Migration Studies and Colonialism

Lucy Mayblin, Joe Turner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509542956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Demographie

The history of migration is deeply entangled with colonialism. To this day, colonial logics continue to shape the dynamics of migration as well as the responses of states to those arriving at their borders. And yet migration studies has been surprisingly slow to engage with colonial histories in making sense of migratory phenomena today.

This book starts from the premise that colonial histories should be central to migration studies and explores what it would mean to really take that seriously. To engage with this task, Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner argue that scholars need not forge new theories but must learn from and be inspired by the wealth of literature that already exists across the world. Providing a range of inspiring and challenging perspectives on migration, the authors' aim is to demonstrate what paying attention to colonialism, through using the tools offered by postcolonial, decolonial and related scholarship, can offer those studying international migration today.

Offering a vital intervention in the field, this important book asks scholars and students of migration to explore the histories and continuities of colonialism in order to better understand the present.

1
Introduction

Migration studies and colonialism

Between 1600 and 1950, the vast majority of mobile subjects (what some might now call ‘economic migrants’) originated in Europe and sought their fortunes on other continents. An estimated 62 million people – settlers, labourers, colonials, imperialists, invaders – moved around European empires in the period 1800–1950 (Miège 1993). Indeed, colonialism was characterized by conquest, exploitation and domination through migration. From the massive forced migrations of the triangular slave trade and circuits of indenture to the almost unfettered mobility of many (but not all) white Europeans within their various empires, from the large-scale population displacements which the turbulence of decolonization gave rise to to the migration of people from the former colonies to the former metropoles in the mid- to late twentieth century, the history of migration globally is very much entangled with colonialism. It should be unsurprising to us, then, that patterns of mobility and immobility today follow these colonial-era logics in what Steffen Mau and colleagues call ‘the global mobility divide’ (Mau et al 2015). Or that border regimes effectively amount to ‘multilateral projects for the regional containment of Third World persons beyond the First World’ (Achiume 2019: 1515). And yet, when consulting the indexes of a selection of key texts of migration studies today, it is very rare to find any mention of colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization. If the absence of empire as a relevant context to migration studies is a surprise, so too is the general lack of interest in the legacies and continuities of colonialism for contemporary migration governance and the experiences of ‘migrants’ and ‘hosts’ today.

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.

This underlying framework of ‘the unprecedented present’ within migration studies and migration policy making does not lend itself to a deep engagement with history. Nevertheless, a sense of history does quietly frame most analyses of the present. We see this in claims to ‘unprecedentedness’ itself – the common assumption that because a phenomenon is highly visible, contested and difficult to administratively manage, nothing like this has happened before. Because the world’s population is growing all the time, even if the percentage of people that migrate always stays the same, each year will see unprecedented numbers of migrants crossing borders. But that isn’t quite the same as ‘nothing like this has ever happened before’. More explicit nods to history appear in the context sections of books or articles which briefly explain how rights emerged, or how things have changed since previous periods, before moving on to the topic at hand. Sometimes these contexts mention colonialism but most often not.

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, at the time of writing this book, it is common to attend a migration studies conference and fail to find a single paper that mentions colonialism (or indeed ‘race’), questions of mobility and ‘migration’ have been taken up by those working beyond the field of migration studies, in postcolonial, decolonial and related intellectual projects. From the start, postcolonialism, decoloniality, indigenous studies, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and many other projects have been interested in migrations, diasporas, conquests and hybrid transnational identities, and the power relations that they gave rise to on multiple spatial scales. This means that there already exists a substantial body of work which presents concepts and frameworks for analysing migration in the (post/neo-)colonial present. Much of this work in postcolonial studies has been in the arts and humanities but it is ripe for application to social scientific phenomena. Other areas of scholarship such as decoloniality and TWAIL have more directly engaged with social scientific questions. Indeed, there are numerous bodies of work across the social sciences internationally which both address migration and place colonialism at the centre of their analyses. Yet the core of migration studies, which is highly influential in international policy-making circles, appears to remain largely unaffected by this work.

