Migration Studies and Colonialism. Lucy Mayblin
pitfalls of Eurocentric modernization orthodoxy.
Can Eurocentrism be overcome?
As Aníbal Quijano (2007) has argued, we are all stuck in colonial modernity, which suggests that finding a path out is challenging. Structural barriers are important here. As noted earlier, particular languages, most notably English, are privileged in the world of academic publishing, and people such as ourselves, who are located in wealthy European and white-settler states, are more likely to have the support and resources to then successfully publish in influential journals and with well-resourced publishing houses (Cabral, Njinya-Mujinya and Habomugisha 1998). Those ideas which conform to established norms of ‘good’ theory or scholarship from recognized figures of the ‘canon’, which is usually itself made up of European and US-origin scholars, are then also more likely to be accepted for publication. Global South scholarship is more likely to be seen as particular to the context in which it is produced or to similar ‘developing’ contexts. Philosophical or policy ideas produced in the Global North are thus readily applied globally or to a wide range of international contexts, but ideas produced in the Global South are more likely to be seen as context specific (Alatas 2006). These are barriers to scholars in Global South countries publishing and influencing debates in international journals, but they are also barriers to the publishing of any work from any location which challenges dominant modes of thinking. Nevertheless, there are several schools of thought that have sought to imagine, or move, beyond Eurocentrism or colonial/modernity, depending on their perspective. We will briefly describe four of them here: delinking; border thinking; the pluriverse; and connected histories/sociologies.
Amin (1988) proposed ‘delinking’ in the late 1980s as a response to the problematic entanglement of ‘development’ in Third World countries and international political and economic power relations which sought to both control development and ultimately stymie it. Amin argued that Third World countries could not improve the living standards of their populations by engaging with targets set within the highly unequal global capitalist system. Instead, he argued, they should ‘delink’ from the global system and pursue domestic development priorities. This idea, as a practical economic policy proscription, was highly contested (see, for example, Smith and Sender 1983) but the concept of epistemic ‘delinking’ was taken up in the discourse of decolonizing knowledge articulated by Latin American decolonial scholars. Scholars such as Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano started to argue in the 2000s that what was needed was to ‘change the terms of the conversation’ in order to challenge ‘hegemonic ideas of what knowledge and understanding are’ (Mignolo 2007: 459). Delinking here is about denaturalizing concepts and conceptual fields that are considered to be universal and yet are approached from particular perspectives. For example, what does religion, democracy, culture, society, art or family look like, and how do we know them when we see them? Denaturalizing accepted ways of knowing the world is fundamental to decolonizing knowledge from this perspective. Approaching international migration as something which is embedded in multi-generational patterns of bordering, mobility, immobility, uprooting, colonialism and imperialism would, then, constitute delinking from the accepted ways of knowing which focus on the present as unprecedented and separate from (particularly global) phenomena in the past (Vergara-Figueroa 2018).
One approach to delinking is ‘border thinking’ (Anzaldúa 1987; Mignolo 2007). Border thinking does not need to be newly invented; it is theory which already exists (but is rarely acknowledged away from the spaces in which it is practised) that sits at the borders of the colonial matrix of power. It comes from the lived experiences of people familiar with the darker side of modernity. Border thinking does not happen separately to modernity but in response to it, as part of live struggles against oppression. Thus ‘border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006: 206). The border here is conceptualized in terms of both geographical distance from ‘modern’ places and epistemic difference from the Eurocentric centres of world power. Mignolo and Tlostanova write:
Consider, on the one hand, knowledge in the modern and imperial European languages and – on the other hand – Russian, Arabic and Mandarin. The difference here is imperial. However, they are not just different. In the modern/colonial unconscious, they belong to different epistemic ranks. ‘Modern’ science, philosophy and the social sciences are not grounded in Russian, Chinese and Arabic languages. That of course does not mean that there is no thinking going on or knowledge produced in Russian, Chinese and Arabic. It means, on the contrary, that in the global distribution of intellectual and scientific labour, knowledge produced in English, French or German does not need to take into account knowledge in Russian, Chinese and Arabic. (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006: 214)
In this context, border thinking entails using alternative knowledge traditions and non-European languages of expression in order to reimagine theories of the social, the economic and the political. Examples of border thinking might include Islamic philosophical and scientific thought or First Nation epistemological traditions (Coburn 2016; Smith 2012). Examples of the enactment of border thinking might include the Haitian Revolution and the more contemporary World Social Forum (Santos 2008; Scott 2018; Trouillot 1995). According to decolonial theorists, these alternative perspectives introduce other cosmologies into the hegemonic discourse of western modernity which are not unwittingly committed to, or restrained by, its frame. Border thinking on themes related to international migration is already happening. Mignolo sites the location of border thinking in the Third World but, in acknowledging actually existing mobilities, he then charts ‘its routes of dispersion travelled through migrants from the Third to the First World’,which are then found in ‘immigrant consciousness’ (Mignolo 2011b: 274). Postcolonial intellectual Frantz Fanon then developed his immigrant consciousness at the point of migrating from Martinique to France (Fanon 2008 [1952]). Upon discovering that he was seen first and foremost as a ‘negro’ in France, he thus brought border thinking to France through the immigrant consciousness, encapsulated in the quote ‘Oh, my body, make of me always a man who questions’. Equally, work on settler colonialism and within indigenous studies offers multiple challenging perspectives from the borders of colonial/modern thought which rethinks the power relations at stake in contexts of immigration (see chapter 4; see also Chatterjee 2019; Gonzales 2012; Jones 2009; Klooster 2013; Lugones 1992; Pulido 2018; Rodríguez 2014; Stanley et al. 2014). Whether such thought is transforming hegemonic ideas about international migration is then another question.
Rojas argues that the universalizing colonial logic of capitalist modernity ‘eliminates entire life-worlds, declaring them non-credible alternatives’ (Rojas 2016: 370). The universalizing logic is not equitable, however; modern reason is often thought of as superior to other systems of knowledge. Central to modernization is the distinction between culture and nature. Culture defined the subject that knows; nature defines the object to be known. Because nature is ‘out there’ and is knowable through reasoned examination, it must then be universal and equally accessible on the same terms, irrespective of the cultural background of the knower. As Reiter (2018: 7) points out, ‘to think that the European way of explaining the world is somehow closer to the way the world really is is naive’. Such an assumption is culturally particular, and yet it is nevertheless universalizing. Against this universalizing project, one alternative – a pluriversal politics – offers, according to Rojas, ‘a more just coexistence of worlds that exceeds what is possible under a colonial and capitalist logic’ (Rojas 2016: 370). The pluriverse, then, is about recognizing that modern ways of understanding the world sit alongside other ways of understanding the world which are different, even incomprehensible, from a modern/colonial perspective (Seth 2013). These different ontologies and epistemologies do not exist in a hierarchy but in an ‘ecology of knowledges’ (Santos 2008), or an ‘epistemological mosaic’ (Connell 2018). Nevertheless, some of them may offer solutions to global problems, such as climate change or extreme inequality, which modernity lacks the tools to solve.
If border thinking and the pluriverse look towards the diversity of ways of imagining and understanding the world from different locations, Gurminder K. Bhambra’s work on connected sociologies (2007, 2010, 2014), which is discussed further in