Chronopolitics: Decolonising African Migration Studies

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of 'chronopolitics' as a heuristic for a kind of decolonial imagination in migration studies, one that insists on structural changes as opposed to those relational ones that dominate the field. The article argues that migration scholars should question the coloniality of key concepts they use in their work to understand how the 'solutions' they propose (re)embed a colonial world and view. Building on previous critiques of migration studies, the article proposes that a chronopolitical argument to decolonising migration studies reveals the intrinsic connectivity of temporal and geographical linkages, in order to relate migration research epistemologies to ontological problems. This can allow the migration discourse to move beyond the centre, to address the current 'black burden' of ambivalent academic positioning and predominant methodological and conceptual approaches to migration studies. In these ways, chronopolitics adds conceptually to an underexplored debate in the field.