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  • Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants by Nandita Sharma
  • Gregory J. Goalwin
Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants
By Nandita Sharma
Duke University Press, 2020, 384 pages. https://www.dukeupress.edu/home-rule

In Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, Nandita Sharma develops a theory of international migration that situates current political debates within a deep postcolonial history of biopolitics, population control, and citizenship policies. Tracing patterns of colonial relations, Sharma emphasizes the postcolonial nature of the modern world system. Nations, she argues, are the core of a Postcolonial New World Order that have turned us all into National-Natives of some place, creating an expectation that each person belongs to a sovereign separated nation state. Such a system necessarily draws borderlines between members of the nation and everyone else, a distinction that is of critical interest to Sharma. By limiting national membership and creating "people of a place," Sharma argues that the nation state system creates a new class of people as well, those "out of place" who lack their own sense of national membership or who can be found outside of their "natural" territory. It is this new form of governmentality and biopolitics that forms the core of Sharma's argument. In tracing how these processes function in the postcolonial world, Sharma identifies a discourse of autochthony that restricts national membership even further: the only "true" nationals are what Sharma calls "National-Natives": those who can in some way show they are Native to the nation. But this National-Nativity is native in a very specific way, that is, native to the postcolonial nation state itself, not the territory it occupies. This thus creates two other categories of humanity "Indigenous-Natives," those who predated the nation state and thus do not share fully in its community, and "Migrant-Natives" subsequent settlers from outside the nation state's territory. This distinction, Sharma argues, is central to modern discourses of migration. By reconceptualizing national communities in this way, indigenous peoples are set aside in favor of new National-Natives who themselves often argue that Migrants represent a new form of colonialism, one that threatens their "rightful" claim to national sovereignty.

Following an introduction that lays out the core of her argument, Sharma's substantive chapters muster a dizzying array of evidence from a wide variety of cases to flesh out her central thesis. Chapter 2 emphasizes how today's distinction between Natives and Migrants constitutes a fundamental legacy of European imperialism drawn from a discourse of autochthony that was a key part of imperial regimes. Crucially, White Settler colonies were seen as distinct from colonies in Africa and Asia with different practices of "reserving" land for native use simultaneously weakening their claims on other territory. Chapter 3 examines the importance of the category of Migrant during the transition from imperial to nation states. It was during this time period that practices of immigration control first began to flourish, setting the stage for modern efforts at population control. Chapter 4 takes the story of immigration control forward in time, emphasizing the intensification of such efforts post WWI with the growth of a more comprehensive international system. Chapter 5 examines the changes in this system following the end of WWII when the victors actively championed a nation state system in a way that created new modes of managing national populations within a system of competitive capitalist social relations. Chapter 6 turns to the "developing" world and the policies of modernization and developmentalism that were imposed by a new economic order constructed by wealthy capitalist countries and hijacked efforts for nationalist self-determination and sovereignty. Chapter 7 examines the "global lockdown" that developed by the late 1960s in which the separation between National-Natives and Migrants was consolidated through the growth of citizenship laws and codified immigration policies. Chapter 8 returns to the national discourse of autochthony, examining how such ideas can be mobilized from both above and below to pursue a wide variety of political and social aims, but all of which rely upon the authority granted to national states as a legacy of imperial...

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