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 distinguished them from elsewhere: rationality and science, art and literature, human rights and democracy, and technological advancement. From Europe, this was first exported to the white settler colonies but has long been seen to have much broader relevance. As Bhambra (2007: 4) points out, ‘the Western Experience has been taken both as the basis for the construction of the concept of modernity and, at the same time, that concept is argued to have a validity that transcends the Western experiences’. But the world was very much globally interconnected through this period, and none of these developments or struggles happened in isolation. Indeed, the story of the ‘European miracle’ itself is selective in that it more often than not ignores colonialism and enslavement and is therefore incomplete.

      Central to understanding modernity are the vectors of time and space. Temporally, modernity happened, or happens, at particular times in particular places. The temporal aspect of modernity (its arrival) is usually thought of as occurring within the context of a linear conception of time and progress which originated with the Enlightenment. Thus ‘the present was described as modern and civilized, the past as traditional and barbarian. The more you go towards the past, the closer you get to nature’ (Mignolo 2011a: 152). Europe, therefore, progressed from nature, through tradition, to enlightenment, others did not. But because progress towards modernity occurs within a linear conception of time, Europe (or ‘the West’ as a symbolic geography) will always be ‘ahead’. If others accelerate, they may ‘catch up’. The achievement of modernity is thus a kind of long-drawn-out race. But the rules are not always clear. For example, if a country is seen to have caught up economically, because it has become wealthy, it is likely that other aspects, such as the religiosity of the population, or dominant cultural practices, will be viewed as ‘backward’, indicating that the country (and its nationals) is indeed still ‘behind’ in time (Shimazu 1998).

      Societies outside of Europe did have alternative conceptions of time in general, for example approaching time as cyclical, and alternative ways of making sense of the relationship between past and present events. But this fact did not diminish the assessment by colonizers that these places were without history. This was the case in India. British colonials did not find evidence of the recording of history which correlated with their understanding of what history should look like, and they determined that because Indians had a cyclical conception of time they were incapable of knowing their own history or of deciphering between myth and fact (Thapar 2002). Thapar (2002) argues that in fact early Indian texts indicate both cyclical and linear conceptions of time in operation, but this was not apparent to British colonials during the colonial period, in part because they were making sense of India within the context of colonial worldviews which rendered the inferiority of Indian society an existential necessity.

      Mignolo (2011a) draws our attention to the fact that in the first centuries of colonialism the difference between colonial conqueror and the objects of conquest was articulated in terms of barbarism: ‘others’ were barbarians. With the development through the Enlightenment, following Hegel, of ideas of linear time, and thus progress from barbarism, ‘barbarians’ became ‘primitives’. Primitives are still barbarians, but they are very specifically defined in temporal terms: as being of the past and capable of change (enlightenment, civilization) into the future. Over time, and into the present, the concept of linear time has thus facilitated the classification of cultural differences according to their proximity to either modernity (the present and future) or tradition (the past). But as we know from Said (1995 [1978]), places elsewhere to the western academy only exist in these ways to the extent that Occidentals understand them as such. The Orient exists only in the minds (and works) of Occidentals.

      While migration studies has tended to be dominated by well-funded research undertaken in the ‘developed’ or ‘First World’ of the ‘Global North’ or ‘the West’, it has then disproportionately focused on migration from the ‘developing’ or ‘Third’ World’ to the ‘First World’. That research institutions in the ‘Global North’ are better funded than those in the ‘Global South’ is (generally speaking) a consequence of long histories of colonial-era plunder, appropriation, exploitation, and wealth accumulation (Collyer et al. 2019; Keim et al. 2014). But the fact that this is not generally understood and reflected upon in the North then has implications for the social theories we develop to deal with international migration today (to paraphrase Bhambra). Because without acknowledging colonial history, South–North migrations become the primary migrations of interest in the world, become potentially illegitimate, become something detached from sedimented and unequal global racial and economic power relations. They become about individualized aspirations and motivations for a ‘better life’ set apart from the broader global historical contexts in which they might be understood.

      No longer exclusively СКАЧАТЬ