This book responds to this disconnect. Its purpose is not to spend endless pages critiquing migration studies as it is articulated in hegemonic journals, conferences, policy fora and textbooks in the Global North. Rather, our aim is to demonstrate what paying attention to colonialism through using the tools offered by postcolonial, decolonial and related scholarship can offer those studying international migration today. We do not present a new grand theory or claim that every single thing that people want to research can be explained with reference to colonialism. What we do offer is a range of inspiring and challenging perspectives on migration that are less often seen in influential migration studies research centres in Europe and North America, not least because students are so often asking us for reading lists along these lines. We also, by extension, suggest that in raising the colonial question, those engaging in research on migration may then need to consider the politics of knowledge production – the underlying assumptions, categories and concepts – which they rely on within this academic field.

While literatures already exist which should make ignoring colonialism seem like a bizarre and naive omission, these literatures seem still to be inaccessible, or unimportant, to many. This book seeks to showcase some of this work for people who research migration and yet never encounter such perspectives. If you are well versed in these debates, the issues that we discuss will doubtless seem obvious. Indeed, we are ‘white’ academics working in British higher education institutions and for this reason our perspectives are of course particular and limited, and undoubtedly readers will spot omissions and parochialisms throughout the book. Whilst we have sought to frame our discussion of the literature and examples in a global manner, we still broadly rely upon the legacy of intellectual projects from the Americas (North and South), with engagements from scholars from Asian and African traditions. For those not familiar with these literatures, we hope that this book will raise questions such as how broadly postcolonial and decolonial perspectives might change the kinds of research questions that we ask in migration studies, as well as the ways in which we analyse our data. Do such perspectives allow us to frame our research in terms that accord with the interests of policy makers? No. Are such perspectives policy friendly in the current terms of debate on migration? Rarely. If, and how, these perspectives can therefore be used in challenging migration policy, as most critical work hopes to do, is a topic for contemplation in the coming years. This volume, we hope, will spark discussion as part of what some have termed the ‘postcolonial turn’ in migration studies (Koh 2015; Tudor 2018). Our aim is not that you cite this book, but that in the future you cite some of the scholars discussed within it.

The growing call to ‘decolonize’ the social sciences

Recent years have seen the intensification and spread of calls to ‘decolonize the university’ and it would not be appropriate to write a book on the theme of migration studies and colonialism without discussing this agenda. While ‘decolonizing’ is a highly contested issue, the content and praxis of which is unresolved, at its heart is an agreement that we put colonialism and its legacies and continuities at the heart of our understanding of the contemporary world (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi 2016). Academia is an important site of knowledge production and, as Dalia Gebrial argues, ‘consecration’. She goes on:

It has the power to decide which histories, knowledges and intellectual contributions are considered valuable and worthy of further critical attention and dissemination. This has knock-on effects: public discourse might seem far from the academy’s sphere of influence, but ‘common sense’ ideas worthy of knowledge do not come out of the blue, or removed from the context of power – and the university is a key shaping force in the discursive flux. (Gebrial 2018: 22)

Decolonization in this context includes, but is not limited to, renewed questioning, or uncovering, of the colonial origins of some of the core concepts of the social sciences (e.g. ‘modernity’, ‘development’, ‘capitalism’, ‘human rights’, ‘demography’); a focus on the Eurocentrism inherent to much social science research; and a critique of the ways in which contemporary research (and teaching) practices sometimes/often (depending on the field) reproduce colonial power relations.

