton, Glick Schiller and Basch 1992), and more post-structuralist-influenced approaches to mobility and spatiality (Urry 2007), this environment has not been conducive to a sustained engagement with postcolonial and decolonial theory or even a broader engagement with historiography (Gabaccia 2014). The often superficial engagement with history is evidenced by the long-held view in key migration study textbooks that continue to periodize ‘contemporary migration’ (i.e. after the Second World War) as ‘new’, ‘unprecedented’ and ‘unique’ (see, for example, Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014).
In spite of the colonial blind spots within migration studies, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the field has completely ignored colonialism. Migration theories which draw on world systems theory (which is also an intellectual point of departure for decoloniality) are notable in taking account of colonial histories in their analyses (Richmond 1994; Satzewich 1991), and textbooks on migration studies almost always cover this theoretical field (see Brettell and Hollifeld 2008; Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014; Martiniello and Rath 2012). World systems theory (see Wallerstein 2004) makes sense of the world in terms of the incorporation of increasing numbers of states into the global capitalist economy and the consequent emergence of a worldwide division of labour which has uneven impacts on different societies. It divides the world into core, semi-periphery and periphery and argues that the core and periphery are locked into a relationship of exploitation and dependency which structurally prevents peripheral countries from developing. There are clear implications for migration studies here in that migration would then be understood as part of much broader relationships between states and societies. As wealthy ‘core’ economies became increasingly dependent upon low-paid migrant labour from the peripheries from the 1970s, international labour migration came to be seen as an important element in relations of domination between core and periphery. What is now called South–North migration therefore, from this perspective, reinforces relations of dependency.
There are criticisms to be made of the extent to which world systems theory adequately accounted for, or then instrumentalized, race and gender in the world system (Grosfoguel 2011). Nevertheless, this is undeniably a corner of migration studies which has sought to incorporate an account of historical colonial power relations in seeking to make sense of the present. Equally, Latin American decolonial work on the ‘coloniality of power’ is indebted to world systems theory even as it departs from its primarily economic focus (Quijano 2000). It is here that we see emerging some decolonial analyses of migration which are alive to the importance of colonial histories, and indeed presents (Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015).
A postcolonial awareness is also visible in, if not central to, other areas of migration studies. Scholars who research the European context often, for example, note the movement of migrants from former colonies to former metropoles in the second half of the twentieth century (Geddes and Scholten 2016). These ‘postcolonial’ migrations have given rise to many studies which, though more often cited in sociologies of race and ethnicity or cultural studies (for example, Cohen and Jonsson 2011; Gilroy 2002b, 2004; Hall 1996c; Wemyss 2009), nevertheless overlap with the concerns of migration researchers (for example, race and racism as legacies of empire are strong themes in Joppke 1999). Those who research the settler colonies as ‘countries of immigration’ also often note the colonial history of those countries, albeit often too briefly and rarely with an engagement with settler colonialism as an ongoing phenomenon. Those who work on what is increasingly dubbed ‘South–South’ migration are, furthermore, offering a wellspring of non-Eurocentric analytical frameworks which, if not necessarily centring colonial histories, are certainly working against Eurocentrism and are very much alive to the connected colonial histories that link different parts of the world (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2019).
There are, nevertheless, prominent volumes in the field which barely mention colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization (e.g. Brettell and Hollifield 2008; Carens 2015; Faist 2000; Kivisto and Faist 2010; Sassen 1999; Soysal 1994). Likewise, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship is frequently ignored as a way of theorizing migration in key textbooks (even those professing to ‘diversify’, for example Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020). There are also many postgraduate ‘Refugee and Forced Migration’ programmes at ‘world-leading’ universities which cover neither these themes and theories nor issues of race and racism. As historical-structural approaches, such as those deriving from world systems theory, have been dismissed as overly structurally deterministic and have fallen out of favour, with them we have lost a focus on global racism and the legacies of colonialism as structuring axes of inequality and im-mobility. The focus has moved towards the more agential meso- and micro-level theories of ‘communities’, ‘networks’, ‘circulations’ and individual migrants within the context of globalization. But at the same time as acknowledging people’s power to act upon their own lives, these approaches pay too little attention, as previously noted, to structures of race and racism.
