ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a phenomenological approach can contribute to a critical understanding of migration by focusing on three key areas. First, the chapter examines contemporary human rights problems faced by migrants navigating a world of nation-states and territorial borders by focusing on the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s account of statelessness takes us beyond individual rights violations arising from border control and brings to view a fundamental “condition of rightlessness” experienced by the stateless. This condition entails, among other things, the lack of recognition as a person entitled to rights, the loss of a political community guaranteeing a right to action and speech, and an expulsion from humanity and the world. Second, the chapter focuses on the unequal allocation of rights and rightlessness in the context of migration by turning to Frantz Fanon’s work, which investigates the banishment of racialized others from the intersubjective world of co-appearance and co-perception. Fanon’s analysis of racism and colonialism can illuminate how and why contemporary border policies render racialized others vulnerable to different forms of violence. Third, the chapter examines how a phenomenological orientation to migration can shed light on the various struggles that migrants have waged against rightlessness. For this purpose, the chapter reconsiders Butler’s work on performative action in the face of vulnerability and “the right to appear” together with Arendt’s concept of “the right to have rights” and Fanon’s vision of “a new humanism.” Taking issue with narrow, exclusionary, and Eurocentric discourses of humanism, these thinkers highlight that “humanity” is not a given essence or a fixed identity but rather a sociohistorical construct that is continuously contested and reinterpreted by various struggles to guarantee equality and freedom for all. They articulate a critical humanism that urges us to understand contemporary struggles for the right to freedom of movement in terms of a right to appear in an intersubjectively shared world as an equal and distinct living being.
