Migration Studies and Colonialism. Lucy Mayblin
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Название: Migration Studies and Colonialism

Автор: Lucy Mayblin

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Социология

Серия:

isbn: 9781509542956

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      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.

      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, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath[e] coloniality all the time and everyday’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243).

      Decolonial scholars are, then, in part, interested in exploring the means by which we can ‘delink’ from coloniality/modernity and in doing so recover alternative knowledge systems (Mignolo 2007). Decoloniality is, therefore, a diverse project which has developed through an intellectual tradition distinct from postcolonialism, but which shares many of the core concerns (see Bhambra 2014).

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