Refocusing on race and racism necessitates a renewed focus on the legacies of colonialism in contemporary power relations and particularly on the continued relevance of racial hierarchy for contemporary social, political, legal and economic life. Migration scholars tend to shy away from ‘race’ as a concept, as noted above, since it is associated with histories of racial science which we do not wish to lend legitimacy to. When studies do at least show an awareness of colonial histories, it is too often the case that colonial knowledge, racism and power are treated as something ‘in the past’ (see, for example, Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020: 312–16). Nevertheless, ‘race’ continues to hold meaning in the social world and racial ideas continue to significantly impact upon people’s lives (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Lentin 2020; Yancy 2016), as the recent renewed focus on racial capitalism has shown (Bhattacharyya 2018). In order to develop more adequate analyses of migration in the contemporary world, we need to acknowledge this and incorporate such analyses into migration studies.
A further issue is the extent to which migration studies continues to be quietly invested in ‘modernization theory’ (see Bhambra 2014). This is the idea that Europe and the white settler colonies at some point became ‘modern’ (wealthy, democratic, rational, secular, rights-based, egalitarian, capitalist, etc.), and that this process (the ‘European miracle’) was endogenous. In order for other parts of the world to become like Europe and its settler colonies (an aim assumed to be desirable), and particularly for them to eradicate poverty, modernization theory advocates that they can and should follow the path laid out by Europe and the wider Global North. This idea of modernization underpins the idea of ‘development’ (Escobar 1995). It centres Europe and European history as the reference point from which a road map into the future is imagined for countries deemed ‘underdeveloped’. The concept of ‘development’ is important in migration studies and is rarely paid critical attention. There is an assumption that development is the same as poverty reduction and that migration may facilitate or hinder this desirable process, or that from the opposite perspective development can facilitate or curtail migrations. That is not to suggest that poverty reduction is a problematic aim, but that we do need to acknowledge: (a) the colonial history which facilitated wealth accumulation in ‘the West’ – development in this part of the world was not endogenous and unrelated to impoverishment and exploitation in other parts of the world (Rodney 2018 [1972]) and cannot therefore be simply mimicked elsewhere; and (b) the ongoing power relations which facilitate inequality in both mobilities and immobilities but also in concentrations of wealth and poverty globally. An interrogation of the colonial origins of the idea of development facilitates an alternative framing of the issues at stake.
A growing number of scholars argue that our analyses of migration-related phenomena are enriched by an analysis which acknowledges histories of colonialism, and related racisms. On this theme, Adeyanju and Oriola (2011: 952) observe that ‘there is no notable scholarship in the existing body of literature on African migration that deals with the influence of the colonial discourse and ideology on Africans’ desire to immigrate to the West’. This is despite the fact that these discourses, which have endured the end of formal colonialism, are for them central to understanding the motivations behind African migration to the West, and despite the fact that African migration to ‘the West’ has received a significant amount of scholarly attention. Mains et al. (2013: 131) suggest that the critical interweaving of postcolonial theory and migration studies offers ‘a unique opportunity to reflect and ground our understandings of mobility in more complicated and (hopefully) sensitive ways’. A call to complication and complexity, then, goes to the heart of the potential of the bodies of literature discussed here.
But there have also been recent suggestions that a post- or decolonial frame risks reconfirming the national territory as a site of analysis (Anderson 2019; Sharma 2020). A central danger, some argue, is that migration researchers might be cementing or confirming the migrant/native distinction by working from such perspectives when what we should be doing is denaturalizing such binaries through de-nationalizing and de-territorializing our work (see also Davies and Boehmer 2019). We contest this reading of post- and decolonial perspectives though concede that too often binaries are reinforced rather than complexities embraced. Undeniably, anti-colonial movements have historically drawn on nationalist discourses as a move to resist colonial definitions of belonging, but this has not been without significant intellectual critique (for example, see Fanon 2008 [1952]). Equally, indigenous studies have been criticized for promoting an exclusionary ‘nationalist’ agenda and the debate rages about how solidarities can be built across colonial/modern lines of racialized distinction which were the very basis of the formation of settler-colonial states (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008–9; Tuck, Guess and Sultan 2014). While we would distinguish between projects of self-determination under conditions of colonial occupation on the one hand and anti-migrant nationalism on the other, the point here is that such struggles are certainly not the totality of intellectual discussion within decolonial or related fields.
