Postcolonialism as the governmentality of immigration controls

Abstract

Postcolonialism's insistence on historical connection is an important, source of its influence on contemporary social theory. The connections between metropoles and colonies of empires; between the imperial past and postcolonial present; and between people partitioned into separated state categories. However, postcolonial theory largely ignores the connections between colonial mobility controls and national citizenship and immigration controls. Instead, the latter is regarded as a definitional aspect of state sovereignty, transcending time and place (or at least seen as an aspect of European states since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia). At the same time, migration studies have ignored both the prenational history of state governance over human mobility and reified the nation-state categories of “citizen” and “migrant.” I argue that postcolonial theory and migration studies would both be helpfully served by understanding postcolonialism not only as a theoretical approach but as the post-World War II form of ruling relations, one defined by the global regime of nationalized immigration controls and productive of the now-normalized national binary of citizen and migrant. I focus on the current hardening of this binary through (uncannily imperial) discourses of native-ness to show how the negative duality of National-Natives and Migrants informs antiimmigrant politics today.