Migration Studies and Colonialism. Lucy Mayblin
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 vertreten means to represent in the form of a substitute or proxy, darstellen is to represent in the form of a depiction or portrait. Spivak is here interested less in the subjective experience of oppression and more in the mechanisms and structures of domination. She argues that the subaltern, by virtue of being the subaltern, cannot speak in the ways we demand of her, yet too often European academics present themselves either as objective observers of others or as allowing the oppressed to speak for themselves. What this hides, Spivak argues, are the power relations at stake, as well as the historically rooted worldviews of academic ‘observers’ who interpret as they translate.
Finally, Homi K. Bhabha contributed the next keystone publication in what have now, retrospectively, become the key pillars of postcolonialism. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha (2005 [1994]) investigates identity through the lens of representation within the context of colonialism. He suggests that the value differential between the original and the copy, with western culture always representing the former, consistently places the mimicking colonized subject in a position of ‘otherness’. Identity here is therefore either ‘presence’ (the real thing) or ‘semblance’ (similar to but not the real thing). Thus the point that to be anglicized is ‘emphatically not to be English’ demonstrates the place of knowledge as a form of social control: whether such knowledge is implicit or not, it cannot be learned (2005 [1994]: 125). The copy can thus always be identified and therefore controlled. For Bhabha, the writing out of colonial spaces from the narrative of modernity, the spatializing of time, instituted a particular theory of cultural difference which installed ‘cultural homogeneity into the sign of modernity’ (2005 [1994]: 349). The crux of the critique therefore becomes apparent: modernity is fundamentally limited by its built-in ethnocentrism.
While postcolonial studies is often associated with South Asian scholars working from post-structural perspectives in the humanities, decoloniality is associated with Latin American scholars working from world-systems perspectives in the social sciences. In a key founding article of the field, Anibal Quijano articulated a theory of the coloniality of power. Quijano argues that the ‘modernity’ of Europe has become the context for its own being, but that this is in fact ‘so deeply imbricated in the structures of European colonial domination over the rest of the world that it is impossible to separate the two’ (Bhambra 2014: 130). Coloniality and modernity are therefore ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Mignolo 2007: 464). Many other scholars, particularly those from, or working in, Latin America, have explored this co-constitutive relationship between coloniality and modernity (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2000, 2011a; Vázquez 2011; Wynter 2003).
In the same vein as the postcolonialists discussed above, decolonial scholars are interested in the ways in which colonial power has not only been used to physically and materially dominate groups or societies identified as racially inferior, it has also entailed the subjugation, dismissal and erasure of whole systems of knowledge identified as intellectually inferior. Thus Maldonado-Torres has identified three key realms of coloniality which are of interest to their project: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being: ‘while the coloniality of power referred to the interrelation among modern forms of exploitation and domination (power), and the coloniality of knowledge had to do with the impact of colonization on the different areas of knowledge production, [meanwhile] coloniality of being would make primary reference to the lived experience of colonization and its impact on language’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242)
In dialogue with Levinas, Maldonado-Torres explains that ‘coloniality survives colonialism’ and this has implications for political and economic power and for knowledge production, but it also affects our ways of being in the world: ‘It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense,