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 precisely in its having become universal. From now on, it’s modernity all the way down, everywhere, until the end of times’, as Escobar (2007) has pointed out. In this context, ‘not only is radical alterity expelled forever from the realm of possibilities, all world cultures and societies are reduced to being a manifestation of European history and culture’ (Escobar 2007). By ‘radical alterity’, Escobar refers here to different ways of living; different sets of ambitions for the political, economic and social organization of societies; different ways of understanding and being and acting in the world beyond the hegemonic ideology of modernity spreading globally from an imagined western epicentre. The ‘coloniality’ concept in coloniality/modernity does not, therefore, simply refer to colonialism. Instead, it is about a colonially inspired Orientalism in Said’s (1995 [1978]) terms, a worldview.

      ‘Coloniality of being’ refers ‘to the lived experience of colonization and its impact on language’, or the way in which one speaks and thinks of one’s place in the world through the filter of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242). We might think of this in relation to W. E. B. Du Bois’s work on double consciousness. To be African American was, for Du Bois, to live with a double consciousness, simultaneously black and American, always living with this ‘two-ness’ and always seeing oneself through the eyes of white America. This concept of double consciousness has been elaborated and applied beyond the nineteenth-century US context (see Gilroy 1993) and its overlap with Maldonado-Torres’s (2007) concept of the ‘coloniality of being’ (in the Latin American context) might help to elaborate our understanding of both concepts. How we think about our place in the world is therefore related to how we imagine our geographical and temporal location in relation to modernity.

      Intellectually, Eurocentrism is an orientation which puts some places (Europe and ‘the West’ more broadly) at the centre of world history as well as of contemporary knowledge production. Only upon entry into modernity do other places enter that world history (Dussel 1995). Eurocentrism therefore requires us to ignore connected histories, colonial interconnections and the actual role of the non-West in world history. But it also requires us to ignore non-European philosophical traditions and intellectual projects oriented to making sense of the world in which they found themselves – just as Europe’s philosophers were doing. Eurocentrism is about an orientation to a ‘normal’ political, philosophical, economic and historical reference point. That reference point may not be explicit; it may be implicit. But it would suggest, for example, that in thinking through moral arguments for immigrant inclusion or exclusion globally we look only at European-origin philosophers.