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

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СКАЧАТЬ as allowing the oppressed to speak for themselves, rendering scholarly representations as unproblematic. What this hides, Spivak observes, is the economic, cultural and intellectual power relations that are at play in such representations, as well as the historically rooted institutional contexts, categories and worldviews in which academic observers are situated.

      Singaporean scholar Sin Yee Koh (2015) argues that Eurocentrism in migration studies manifests itself in, amongst other things, a disproportionate focus on immigrant-receiving states in western countries and a dearth of studies which focus on the perspectives of sending contexts, except as a developmental concern. The continuity (as opposed to contemporary novelty) of migration patterns from former colonies in Asia to former metropoles in Europe, as well as between former colonies within Asia, is a particular area of scholarly silence, according to Koh. But, at the same time, concepts which are derived from ‘the Anglo-western experience’, such as typologies of different types of migrant, ideas of liberal citizenship or ideas of ‘development’ (discussed further below), are applied unthinkingly in other places as though they are universal and not context specific.

      Migration studies has the potential to disrupt such categorizations through its knowledge of interconnection, transnationalism, complexity and hybridity. More often, however, the ‘three worlds’ lens is applied, with scholars offering expertise in one of the worlds, and disciplinary affiliations accordingly fitting into one of the ‘modern/developed’ disciplines, those concerned with developing countries and those exploring post-socialist contexts from the perspective of post-socialist area studies. But what if we ruminate on the nature of colonial modernity and what it might mean for how we carve up our analysis of the world? For example, Chari and Verdery (2009) have argued, in light of the insights of Pletsch (1981) noted above, that in the post-Cold War period we need to look between and beyond the ‘posts’ of post-socialism and postcolonialism. They write: ‘an integrated analytical field ought to explore intertwined histories of capital and empire’ and in doing so interrogate ‘the ongoing effects of the Cold War’s Three-Worlds ideology’ (2009: 19). The Cold War, they point out, was not just about analytically organizing the world but also about representing it.

      A dialogue across ‘posts’ may therefore be helpful in order to explore the messy reality of the world beyond the neat categories that we have created to aid our understanding of it (Kangas and Salmenniemi 2016; Krivonos 2019; Krivonos and Näre 2019). When we look at the histories of colonialism, socialism and capitalism, what we in fact find are connected histories (Bhambra 2014). Chari and Verdery (2009) think ‘between the posts’ because post-socialism and postcolonialism are not just about particular geographical spaces, they are about historical representations of space and time which have implications for knowledge and practice everywhere, not just in locations which were colonized. Thus what they draw attention to is that in order to comprehend the world, we need to explore the consequences of colonialism and decolonization, and Soviet socialism and its end, for spaces beyond those directly involved. The concept of coloniality allows us to do this; the coloniality of power, knowledge and being are not geographically limited in their reach, and the colonial articulation of modernity is pervasive but differentially experienced around the world.

      Where and who is and can be modern changes over time. This is also intermeshed with ideas of racial inclusion and differentiation. Because modernity has a racial (biological but also cultural) content rooted in colonialism, coloniality is at all times imbued with a racial sorting logic. That is not to suggest that racial categories are static or always about phenotype. For example, the Irish are now generally considered to be modern and white, and Finns are more modern and whiter than Russians through joining the European Union (Ignatiev 1995; Krivonos and Näre 2019). These common-sense logics of inclusion and differentiation are not rational, but they do appear rational to many people, including academic researchers. Thinking with modernity therefore draws our attention to the ways in which whiteness, Europeanness, Christianity and ‘the West’ occupy a semantic field with shifting emphases (Hall 1996a; Hesse 2007). To reduce this field to economics СКАЧАТЬ