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 seen as particular to the context in which it is produced or to similar ‘developing’ contexts. Philosophical or policy ideas produced in the Global North are thus readily applied globally or to a wide range of international contexts, but ideas produced in the Global South are more likely to be seen as context specific (Alatas 2006). These are barriers to scholars in Global South countries publishing and influencing debates in international journals, but they are also barriers to the publishing of any work from any location which challenges dominant modes of thinking. Nevertheless, there are several schools of thought that have sought to imagine, or move, beyond Eurocentrism or colonial/modernity, depending on their perspective. We will briefly describe four of them here: delinking; border thinking; the pluriverse; and connected histories/sociologies.

      One approach to delinking is ‘border thinking’ (Anzaldúa 1987; Mignolo 2007). Border thinking does not need to be newly invented; it is theory which already exists (but is rarely acknowledged away from the spaces in which it is practised) that sits at the borders of the colonial matrix of power. It comes from the lived experiences of people familiar with the darker side of modernity. Border thinking does not happen separately to modernity but in response to it, as part of live struggles against oppression. Thus ‘border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006: 206). The border here is conceptualized in terms of both geographical distance from ‘modern’ places and epistemic difference from the Eurocentric centres of world power. Mignolo and Tlostanova write:

      In this context, border thinking entails using alternative knowledge traditions and non-European languages of expression in order to reimagine theories of the social, the economic and the political. Examples of border thinking might include Islamic philosophical and scientific thought or First Nation epistemological traditions (Coburn 2016; Smith 2012). Examples of the enactment of border thinking might include the Haitian Revolution and the more contemporary World Social Forum (Santos 2008; Scott 2018; Trouillot 1995). According to decolonial theorists, these alternative perspectives introduce other cosmologies into the hegemonic discourse of western modernity which are not unwittingly committed to, or restrained by, its frame. Border thinking on themes related to international migration is already happening. Mignolo sites the location of border thinking in the Third World but, in acknowledging actually existing mobilities, he then charts ‘its routes of dispersion travelled through migrants from the Third to the First World’,which are then found in ‘immigrant consciousness’ (Mignolo 2011b: 274). Postcolonial intellectual Frantz Fanon then developed his immigrant consciousness at the point of migrating from Martinique to France (Fanon 2008 [1952]). Upon discovering that he was seen first and foremost as a ‘negro’ in France, he thus brought border thinking to France through the immigrant consciousness, encapsulated in the quote ‘Oh, my body, make of me always a man who questions’. Equally, work on settler colonialism and within indigenous studies offers multiple challenging perspectives from the borders of colonial/modern thought which rethinks the power relations at stake in contexts of immigration (see chapter 4; see also Chatterjee 2019; Gonzales 2012; Jones 2009; Klooster 2013; Lugones 1992; Pulido 2018; Rodríguez 2014; Stanley et al. 2014). Whether such thought is transforming hegemonic ideas about international migration is then another question.