Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics: Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States in comparison ed. by Ulbe Bosma, Jan Lucassen, Gert Osstindie (review)

What is a postcolonial migrant? What can be gained from thinking of postcolonial migrants as a distinct category of people? Moreover, do “preceding colonial histories” influence integration and multiculturalism policies in postcolonial states? Contributions to the edited collection Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics: Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States in comparison seek to address all of these questions. It is an ambitious task and the wide-ranging chapters raise almost as many questions as they answer.

The premise of the collection is that for constitutional, legal, cultural and social reasons, the migration that follows the formal end of empire is distinct. Postcolonial migrants, the contributors suggest, represent a unique form of migration due to their “pre-migration histories” in colonial states (15), their particular influence on the shaping of national identities and the varying capacity of particular nations to reconcile their multicultural presents with their colonial pasts.

In their provocative and cogently argued introduction, the editors discuss possible meanings of the term “postcolonial migration.”¹ Instead of introducing rigid categorizations, the editors point instead to the range of people who could be potentially considered postcolonial migrants. This includes people who moved at various stages of the imperial “collapse” via various territories, as well as people who were either colonized, worked for colonizing powers or were “returning settlers and colonial elites” (4). At the same time, the editors distinguish postcolonial migrants from other “non-elite migrants from the Global South” by pointing to their relative access to “metropolitan citizenship rights,” their cultural and linguistic affinity and the manner in which their “migrant biographies are linked to diasporic experiences and the specific character of transnational bonds with their countries of origin” (11). This ambiguous approach to the question of defining postcolonial migrants has both merits and pitfalls. The numerous references by the volume’s contributors to categorical “overlaps” and the many categorical slippages contained in the collection serve as a reminder that postcolonial migration cannot be considered in isolation from other migration dynamics, most notably transnational networks and global capital flows (both conspicuously absent from this collection).

This edited collection is a deeply comparative enterprise. Contributors focus on specific national contexts while readers are left to discern for themselves the points of intersection and divergence. At a general level, all of the contributors focus on the myriad influences that postcolonial migrants have had on shaping questions of national identity and politics of inclusion and exclusion. To this end, the collection deliberately juxtaposes European experiences (France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Portugal) with those in Russia, Japan and the United States. Yet what is most apparent when regarding the collection as a whole is how different postcolonial migration experiences within Europe, never mind other parts of the world, were from one another.

For instance, James Cohen observes that in France, the notion of “postcolonial” was, and continues to be, publicly debated and politicized accordingly. It is an identity that people actively embrace. This phenomenon does not appear with the same fervour in other countries. Meanwhile, Shinder S. Thandi highlights the diversity of population flows from the Caribbean, East Africa and the Indian subcontinent to Britain. Crucially, Thandi argues that the British postcolonial migration experience and the politics of identity were shaped not only by the diversity of migrants but also by the ongoing ties between Britain and its former settler colonies and dominions. Gert Oostindie highlights the distinctiveness of multiculturalism in the Netherlands because the only way to explain the presence of non-Western migrants, he argues, is to look at the Dutch Empire in Indonesia and the Netherlands Antilles. Like Cohen, Oostindie points to constitutional change as a significant element in determining the pace and direction of migration out of the former Dutch colonies and their impact on Dutch society.

M. Margardia Marques uses the Greek idiom of Scylla and Charybdis, meaning a choice between...