Migration Studies and Colonialism. Lucy Mayblin
is interested in overcoming the gap between general historical frameworks (which tend, even when critical, to be Eurocentric) and the many particular contexts and experiences that they then ignore. Subrahmanyam argued that the histories of different places are often analytically isolated from each other because of the way academic work happens, and he suggested that, through looking at the connections between places, deeper insights were gained. Rather than then looking at the diversity of particularity and relating it to European modernity in an implied or explicit hierarchy, or suggesting cultural relativism and reifying difference, Bhambra (inspired by Subrahmanyam) suggests that a focus on interconnectedness allows us to more adequately understand the world historically and contemporaneously. Focusing on interconnections, argues Bhambra (2010: 140), ‘allows for the deconstruction of dominant narratives at the same time as being open to different perspectives, and seeks to reconcile them systematically’.
Historical examples of international interconnection abound, which, once acknowledged, make it difficult to contemplate topics such as democracy, human rights or nationhood without understanding these to have emerged from and in global interconnectedness (as opposed to from within the geographical space of Western Europe exclusively). But Bhambra’s intention is not to simply argue for a reconstruction of how we understand history and its impact on the present. She goes further in arguing for connected sociologies, which in the present assume the world to be made up of a set of interconnections and influences, and within this context do not centre on particular locations such Europe or the West. In this sense, the South–South migration agenda, which is a burgeoning area of scholarship at the time of writing (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2019), might find theoretical inspiration in her interventions.
Conclusion
This chapter has described and discussed one of the most fundamental insights offered by post- and decolonial scholarship: the critique of the dominant discourse of modernity. It has explained how modernity can be understood as a way of thinking about the world in temporal and spatial terms, and how this framework then has far-reaching implications for the social sciences, including for migration researchers. The chapter has discussed Eurocentrism and the ways in which ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ are symbolic geographies, containers of modernity, which shift over time and are not territorially delimited. After a detour into the ‘migration and development’ literature as an illustrative example of an area of migration studies that might benefit from being rethought in light of these insights on modernity and Eurocentrism, the chapter ended with a brief exploration of some proposals for overcoming Eurocentrism. Taking seriously the intellectual contributions to social scientific thought discussed in this chapter, we might strive to make our work more adequate to the task of understanding the world from different vantage points, plural as it is.
Having offered this important exposition on post- and decolonial thinking on time, space and modernity, the next chapter moves into a more specific engagement with the concept of race. Ideas of race, and ideologies and practices of racism, are deeply entangled with colonial histories and also migration histories. If migration studies is to take seriously the need to engage with past and present colonialisms, and their legacies and continuities, an engagement with race is essential. While migration studies scholars seem to have shied away from race as a concept, they can rest assured that others have been busy theorizing the social, economic, cultural and political through the lens of race for a very long time. We draw upon this deep and rich body of intellectual work to discuss how migration scholars can (indeed must) start to seriously engage with thinking on race without becoming trapped in essentialist and racist logics.
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