There are disparate political and intellectual projects that all coalesce around these themes. The political projects have largely been student led and have particularly centred on ‘addressing issues of racial exclusion and racialized hierarchy within the university, including its teaching and research practices’ (Bhambra 2019: 1). ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ is widely seen as triggering a wider global movement. This campaign, based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, centred in part around a campaign in 2015 to have a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from a prominent location on campus (Gebrial 2018; Nyamnjoh 2016). Cecil Rhodes was a wealthy British businessman and politician, who was prime minister of the Cape Colony in the late 1800s, founded the colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and parts of Zambia) and was an ardent white supremacist who laid the legal groundwork for apartheid. Challenging his reification on campus was, for the students studying there, urgent and necessary in the post-apartheid context. ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ Cape Town drew the attention of students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. They too had a statue of Rhodes on campus and, as part of a much broader agenda of drawing attention to the colonial entanglements of the university, they campaigned for its removal (Gebrial 2018; Rhodes Must Fall Movement 2018). Of course, this is set within the context of a long history of anti-colonial movements in South Africa but also globally.

These explicitly de- and anti-colonial protest movements have been linked to other campus-based protests such as those against caste privilege at Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities in India, and Black Lives Matter on campuses in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018). Related to these disparate events is the broad-based campaign ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’. This student-led movement, often headed by students of colour, asks that teachers in higher education take a look at their reading lists and consider whether there are any scholars of colour on them at all. Where there are scholars of colour on reading lists, how many of them are present to offer core theory, as opposed to place-specific case studies? How many courses address questions of race, racism, colonialism or its ongoing legacies? These questions are most poignant when the courses under consideration cover topics such as international development or international migration. ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’ is a challenge: it should not be possible to teach a course on international development without putting colonialism and neo-colonialism centre stage, and the First World should not be the source of every theoretical perspective relating to the topic of poverty in the Third World. For us, the same is true for migration studies: it should not be possible to teach a course on migration without mentioning colonialism or having any discussion of ‘race’ and racism, and the First World should not be the source of every theoretical perspective relating to the topic of migration globally. The point is not necessarily to stop teaching Marx, Foucault, Agamben or Carens, it is to also make sure that you are teaching Fanon, Quijano, Wynter and Spivak alongside them, while also asking how colonialism frames the work of all of these scholars.

In light of the debates sketched out above, what does it mean to ‘decolonize’ a field of scholarship? Is such a task even meaningful or is it just paying lip service to a live political issue which is having a fashionable moment and tokenistically mentioning it while carrying on as normal? For Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, decolonizing in the university context involves the following activities:

it is a way of thinking about the world which takes colonialism, empire and racism as its empirical and discursive objects of study; it resituates these phenomena as key shaping forces of the contemporary world, in a context where their role has been systematically effaced from view … [then] it purports to offer alternative ways of thinking about the world and alternative forms of political praxis. (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018: 3)

This definition places emphasis on epistemology and on the underlying Eurocentric frameworks which cut across a lot of research that is undertaken in universities around the world (see also Alatas 2006; Amin 1988; Mignolo 2011a). It focuses on academic knowledge production and particularly on the sanctioned erasure of histories of colonialism and ongoing anti-colonial struggles from many (most) fields of study. It furthermore argues that the ways that we think about the world can lead to political praxis which seeks to change it.

There have been challenges to this perspective in recent years which must be acknowledged here. The most well-known intervention has been from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), who are interested in decolonization in the field of education studies within the context of settler colonialism. Their point is that in settler-colonial states such as Canada, decolonization should always refer to the relinquishing of stolen land to indigenous peoples, and that ‘until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism’. They argue that:

curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. (Tuck and Yang 2012: 19)

When they write about decolonization, then, they ‘are not offering it as a metaphor’ or ‘an approximation of other experiences of oppression’. Decolonization, for Tuck and Yang, ‘is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym’ (2012: 3). University-based intellectual and pedagogic activities are, for Tuck and Yang, ‘white moves to innocence’, which allow settlers to feel better about the horrors of settler colonialism without actually doing anything practical to change it since to do so would involve (at a minimum) a loss of privilege.

This is an important intervention and decolonization of intellectual thought should not be simply another ‘move to innocence’ which assuages ‘white guilt’. We need to sit with the discomforts which their intervention may give rise to and take them seriously in approaching our own wo...