Abstract
Writing on the cusp of the migration and diasporic turn in Anglophonic literature, Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad (1992: 86) argued that migration’s vast differences—comprised of refugees, tourists, students, and the transnational elite, among others—offered no ‘firm generalization’ nor ‘uniform political choice’. These differences that presented themselves as obstacles for Ahmad is precisely what drew me to researching migration. The phenomenon’s diverse flows and multi-sited connections aspired to a politics with difference at its center, generating polyrhythmic articulations of belonging, emancipation, where the dreams of an elsewhere could be heard. I have been consistently reminded, however, that migration studies have all too often bypassed the complexity that underwrote Ahmad’s critique. What has emerged is a field where scholarship has frequently bracketed migration’s complexity in favor of dividing it into discrete spatiotemporal processes that has tended to privilege destination over origin and settlement over circulation.
For these reasons, Elaine Ho’s (2019) Citizens in Motion is a welcome reorientation of migration studies’ conventional cartographies. Ho (2019: 95) synthesizes the processes of emigration, immigration, and remigration under the analytical framework of ‘contemporaneous migration’. In distinction to capturing one facet of migration, contemporaneous migration attends to the ‘multiple migration routes that migrants undertake across migration sites’ as well as understanding these spaces as being simultaneously produced by emigration and immigration. Resonating with scholarship on the geopolitics of migration and mobility (Hyndman, 2012), Ho illuminates how migrant mobilities are animated through the entanglements of national integration and extraterritorial citizenship that differentiate the kinds of attachments and identities held by migrants.
I want to focus my commentary on the ways Ho’s work draws on the concept of diaspora. Diaspora’s geographies of dispersal, settlement, transnational connections, and return, I suggest, offer an allied yet distinct inflection to the concept of contemporaneous migration that structures the book’s six chapters. What are the implications of routing migration theory through contemporaneous migration—emigration, immigration, and remigration—instead of diaspora’s mobilities of dispersal, settlement, connections, and return? The tensions between contemporaneous migration and diaspora’s positioning across the text expose three interrelated strands that raise fundamental questions about the kinds of knowledge produced by migration studies, especially what it sets in motion and what it renders inert. First, is the relationship between diaspora and the state; second, is how migration’s temporalities question essentialized constructions of race and ethnicity that undergird diaspora formations; and third, is the politics that shape diaspora returns to the homeland.
From the late 1980s, diaspora’s scholarly resurrection emphasized the transnational networks connected by homeland-oriented practices (Brah, 1996; Gilroy, 1993). Diaspora broke the isomorphic mapping of nation-identity and state-territory to signal forms of belonging hatched beyond autochthonous attachments. Although diaspora’s conceptual challenge has since been channeled into the more expansive critique launched by the mobilities paradigm (Sheller, 2017; Urry, 2007), the concept anticipated mobilities’ targeting of the pervasive ‘sedentarist metaphysics’ that structures social scientific models of the world (Cresswell, 2006: 46). Yet, I have increasingly felt that while diaspora is used to set the world in motion, its theorization as a mere extraterritorial appendage of the nation-state constrains its diverse geographical imaginaries, while also potentially depleting migrants and diasporic subjects of their creative reenvisioning of belonging and citizenship, the two prevailing themes of Ho’s text.
As the title makes clear, Citizens in Motion privileges the mobility of those entitled to formal rights by the nation-state. The emphasis on citizens reflects a transformation of the subjects responsible for transnational placemaking. Once the domain of those on the nation’s margins, with their territory spanning connections countering their exclusion, for overseas citizens, these affiliations are represented as an excess that impedes their national integration. The migrants that inform Ho’s (2019: 11) analysis navigate the constraints imposed by the ‘citizenship constellations’ that encompass multiple migration sites. Ho’s (2019: 35) reconfiguration of citizenship along a transnational terrain where migrants are locked in a ‘holding pattern’ that pits economic success against family well-being, echoes Aihwa Ong’s practice of ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1999) triangulated between the family, state, and capital. The transnational dispersal of citizenship rights and obligations raises questions about how migrants, in their negotiations across sites, perform ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin, 2008) that contest the limits of belonging. In my work, I have sought to show the ways in which migrant and diasporic aspirations to belong create alternative sites that eradicate the distinctions between ‘here’ and ‘there’ that migrants must constantly bridge (Ashutosh, 2008, 2013, 2019).
