precisely in its having become universal. From now on, it’s modernity all the way down, everywhere, until the end of times’, as Escobar (2007) has pointed out. In this context, ‘not only is radical alterity expelled forever from the realm of possibilities, all world cultures and societies are reduced to being a manifestation of European history and culture’ (Escobar 2007). By ‘radical alterity’, Escobar refers here to different ways of living; different sets of ambitions for the political, economic and social organization of societies; different ways of understanding and being and acting in the world beyond the hegemonic ideology of modernity spreading globally from an imagined western epicentre. The ‘coloniality’ concept in coloniality/modernity does not, therefore, simply refer to colonialism. Instead, it is about a colonially inspired Orientalism in Said’s (1995 [1978]) terms, a worldview.
This ‘coloniality’ has been analytically disaggregated into a range of spheres, notably power, knowledge and being, as discussed in the Introduction. The coloniality of power refers to ‘the interrelation among modern forms of exploitation and domination’, or how western global domination is dependent on exploitation (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242). Coloniality of knowledge relates to the ‘impact of colonization on the different areas of knowledge production’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242). That is, where authoritative and influential knowledge is produced and proliferated, which knowledges are produced by which people, and which languages and media hold legitimacy and have greater global reach. This concept has clear relevance for migration studies and should give us pause to consider who produces ‘global’ knowledge, in which languages is it disseminated, where are they located and who is excluded from this conversation? Paul Gilroy (1993: 6) has articulated this from a different perspective (that of cultural studies) as ‘the struggle to have blacks conceived as agents, as people with cognitive capacities, and even with an intellectual history’. The coloniality of knowledge either denies this to be the case or admits it to be plausible but scratches its head in terms of where to find such an intellectual history. For the western academy, and indeed beyond, intellectual history is white.
‘Coloniality of being’ refers ‘to the lived experience of colonization and its impact on language’, or the way in which one speaks and thinks of one’s place in the world through the filter of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242). We might think of this in relation to W. E. B. Du Bois’s work on double consciousness. To be African American was, for Du Bois, to live with a double consciousness, simultaneously black and American, always living with this ‘two-ness’ and always seeing oneself through the eyes of white America. This concept of double consciousness has been elaborated and applied beyond the nineteenth-century US context (see Gilroy 1993) and its overlap with Maldonado-Torres’s (2007) concept of the ‘coloniality of being’ (in the Latin American context) might help to elaborate our understanding of both concepts. How we think about our place in the world is therefore related to how we imagine our geographical and temporal location in relation to modernity.
These insights into the spatial and temporal dimensions of modernity, which problematize the idea of traditional developing societies who are behind in time and need to catch up through modernizing, unravel many of the dominant understandings of contemporary international migration. They raise a set of questions which, if taken seriously, would alter the basis upon which much funded research on migration is undertaken. For example, whose mobility is, in this context, problematized and whose is not? When we look at this problematization in the context of colonial histories, what sorts of explanation for it appear plausible and which do not? What kinds of historical and contemporary interconnections have given rise to particular migration patterns and responses to them? Why would migration from a generalized ‘Global South’ be construed as threatening in the North? How do migrants understand the relations and differences between the places they have come from, and are going to, and how is their migration understood against the backdrop of histories of colonialism and ideas of modernity and unmodernity? In short, through thinking of modernity as a culturally produced time/space construct, we must then start to think through the lens of historical, as well as contemporary, interconnections. This is a theme we return to below.
Eurocentrism
The concept of Eurocentrism is closely aligned with these discussions around contesting the dominant conception of modernity. Knowledge production – the questions that we ask, the hypotheses that we come up with, the research methods that we employ, the frameworks through which we interpret our findings, the places we publish and the audiences that will consume our ideas – emerges from historically contingent social conditions and contexts. Alatas (2006) argues that because some countries (for him, the United Kingdom, France and the United States) are ‘world social science powers’, scholars in Asia must engage with their frameworks and scholarship, even as scholars in the world social science powers can completely ignore scholarly debates happening within Asia (or indeed elsewhere) (see also Gamage 2016). This is because these powers generate large volumes of published social science output, are well funded to undertake research internationally, have global reach and hold a global prestige that makes them impossible to ignore. They have both the resources, and access to visas, to conduct international research projects and the social position to make their findings about a variety of contexts plausible. Indeed, even within the fields of postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, the most famous scholars internationally are more often than not based in Global North institutions (Cusicanqui 2012). We have, then, according to Alatas (2006), dominant producers of global knowledge, who can write with authority about anywhere, and peripheral consumers of global knowledge, who can only write with authority about particular places and when doing so must use the frameworks of the global knowledge producers. Even when research focuses on the Global South (or racialized, migrant communities in the Global North), this is all too often an extractive research process (see Tilley 2017). When scholars in the Global South are engaged with the power structures of global knowledge production, this often means that they are treated as empiricists or area specialists rather than producers of ‘theory’ (often still seen as universal and generalizable). Keguro Macharia (2016a) calls this ‘being area-studied’. This, briefly put, is what Eurocentrism amounts to in the global academy.
Intellectually, Eurocentrism is an orientation which puts some places (Europe and ‘the West’ more broadly) at the centre of world history as well as of contemporary knowledge production. Only upon entry into modernity do other places enter that world history (Dussel 1995). Eurocentrism therefore requires us to ignore connected histories, colonial interconnections and the actual role of the non-West in world history. But it also requires us to ignore non-European philosophical traditions and intellectual projects oriented to making sense of the world in which they found themselves – just as Europe’s philosophers were doing. Eurocentrism is about an orientation to a ‘normal’ political, philosophical, economic and historical reference point. That reference point may not be explicit; it may be implicit. But it would suggest, for example, that in thinking through moral arguments for immigrant inclusion or exclusion globally we look only at European-origin philosophers.
Eurocentrism is not therefore simply about a disproportionate focus on geographically European societies. Amin (1988: 185) charges that Eurocentrism incorporates ‘an inability to see anything other than the lives of those who are comfortably installed in the modern world’. Not seeing here is not the same as ignoring. Rather, it is not seeing people as themselves but instead seeing against the measuring-stick of the West. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has made an important contribution to this discussion in elaborating beyond the inability to ‘see’ to an inability to represent more broadly. In her seminal article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (also discussed in the Introduction), Spivak problematized the way in which the Third World subject is represented in western discourse. She argues that while western intellectuals often express a belief that subaltern groups understand their oppression and can speak for themselves, such an argument ignores the inaccessibility of the subaltern as a ‘subject’. For her, the subaltern is destined to remain mute as a result of mistranslations emergent from the relations of power involved in the colonial encounter. The ‘true’ self-conscious voice of the subaltern is therefore inaccessible because the subaltern, by virtue of being the subaltern, cannot speak in the ways demanded of
