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 voyages in the late fifteenth century opened up an entire continent to European populations who travelled in increasing numbers to the New World. Some were in search of adventure, others fleeing poverty, famine, religious persecution and economic disadvantage. Whatever their motives, the decades and centuries subsequent to Columbus’s ‘discovery’ were marked by the subjugation and elimination of indigenous populations and the extraction and appropriation of their resources and land (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).

      In the journal Nature, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin note that the arrival of Europeans in the lands that would come to be known as the Americas – lands which had been known by their pre-existing (and continuing) inhabitants as Turtle Island and Abya Yala – ‘led to the largest human population replacement in the past 13,000 years’ (2015: 174). They suggest that the continent had had a population of around 61 million prior to European contact and that this ‘rapidly declined to a minimum of about 6 million people by 1650 via exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine’ (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 175). In this way, Abya Yala was gradually, although not without resistance, transformed into the Americas.

      Where we start from, and which histories and epistemologies we acknowledge, will profoundly shape our understandings. This is the central premise of this vitally important book. Mayblin and Turner start from an understanding that the field of migration studies is poorer – in terms of both intellectual coherence and policy applications – if it does not take colonial histories seriously. While they do not suggest that colonialism explains everything about migration, they do argue that migration can rarely be adequately understood without taking it into account. While there is plenty of literature at this nexus, in a global context, it does not often form the basis of migration studies as it is generally conceived in Europe or the United States. Mayblin and Turner ask those of us located in migration studies who have not addressed the histories of colonialism to consider what difference would be made to our understandings if we were to do so. It is urgent that this call be answered.

      Gurminder K. Bhambra, University of Sussex

      Migration studies and colonialism

      This book starts from the premise that colonial histories should be central to migration studies. We argue that colonialism is so fundamental to contemporary migrations, mobilities, immobilities, receptions and social dynamics that it is certainly not something that should only be of concern to scholars of colour, indigenous scholars and/or those working in formerly colonized countries. Our overarching aim is to explore what it would mean (acknowledging that it will not in fact mean one thing but many) to take seriously the centring of colonialism in researching migration, not through forging new theories but through learning from, and being inspired by, the wealth of literature that already exists in the world to engage with this task.

      Migration studies is of course a diverse multidisciplinary field. Yet even critical migration studies has tended, according to Tudor (2018: 1065), ‘to forget about postcolonial racism and racialization and instead promoted an understanding of migration that is disconnected from postcolonial analysis’. Gayatri Spivak (1999) calls this type of silencing ‘sanctioned ignorance’. Sanctioned ignorance is not necessarily an issue of individual malice but is an institutionalized way of thinking about the world which operates to foreclose particular types of analysis or considerations from entering into the debate. One of the enabling factors of this type of silencing is the real urgency of contemporary issues and ‘crises’ relating to migration. Certainly, presentism is engendered within the field as every year brings new crises, displacements and patterns of migration and new politicians and laws seeking to control it. The present is, it seems, always new.

      We think that sanctioned ignorance of histories of colonialism, and of the wide-ranging debates around the legacies of colonialism in the present, within migration studies is a problem. First, because ignoring vast swathes of human history leaves us with theories which are inadequate to the task of making sense of the present. Second, because without acknowledging these histories, the common usage of dehumanizing phrases associated with racial science such as the animalistic ‘migrant stocks’ and the disaster-like migrant ‘flows’, ‘mass influxes’ and ‘waves’ can appear objective rather than historically and culturally emergent. Third, it facilitates the denial of ongoing colonialisms in the present, and in doing so silences struggles for justice.

      While, СКАЧАТЬ