Postmigrant thinking: Definition, critiques and a new offer

Abstract

Peggy Pietsche, one of the most prominent voices of Black women in Germany, is sitting next to me during the conference Navigating the Changing Times of Gender, Sexuality, and Migration in Europe (2022). The conference poster, with beautiful figures and vibrant colours, is being projected on the auditorium screen as the plenary panel's backdrop. Pietsche leans towards me and remarks that the most problematic term in the conference title is ‘migration’. I look at her perplexed. I am a migration scholar and have done research on Turkish immigration to Germany for 20 years. Pietsche does not say more; the conference is about to start. As the speakers take their seats on the stage, her words are echoing in my mind: ‘the most problematic word in the conference title is migration’.

As a migration scholar, I am aware of the problems that come with the term migration, and in the past, many scholars have criticized this term on methodological and theoretical grounds (Türkmen, 2024). When I use the term ‘migration’, I mean a movement of people from one country to another with the intention of settling or moving again. This binary thinking, however, does not capture the complexities of migration that begin after immigrants arrive. One of the more recent terms that has come into use as a better alternative to migration is ‘postmigration’, a term coined by a group of artists led by the Gorki Theatre's (and previously Ballhaus Naunynstrasse's) director Shermin Langhoff (2011). Postmigration is both a theoretical framework and empirical fact: the term seeks to capture the complex socio-political dynamics that shape and are shaped by migration experiences, which in turn lead to the collective transformation of society through the act of migration (Foroutan, 2019).

I join a group of scholars who incorporate multidimensional ways of exploring migration processes while taking colonial history and postcolonial presence into account (Altay et al., 2023; Römhild, 2021). A critical difference distinguishes the concepts of migration and postmigration: Migration, as an analytical concept used to study people's movements, is limited to structural and contemporary conditions as well as normative categories. Postmigration focuses instead on how societies transform through migration. While analysing this transformation, a postmigrant framework is enhanced by engaging with migrants' experiences, historical legacies, cultural repertoires and colonial and postcolonial conditions. In this comparison, the postmigrant framework appears to take a more encompassing approach to analyse transformations through migration. The framework of postmigration has already been used widely in the German context, although it has received less recognition in other European or North American scholarship (see the research website for the German Center for Migration and Integration Research, www.dezim-institut.de, and new discussions by Yildiz, 2023).

While postmigration does stand as an important framework to remedy the problems of migration scholarship, it contains two major problems of its own: The persistent migrantization of racialized people, and the question of what added value the framework actually brings to the existing critiques of migration scholarship.

First, thinking about racialization and migrantization in postmigration societies is complicated. In a postmigrant society, a society that has been transformed by experiences of migration, we observe new solidarity between racialized and migrantized communities, specifically to unite against racism (Stjepandić, 2021). Due to the fact that many racialized people are rendered as non-belonging by European institutions and historical narratives, they experience problems similar to those of migrantized people. For example, many Black German students in my classes complain that white Germans speak to them in English on the street, assuming that they are migrants in Germany and do not speak German. The migrantization of racialized people put migrants and Black Germans in the same category: neither is seen as belonging to the white colonialist nation-state; they are both rendered non-belonging through their experiences with everyday bordering, social and symbolic boundaries, and the demarcation of their bodies as ‘different’ (Korteweg & Yurdakul, 2024).

More broadly, the migrantization of racialized people reproduces and complicates existing racist hierarchies, colonial and postcolonial stereotypes (Yurdakul & Korteweg, 2021), and reinforces an overwhelming sense of non-belonging (Korteweg & Yurdakul, 2024). It evokes colonial histories and renders both racialized and migrantized people as ‘non-belonging’ to the nation-states that they are settled in. Thus the postmigrant framework cannot yet deliberately work out the simple problem that we must say ‘migrant’ to say ‘postmigrant’: reinforcing the term ‘migrant’ in its name, the scholars who use the postmigrant framework for analysis may be further migrantizing racialized people. So far, we have seen no solution to this problem.

Second, the postmigration framework does reiterate some of the previous critiques of migration research, specifically repeating the critique levied by the term ‘demigrantization’. In a postmigrant society, binary forms of belonging no longer have any meaning. Similarly, the term ‘demigrantization’ has been useful to encourage striking out the categories and binaries undergirding the ‘native citizen versus migrant other’. Scholars promoting this term have argued that abandoning these categories is the way to achieve a complex and comprehensive perspective on migration research which can take the realities of migration into account. Like with the postmigrant framework, demigrantization scholars encourage migration researchers to focus on the broader social, political and economic processes that shape migration (Anderson, 2019). Demigrantization, which I interpret as having taken root in the critiques of methodological de-nationalism, calls migration scholars to move away from the conception of societies as nationally bounded containers, and instead focus on the practices, institutions and discourses that constitute migration as a social phenomenon by itself (Scheel & Tazzioli, 2022). This is similar to what postmigration calls for and offers. Both postmigration and demigrantization, then, build on previous critiques of migration research—such as ‘autonomy of migration’ (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013) ‘mobile peoples’ (Isin, 2018) and ‘methodological de-nationalism’—to rightfully criticize contentious research practices in migration scholarship. While building on previous theories, further work will need to specify what novelty postmigration brings to this debate.

I introduce the concept of the embodiment of inequalities to refine the concept of postmigration. Here, I draw on the work of gender studies scholar Alyosxa Tudor (2018). While Tudor can be seen as similar to previous critical migration scholars who challenge normative understandings of established categories in migration scholarship, they furthermore seek to deconstruct the power relations that ascribe migration to certain racialized, gendered, and sexed bodies. Tudor argues that we must look at the colonial, postcolonial, and whitened understandings of nation and Europeanness to properly unpack migration. Drawing on performative practice and the embodiment of migrantization, Tudor carefully revisits the intersectional question of how we can use innovative methods to rethink migratization and racialization—without equating them as normative categories, but considering them as embodied forms of social hierarchies and social struggles. In fact, Tunay Altay (2024) shows in his empirical work how queer migration transforms the ways in which racialization is experienced, and how migrants' entangled experiences create new forms of alliance based on their experiences of racialization. Tudor (2018) calls for a transnational feminist knowledge production to highlight this process, an approach also called for in a recent work by Parreñas and Hwang, where they argue for a multiscalar analysis of inequalities through a transnational feminist lens (2023). Recent work by Cleton and Scuzzarello (2024) points out the importance of looking at migration research through an intersectional lens to analyse migratory governance structures. I hone in on these theoretical discussions and empirical examples by thinking carefully about embodied inequalities which stem from racialized and migrantized experiences within societies that are transformed by migration. I encourage migration scholars to further ask whose bodies are affected differently when we put on the postmigrant lens.

The opinions expressed in this Commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors, Editorial Board, International Organization for Migration nor John Wiley & Sons.