Description
In researching migration, there is an ontological favoring of arrival and departure at work which neglects the dynamic of movement, the layering of multiple temporalities and spatialities that contour migratory journeys and make up the particular ‘unsettled’ worlding of people on the move. Focusing on critical cultures of embodying, resisting, and traversing border technoscapes, critical migration scholars have therefore more recently ventured into centering subversion, autonomy, but also refusal and resistance of the ‘migrant’/’guest’ role.
Informed by participatory research with people on the move active in the Palestine solidarity movement (in Germany, the Netherlands, and Lebanon) I theorize refusal as resistance. Departing from Derrida’s notion of ‘hostipitality,’ I show how the current migration regime conceives of migrants as guest-figures, whose temporal coevalness is structurally denied. By refusing this hostile hospitality, refusing the figure of the guest, people on the move question the bio-/necropolitical apparatus that is built upon the notions of crisis by means of their very practice of precarious homemaking. In a last step, I move toward formulating a decolonial perspective toward migration studies, which questions the use of ‘crisis’ itself as epistemological prism towards migration and mobility.
