Migration Studies and Colonialism. Lucy Mayblin
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.
2 Time and Space: Migration and Modernity
Introduction
This chapter discusses a central concern for scholars working with postcolonial and decolonial theory: modernity. These debates are vital for centring colonialism in migration studies. The idea that some parts of the world became modern through, inter alia, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and beyond, and that others did not, is fundamental to much social scientific enquiry (Bhambra 2007). Some of the key features of modernity are scientific progress, democracy, human rights and capitalism. Where these features are absent, it is often suggested that they must be promoted in order that societies who are ‘behind’ might ‘catch up’. This distinction between the ‘modern’ world and the ‘traditional’ world endures today in distinctions between developed and developing countries. It has also structured the academic division of labour in terms of the legitimate objects of study, and particularly the legitimate societies for different types of enquiry. Sociology, for example, tends to focus on ‘modern’ societies such as France or Australia, countries which are not within the purview of development studies. In turn, this framing then has significant implications for how migration is researched and understood in, and between, different parts of the world.
This chapter thus explores the concept of modernity within the social sciences and explicates the ways in which modernity has been denaturalized and parochialized by postcolonial and decolonial studies. 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. We then discuss the under-recognized darker side of modernity. This darker side draws attention to historical omissions, erasures and silences, which complicate our understanding of the emergence of modernity. The next section focuses on the issue of Eurocentrism, and how Eurocentric perspectives emerge from, and are fed by, the uneven global politics of knowledge production. This discussion is very important for rethinking contemporary migrations because it unsettles the underlying framework from which much research into international migration begins. Following this, we explore how ideas of Eurocentrism link to dichotomies around West and East, North and South, and how these types of distinction emerge from histories of colonialism. At the same time, imaginaries such as ‘the West’ and ‘the Global South’ are shifting symbolic geographies of territory, race and culture whose content changes over time.
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. We present some perspectives that have sought to overcome or think from the borders of modern/colonial thinking as indications that this work is indeed being done already. 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.
Problematizing the concept of modernity in the social sciences
‘Modernity’ is a key orienting concept within the social sciences within many universities globally (Bhambra 2007). Indeed, for most scholars, modernity is a relatively uncontroversial and useful shorthand for a series of events which occurred in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and which fundamentally changed European societies for ever. Anthony Giddens, for example, explains that modernity refers to ‘modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence’ (Giddens 1990: 1). This generality, he notes, leaves the exact content of ‘modernity’ (and its effects) open for discussion; but two things, when and where it emerged, are undisputed.
Colonial expansion led to the proliferation of forms of knowledge for making sense of the world, as well as ways of organizing this knowledge (Mignolo 2005). As the social sciences developed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the divisions between the disciplines often followed colonial modes of thinking about the world in relation to ‘modern’ societies and, conversely, ‘traditional’ societies. For example, sociology historically (and to a large extent contemporaneously) dealt with ‘modern’ societies and the conditions of living in modernity (Bhambra 2007), while anthropology and human geography dealt with ‘traditional’ societies and ‘primitive’ peoples (Asad 1979; Deloria 1988). Disciplines such as political science and economics started from the position of understanding politics as a western phenomenon (usually originating in ancient Greece), or the capitalist economy as a product of modernity, and later expanded out from this geographical starting point (Hay 2002; Marx 1990 [1887]; Skinner 1979; Waltz 1959; for debates on this in international politics, see Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015; Hobson 2004).