Читать книгу Migration Studies and Colonialism - Lucy Mayblin - Страница 11

The book is structured as follows. Chapter 2 discusses a central concern for scholars working with postcolonial and decolonial theory: modernity. We discuss two key aspects of the conceptual framework of modernity: the temporal and the spatial, and how these aspects are deeply connected to colonial histories. These debates are vital for centring colonialism in migration studies and have significant implications for how migration is researched and understood in, and between, different parts of the world. The chapter also discusses the concept of ‘Eurocentrism’, and how Eurocentric perspectives emerge from, and are fed by, the uneven global politics of knowledge production. The penultimate section discusses a specific idea, that of ‘development’, and how ideas of development follow colonial ways of understanding the world. The final section asks whether Eurocentrism can be overcome since, as Walter Mignolo argues, we are all trapped in the ‘colonial matrix of power’. As a whole, these discussions lay the groundwork for much of what follows in the book and as such the discussions follow through and are elaborated through the subsequent chapters.

Chapter 3 demonstrates the relevance of interdisciplinary work on race to the central questions of contemporary migration studies. We thus explore the connections between colonial racism and mobility and explain how an analysis of race can help us understand contemporary migration and mobility. The chapter focuses on the centrality of race to the shaping of the modern world through European colonialism. Here we demonstrate how race was bound to colonial rule and imperial capitalism and, as importantly, how systems of domination relied on the management of mobility globally. We tie the more ‘historical’ way that race related to the control of movement to the modern push towards state immigration regimes and explore what this means for studies of migration. We also examine how different bodies of scholarship have theorized race. Race is foregrounded here as a ‘sociopolitical fact of domination’ (De Genova 2018: 1770). Throughout the chapter, we demonstrate in more detail how race informs the politics of mobility, but also how an analytics of race helps us understand migration in a more rigorous and historically accurate manner. In short, we are better able to understand what underpins mobility, what structures responses to certain people moving and how people experience migration if we centre race and racialization in our analysis.

Chapter 4 focuses on questions of sovereignty and citizenship. While sovereignty is typically defined as ‘authority over a territory occupied by a relatively fixed population, supposedly necessary to protect that territory and its citizens from external [and internal] threats’ (Leigh and Weber 2018, cited in Nisancioglu 2019: 2), an engagement with colonial histories, and the colonial present, significantly complicates this definition. This is in part because the myth of equality between sovereign states is brought into question, and in part because the sovereignty of settler-colonial states especially is directly challenged (Mathieu 2018; Moreton-Robinson 2007, 2015). This chapter therefore explores the relationship between ideas of migration, sovereignty and citizenship when set within the context of colonial histories and presents. It does this through an engagement with three very different areas of scholarship which have centred colonialism in relation to such issues: connected sociologies (postcolonial), migration as decolonization (TWAIL), and indigenous studies. Together, these interventions present modes of thinking about migration in the context of citizenship and sovereignty regimes which denaturalize their formation today.

All of the perspectives discussed in chapter 4 take seriously the importance of colonialisms of various kinds in shaping the present, and they concur that what results are racially grounded global inequalities and injustices. But between them there are contradictions and disconnections. This in part arises from the different modes of colonial relations that are foregrounded in the work of scholars. These different emphases do not necessarily sit easily together, as the discussion on ‘no borders’ at the end of the chapter makes clear. It is not our intention to smooth over these differences but to draw attention to the multiple possibilities raised by a commitment to centring colonialism and then the subsequent importance of local contexts in making sense of them in place.

Chapter 5 focuses upon forced migration and looks at three key interventions on this theme which have sought to rethink forced migration and asylum from a postcolonial, decolonial and TWAIL standpoint. The first section addresses colonial histories in relation to asylum as a human right in order to draw out some important reflections on the exclusivity and Eurocentrism of the category of ‘man’ and ‘human’. The next section focuses on the work of Aurora Vergara-Figueroa, whose writing on deracination in Colombia offers an important new perspective on forced migration. The next section discusses the concept of ‘necropolitics’, first proposed by Achille Mbembe but recently taken up by numerous scholars seeking to understand the role of violence, suffering and (especially) death, particularly ‘letting die’, in migration governance. Collectively, these perspectives disrupt many of the dominant ideas about displacement and forced migration within the field and ask us to rethink both how we understand refugee histories and what that then means for how we understand the present.

Chapter 6 examines the relationship between security and borders as part of the colonial present. The chapter responds to work on border security and the ‘securitization of migration’ which has become an expanding area of scholarship in the context of the global ‘war on terror’ since 2001. In order to challenge some of the assumptions of this research agenda, the chapter maps out how engagement with postcolonial, decolonial and non-Eurocentric scholarship can change how we analyse the seemingly rapid expansion of border security. It does so by demonstrating how border security should be considered part of the reformulation of colonial rule, grounded in an analysis of colonial racism and what this means for studies of border security in both the Global North and South. Through engaging explicitly with Islamic and decolonial African scholarship, the chapter also seeks to challenge how we understand borders, security and political violence labelled ‘terrorism’.

In the final substantive chapter, we aim to take up and expand the burgeoning scholarship in migration studies on the theme of gender and sexuality by arguing that scholars interested in gender and sexuality need to engage more seriously with the role of colonial modernity and racism in contemporary systems of oppression. This is particularly important with scholarship in migration studies because of the field’s historical amnesia over questions of colonialism and race. After outlining the benefits and limitations of feminist approaches to gender and intersectionality as a theory and methodology, we suggest that we are better able to comprehend how gender and sexuality work within coloniality by engaging with three authors’ work and three key concepts: Maria Lugones and the concept of the ‘coloniality of gender’; Hortense Spillers and the concept of ‘ungendering’; and Roderick Ferguson and the concept of ‘taxonomies of perversion’. Each of these scholars speaks to different but interrelated traditions within postcolonial and decolonial feminism, black feminism and queer-of-colour critiques. In doing so, they represent radical departures for how we think about interconnected questions of gender, family, intimacy, sexuality and, importantly, their deep connection to racialized violence and the imposition of colonial and imperial rule. What is so instructive about these authors’ work is that it challenges us to start by understanding that the struggle against patriarchal society (and more specifically heteropatriarchal society – the dominance and ‘superiority’ of both men and heterosexual gender and sexual relations) is at once a struggle against imperial racialized capitalism and colonial dispossession. This is increasingly important in a world where claims to protect ‘women’s’ and ‘LGBTQ+’ rights are being used by states to justify racist and imperial policies (see Farris 2017; Luibhéid 2018; Puar 2007).

Finally, the conclusion brings the key themes and threads together and calls again for readers to appreciate the urgency with which migration studies scholars need to engage with the history and ongoing structures of colonialism.