5 research outputs found
Chronicling Kenyan Asian Diasporic Histories: âNewcomersâ, âEstablishedâ Migrants, and the Post-Colonial Practices of Time-Work
Recent studies of international migration have observed its increasing
complexity. Circular, return and temporary migration between India and Kenya,
arising from the economic and political multi-polarities of increasing SouthSouth
partnerships, is one example of such complexity. These flows are distinct
from the migration patterns of the longer-established Kenyan Asian diaspora,
who settled under the auspices of the British Empire from the 1890s until the
beginning of the 1960s. This paper explores how these transformations are
negotiated through the dynamics of Kenyan Asiansâ ongoing post-colonial
liminalities and ambiguities of citizenship, focusing in particular on the temporal
production of distinctions between ânewcomersâ and âestablishedâ migrants, even
when in practice these distinctions are much more fluid. This article highlights
the regulatory practices of âtime workâ that that enfold the migratory
chronologies of âestablishedâ migrants into the time of the nation, whilst
excluding those of ânewcomersâ. It explores the selective remembering,
forgetting and reworking of the colonial past, a process informed by the
dynamics of modernity, diaspora, nation and postcoloniality in contemporary
Kenya. It argues that whilst distinctions between âestablishedâ and ânewcomerâ
migrants might reflect different positionings in transnational social fields,
differences are also negotiated in contradictions between the experiences,
meanings and understandings of time. This demonstrates how space on its own
is itself a inadequate conceptual lens with which to examine relationships
between ânewcomersâ and âestablishedâ migrants, and that further research is
needed that attends to the temporal dynamics mediating the temporal
dissonances of contemporary transnational social fields