ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I argue that knowledge production for and about refugees has the capacity to challenge deeply engrained structures of domination if they begin from a perspective that sees refugees as contemporary manifestations of historical problems about how to imagine community, belonging, identity, responsibility and value that have been reconciled in the stable concept state-nation-community. I look at two cases – narratives of migrant tea workers in colonial India and contemporary issues that displaced people face in accessing higher education in Europe. I argue that the cases are connected by a persistent coloniality of power which gives value to subaltern others outside of specific formal and regulated value regimes. The labour power of colonised natives is not primarily decided in the labour–capital relation but in the racist social relations of the colony which cast them as culturally inferior, thus justifying a lower wage and demeaning work conditions; how displaced people access higher education in Europe is influenced by rhetorics that culturally “other” the migrant, making higher education as much a tool of unequal “integration” as for education. Subalterned others enter into formal and public relations (labouring, education) as lesser subjects, having to adapt to (and fall short of) dominant norms while having their own narratives and ways of knowing derogated in value. This derogation of value enables the hegemony of key concepts – like state-nation-community – that then stand in place of investigation of the historical problems of how we should live and with whom. With the two cases I suggest that these problems are resolved only through acts of brutality and violence that prevent other historical narratives from emerging. Using Raymond Williams’ idea of conjunctural critique, I use the two cases here to try to break open these concepts.