What resides at the center of mobility in Citizens in Motion is the state. Each chapter’s brief ethnographic vignettes that illuminate migrant experiences work to configure the nation-state as the generator of (im-)mobilities. While the importance of the nation-state cannot be overstated in relation to migrant mobilities, especially as migrants and diasporic subjects serve as key strategies in the state’s extraterritorial power, affixing their imaginations to the nation-state reveal just how neglected diasporic theorization and thinking have become in migration studies. The tension between diaspora and the nation-state was captured by anthropologists Linda Basch et al. (1994: 269) in Nations Unbound.
In counterdistinction [to the concept of diaspora], is the deterritorialized nation-state, in which the nation’s people may live anywhere in the world and still not live outside the state. By this logic, there is no longer a diaspora because wherever its people go, their state goes too.
Ho’s interrogation of fraternal constructions underwritten by the countervailing forces of shared ethnicity and divergent territorial attachments pries apart diaspora’s foundations that have been critiqued for their reliance on essentialized notions of culture (Khan, 2015). In Singapore, China, and Canada, projects of national integration selectively incorporate their histories of migration, thus driving a wedge within and across migrant communities. Singapore’s privileging of immigration from the ‘pre-independence and immediate post-independence period’ in its model of multiculturalism (2019: 54) has resulted in a politics of belonging that popularly emphasizes jus soli over jus sanguinis. Events like the 2012 ‘Cook a Pot of Curry Day’ elevated national norms and provided a venue for the expression of Singaporean-Chinese national affiliations with Malays, Indians, and Eurasians over co-ethnic solidarity with more recent migrants from Mainland China. Such events illustrate how the borders of belonging are etched by enacting divisions within an ethnic group.
From this vantage, blood and culture appear rather thin in relation to natal claims of belonging which are ‘premised on a temporal coding located in the past and can be used to legitimize (or delegitimize) the right to belong in the present’ (Ho, 2019: 55). The temporal aspects of migration add an additional dynamic to what Ghassan Hage (1998), writing about Australian multiculturalism, referred to as ‘ethnic caging’, in which the celebration of difference and otherness imposes control along the lines of national majorities and minorities. Ho’s insights on the divisions precipitated by the politics of integration prompted me to think about the stability granted to the nation that the concept of diaspora has done much to render ambivalent. What new imaginaries of belonging and attachment were envisioned by interactions across different ethnic groups? Furthermore, how was co-ethnic distinction not only premised on the temporality of migration, but intersected with the reserve army of low-skilled migrant labor in Singapore? How did these migrants, who represent diverse national origins across South and Southeast Asia, and who are disciplined through the ever-present threat of repatriation, mobilize against their exclusions?
By way of conclusion, the third point I would like to address is the relationship between remigration and diaspora’s ultimate resting place—the return to the homeland. Ho’s development of ‘remigration’ overturns notions of diasporic returns by blurring the distinction between destination and origins. Returning to the homeland does not extinguish diaspora but, rather, proliferates additional, ‘secondary diasporas’ in which migrant alterity in the presumed ancestral land accompanies their settlement (Ho, 2019: 11). Ho’s account of remigration examines the Communist Party’s rise to power in 1949 and their active encouragement to the Chinese diaspora to return. The experiences of the Chinese refugee returnees from Malaya and Indonesia in the mid-20th century and that of the Vietnamese Chinese in the late 1970s were marked as foreign. These returnees had ‘carved out connections with the Southeast Asian countries they had left, recalling times past and places missed’ and thus ‘disrupted China’s synchronous national narratives’ (Ho, 2019: 31). Their crossing of borders and connections to elsewhere marked the returnees with suspicion and as a threat to the national body. These interventions suggest that the condition of diaspora continues to cast a long shadow across the routes of contemporaneous migration.