This book investigates how, as postcolonial studies revises its agenda to incorporate twenty-first century concerns, asylum has emerged as a key field of enquiry.

This book investigates how, as postcolonial studies revises its agenda to incorporate twenty-first century concerns, asylum has emerged as a key field of enquiry.

Asylum seekers are not welcome in Europe. But why is that the case? For many scholars, the policies have become more restrictive over recent decades because the asylum seekers have changed. This change is often said to be about numbers, methods of travel, and reasons for flight. In short: we are in an age of hypermobility and states cannot cope with such volumes of ‘others’. This book presents an alternative view, drawing on theoretical insights from Third World Approaches to International Law, post- and decolonial studies, and presenting new research on the context of the British Empire. The text highlights the fact that since the early 1990s, for the first time, the majority of asylum seekers originate from countries outside of Europe, countries which until 30-60 years ago were under colonial rule. Policies which address asylum seekers must, the book argues, be understood not only as part of a global hypermobile present, but within the context of colonial histories.

Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

This edited volume asks how governmentality and postcolonial approaches can be brought together to help us better understand specific sites and practices of contemporary postcolonial governance. The framework/approach was inspired by the recent use of governmentality approaches that emphasize how governance functions not solely through states but through multiple tactics and means that regulate the conduct of individuals and institutions through both freedom and constraint. A postcolonial approach to governance exposes the role of postcolonial sites and practices in shaping governance and the inequalities embedded within it, insofar as standards of conduct determine which subjects are privileged and excluded.Postcolonial perspectives show how governance can be both productive and repressive, functioning to impose a fixed code of conduct that objectifies (gendered, racialized, sexualized) ‘others’ as part of its project of improvement. In discussing governance, we must also consider how power is negotiated and challenged through forms of resistance and counter-conduct. This volume argues that we need to incorporate postcolonial theories and carefully examine postcolonial practices and sites, to understand how contemporary governance shapes various transnational inequalities and social divisions. The authors in this edited volume illustrate the value of postcolonial governance as a conceptual framework through empirical examples from Asia, Australia, Africa, and Europe. These cases unpack practices of governance operating within complex political landscapes.

Contemporary Asylum Narratives marks a transition from traditional modes of diasporic belonging to the need for identifications that encompass the statelessness of refugees and asylum seekers. This book explores representations of asylum seekers and refugees in twenty-first century literature, film and theatre.

Through the concepts of the ‘coloniality of asylum’ and ‘solidarity as method’, this book links the question of the state to the one of civil society; in so doing, it questions the idea of ‘autonomous politics’, showing how both refugee mobility and solidarity are intimately marked by the coloniality of asylum, in its multiple ramifications of objectification, racialisation and victimisation. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, The Coloniality of Asylum bridges border studies with decolonial theory and the anthropology of the state, and accounts for the mutual production of ‘refugees’ and ‘Europe’. It shows how Europe politically, legally and socially produces refugees while, in turn, through their border struggles and autonomous movements, refugees produce the space of Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hamburg in the wake of the 2015 ‘long summer of migration’, the book offers a polyphonic account, moving between the standpoints of different subjects and wrestling with questions of protection, freedom, autonomy, solidarity and subjectivity.