Makeshift Migrants and the Law: Gender, Belonging, and Postcolonial Anxieties (review)

The body of the migrant has long been the subject of ideological contest in India. From the historical moment of Partition, when the largest population transfer in history occurred between India and Pakistan, to the current moment of globalization, which has produced an increasingly mobile labour force, the migrant figures as a potent social symbol. Ratna Kapur's compelling new work looks at the discourse of migrancy, demonstrating how it symbolically functions as the "state of exception" in the constitution of legitimate national citizenship.¹ In Kapur's view, migrancy disturbs the narrative of normative nationhood—in this case, the image of India as a global economic powerhouse—and operates as a sign of stigmatized difference. Abdicated by the state, abjured by elites, and denied the privileges of full citizenship, these subaltern "spectral subjects," as Kapur evocatively calls them, embody the very essence of social marginality.

Kapur's interdisciplinary study employs a post-colonial feminist analysis, combined with a Foucauldian lens, to reflect on the law's functions as a disciplinary apparatus. Besides the legal domain, Kapur critiques the representation of the migrant in cinema, mainstream politics, and non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigns ostensibly designed to promote social uplift. In the process, Kapur underscores the discursive links between the legal, cultural, and political spheres when it comes to marginalizing the migrant position.

As Kapur points out, several studies focus on discourses of the state and its performative production of the legal and social category of "migrant." This strategy ineluctably abstracts and effaces the subjectivity of the migrant herself while reifying and reproducing the authority of the state. Kapur pursues her argument from a different locus. She seeks to dislodge the standard approach by ushering in a new paradigm—centring the subaltern migrant position and articulating how the presence of this subversive subject necessarily complicates prevailing notions of the sanctity and seamlessness of the geographically bounded nation. In other words, the ontology of the deterritorialized subject radically unsettles the dominant logic of the territorial imaginary—imagined as the very condition of the possibility of sovereign statehood. Instead, the migrant's existence reveals territoriality as a contingent construct rather than as a naturalized, self-evident claim.

Yet the migrant position, Kapur argues, is not simply a relational one that countervails the terms of idealized citizenship. She unpacks its "normative and material dimensions" as well.² The migrant label, interpreted in both literal and metaphorical terms, is broadly conceived: for Kapur, it refers to the entire constellation of relations produced by the experience of migrancy both within and outside national borders. Thus, the migrant category includes labourers who travel across the nation to join internal diasporas of workers, leaving their traditional livelihoods and domiciles behind; those employed abroad, typically in the service and caretaking industries; the families and partners of the migrant worker, left at home; undocumented persons crossing borders "illegally"; and, most provocatively, those ideologically cast as outsiders on the grounds of their sexual or religious otherness. Such negotiations and mobilities are rarely configured in terms of cosmopolitanism, as are the experiences and aspirations of the elite classes. Rather, these are dynamics driven by economic despair and struggles for survival.

Migrants are caught in a double bind—they need to be mobile to adapt to the capitalist labour market, yet the state refuses to accord them any meaningful rights, while protecting the corporate interests that use them as cheap labour.³ The mix of corruption, politicking, and inadequate social spending all negatively affect the migrant, who is denied basic subsistence but criminalized when pursuing illicit means to stay afloat.

The ostracization of the migrant in no small part can be attributed to the fact that her very existence exposes the hypocrisy of the triumphalist rhetoric of market capitalism. The sheer brutality confronted by the poor and disenfranchised within national borders reveals the fractures and fault lines of this myth. This tension between the imagined ideal and the imperfect real is symptomatic of the post-colonial condition in...