Postcolonial theory has become an established part of academia. As a result, there have inevitably been ongoing attempts to evaluate its influence, discuss its shortcomings, and assess whether it continues to have relevance when it no longer unsettles conventional academic wisdom, as it once undoubtedly did. These conversations now constitute a mini-academic industry of their own. Postcolonial theory has come under sustained attack from some quarters, while others have sought to extend its approach to broader academic frameworks and to reconfigure its theoretical underpinnings for the twenty-first century. As historians of various guises have been central to this debate, we can only welcome a volume which promises to turn its gaze to postcolonial theory and issues of race and migration in historical contexts. In Colonialism and beyond, the editors Eva Bischoff and Elizabeth Engels seek to frame questions of race and migration in a postcolonial perspective, thereby contributing to the debate on the location of postcolonial studies, and asking the question ‘Where can postcolonial studies go from here?’
In foregrounding how we look at questions of race and migration in the twenty-first century, and the new ‘politics of racialization’ (p. 8), the authors in this volume outline an interesting number of case studies which raise important questions about the new configurations of racialization that have emerged over the last century. The editors highlight a framework of ‘thinking across’ to visualize ‘new spatial formations of race and migration which don't fit into older geographies’ (p. 11). This is an admirable aspiration. The book contains many strengths, but it is ultimately let down by the unevenness of the contributions.
The opening chapter by Olaf Stieglitz, which looks at the ‘national culture’ of swimming in Australia, seeks to explore the story of the Australian crawl, a fascinating example of gendered, racialized ‘bodies in motion’, crafted by the new technologies of the early twentieth century. The prism of sports history, as the history of the emergence of modern bodies, is a fertile field; but here the evidence offered is so slight as to be frustrating. The author does little more than lay out snippets from other research, with a lack of sustained discussion linking those snippets together. Although the editors warn us that the chapters are ‘potential starting points’ for discussion (p. 12), the opening chapter is too underdeveloped to get the discussion off to a stimulating start, which is a great shame. The author himself states in the text ‘all this sounds too obvious’ (p. 25), and, unfortunately, so it is.
The second chapter is also concerned with the production of whiteness. While scrutinizing the well-worn field of immigration regimes in nineteenth-century America, Robert Julio Decker does an excellent job of illustrating how whiteness, far from being invisible, has been the subject of much scrutiny and intervention over the years. By examining the workings of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), he illuminates how whiteness was reconfigured between the 1890s–1920s, and that the activities of the IRL, much like organizations such as MigrationWatch in the current moment, act as nodal points between ‘scientific’ and public discourses, helping articulate ‘racial selves’ (p. 39), and giving form to ‘active citizens’ (p. 45) who take responsibility for the preservation of certain visions of both race and nation.
In an equally successful chapter Judith Schachter looks at the complex history of Hawaiian–US relations, and at ascriptions of Hawaiians as ‘native’, ‘tribe’, or ‘nation’. Of especial interest is the role of ‘blood quantum’ (p. 58) and the interplay between state definitions and self-ascriptions of identity, where the US government is accused of playing at ‘blood sport’ (p. 63) in racializing the debate. Schachter illustrates that, for many Hawaiians, self-identification requires an accommodation with the past, which is both flexible and incorporative. She argues convincingly that these processes are not two separate poles of identity formation but that self-ascription often becomes entangled in the rhetoric and practices of colonialism, and that there is a continuation of ‘race-making’ practices of governments and their institutions in the contemporary world (p. 67).
In a chapter entitled ‘Citizen subject: the ambiguity of citizenship and its colonial laboratories’, Serhat Karaayali looks at urban planning regimes in North Africa and the efforts of some modernist architectural projects in the colonies to learn from the lived environments of peoples of the Global South. The chapter attempts to address the central themes of the volume, but the argument frequently falters as the author meanders through too many different contexts without adequately revealing the entanglements between different spatial and temporal environments. There are some excellent observations during the course of the chapter, especially on the nature of labour movements and the role of race in the making of modernity. But the focus of the piece would have been far more effective if there had been more detail on the various housing projects in North Africa which are mentioned, and a more sustained effort to discuss the dialogues between different urban planning projects, which are alluded to but not developed.
In ‘Citizenship and postcolonial Europe’, Manuela Bojadzijev looks at migration to Europe, especially to Germany, and expands on how the hidden histories of earlier migratory movements, central to the construction of European identity, are written out in the context of post-war migration, and its representation as a modern phenomenon which unsettled an imagined pre-existing political and social community. As an exploratory argument that looks to the ramifications of long-term migration to Europe, and the subsequent and ongoing network of migrant organizations which developed within that context, it is an interesting contribution to ongoing debates; it clearly illustrates the importance of a historical perspective in issues of migration, something that could have been emphasized with more rigour throughout the collection. But the author ignores the many contributions that have already been made to this discussion, and one is left frustrated at the failure to develop arguments more systematically, in ways that would more fully illustrate ‘entanglements’ and efforts to ‘think across’.
In the final chapter, on humanitarianism, Lora Wildenthal takes the examples of four humanitarian practitioners to try to illustrate why we should exercise restraint when questioning what could be ‘old’ or ‘new’, or what constitutes historical continuities. In using these vignettes to illustrate her argument, she raises questions which could be asked of the entire volume. All the subjects introduced throughout the book call for looking at how historical phenomena are continually reconfigured in different temporal and social spaces, sometimes in unexpected configurations, which help dissolve older hegemonic narratives about the nature of the world and our relationships to one another. In this context, ideas of race and migration are crucial components in the making of the modern world, and their reconfigured intersections in the twenty-first century are important sites of place-making and subject formation. As the ever more polarized debate on race, migration, and national sovereignty continues apace, historians have a potentially important contribution to make in pointing to the tenuous ground on which some of this debate is constructed. Some of the chapters in this edited volume do justice to this debate. Others, however, are too provisional and underdeveloped to contribute meaningfully to an important topic. The epithet ‘all this sounds too obvious’ applies to too much of this potentially interesting volume.
