Migration Studies and Colonialism. Lucy Mayblin

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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). Modernity, then, has both explicitly preoccupied many social scientists and implicitly provided the underlying framework from which the world today is understood. That is, as comprised of, for example modern and traditional, developed and developing, societies. For migration studies, this dichotomous way of construing the world, distinguishing between developed and developing countries, or more recently the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’, has been the central assumption upon which all else rests.

Postcolonial and decolonial scholars agree that modernity is centrally a concept rooted in the project of European (and later western) self-understanding which went hand-in-hand with colonial expansion. It is about understanding how some societies came to be ‘modern’ (and superior), in relation to ‘others’ who are ‘traditional’ (and inferior). The whole idea of modernity is therefore dependent on the story of the ‘European miracle’. As Gurminder K. Bhambra has argued (2007), this story rests on two fundamental assumptions: rupture and difference. She writes of this in terms of ‘a temporal rupture that distinguishes a traditional, agrarian past from the modern, industrial present; and a fundamental difference that distinguishes Europe from the rest of the world’ (2007: 1, emphasis added). The Renaissance, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution are central СКАЧАТЬ