The project of questioning colonial frameworks of hierarchical distinction (Mayblin 2017; Mignolo 2011a; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a; Wynter 2003), of understanding histories as made up of movements and interconnections between societies and peoples rather than separateness (Bhambra 2014; Krivonos 2019; Nisancioglu 2019), of challenging Eurocentrism (Alatas 2006; Amin 1988; Bhabha 2005 [1994]) and critiquing the ways in which legal, social and economic definitions and functions of border regimes produce certain migrants as a problem (Achiume 2019; Anghie 2008; Pahuja 2011) is the very antithesis of parochialism, nationalism and ‘us and them’ politics. We hope to show this at length through the course of this book but also acknowledge that all fields and perspectives have their own blind spots, contradictions and unrealized aspirations – we are certainly not arguing that there is not a lot of work to do in this area. In the next section, we sketch out some of the key foci of three fields of work that have offered significant inspiration to us in our own work and in exploring in this book what a migration studies that centres colonialism might look like.
Postcolonialism, decoloniality and Third World approaches to international law
In relation to the intellectual projects which are associated with the agenda of ‘decolonizing the university’, postcolonialism, decoloniality, TWAIL, indigenous studies, global histories, South–South relations, black studies and subaltern studies, amongst other projects, are all seen in a variety of different disciplines and geographical locations to have contributed to this agenda. Three of particular relevance to the perspectives presented in this volume are postcolonialism, decoloniality and TWAIL. Here we briefly sketch out the main foci of these intellectual fields, but for an extended discussion of some of the broader theoretical issues at stake refer to chapter 2.
Leela Gandhi (1998: 4) describes postcolonialism as ‘a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath’. In other words, postcolonialism is a critical theoretical perspective which engages with and contests the enduring uneven relations between formerly colonized societies and former colonizing societies. Postcolonialism is rooted for many scholars in ‘Third World’ struggles for decolonization, both in a practical political sense and in terms of ongoing decolonizations of thought, knowledge, economic power and cultural practices (Young 2001). Academic postcolonialism, as a general orientation, originated in the humanities and is better established in English literature, history and cultural studies (which offers a key bridge into sociology, anthropology and human geography) than in the social sciences (Bhambra 2007, 2011; Go 2013). In theoretical terms, postcolonialism has sought to contest dominant western ways of viewing the world and to challenge the assumed universalism of ideas which emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century to the present day. In this sense (and rather confusingly), it is very much not about seeing colonialism as something which has finished and is now in the past, despite its name.
Three authors are often cited as being the founding theorists of postcolonialism within the humanities and social sciences. They are: Edward Said (1995 [1978]), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1999), and Homi K. Bhabha (2005 [1994]). Said’s ‘Orientalism’ takes a Foucauldian perspective in uncovering the discursive production of colonial meanings beyond the end of formal colonialism. Said is primarily concerned with the way in which the western academy reproduces the colonial difference, the inherent ‘otherness’ of non-European societies, through textual and non-textual (e.g. art) media. Colonial power, Said urges, is not separable from colonial knowledge since the Orient, and the Occident, are the products of systems of representation. He reminds us that ‘human history is made by human beings’ and that ‘since the struggle for control over territory is part of that history, so too is the struggle for control over historical and social meaning’ (Said 1995 [1978]: 331). The Orient, then, is an invention of intellectuals, commentators, artists, politicians, writers and others, but it does not exist as a cohesive entity outside of that representation or outside of its relation to the Occidental self-understanding. What is at stake is not ‘that there is a real or true Orient that could have been known, but rather [Said] is provoking us to consider how what we know is itself framed as knowledge through particular systems of representation and the practices of colonial governance based upon them’ (Bhambra 2014: 212). There is a broader challenge here. For migration researchers, that is about questioning whether the subjects of academic research exist as ‘migrants’ outside of our definitions of them as such, and how those definitions connect to colonial modes of defining the world and the various people within it.
Spivak extends this. Her key contribution is to problematize and question how the Third World subject is represented in western discourse, taking up some of the themes addressed by the Subaltern Studies Collective in the early 1980s. In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (Spivak 1988), Spivak seeks to complicate the concept of representation, borrowing the vertreten/darstellen distinction from Marx. While
