- Title
- Temporalising postcolonial governmentality for studies in forced migration
- Creator
- Hodge, Paul; Curtis, Faith
- Relation
- Postcolonial Governmentalities: Rationalities, Violences, Contestations p. 187-212
- Relation
- Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions
- Relation
- https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606822/Postcolonial-Governmentalities-Rationalities-Violences-and-Contestations
- Publisher
- Rowman & Littlefield International
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- In this chapter we argue that strengths-based approaches for working with people seeking asylum embody a prefigurative politics that enacts a temporal dynamism in practice. The examples used make explicit the way practitioners enable anticipatory moments and spaces that both reflect and signify 'a community in formation, a community to come' despite the federal government's governing efforts. The work of Mezzadra et al. is instructive here for the way they combine key themes within Foucauldian governmentality and postcolonial studies in novel ways, especially in terms of temporality. When referring to liberalism, Mezzadra et al. describe the difficulties of conceiving 'a time without and beyond it'. They invoke Foucault's insistence on the need to search for what he called 'possible difference', which involves political subjects resisting liberalism's conditions and overcoming them, 'transforming time into that which it was not'. The authors also refer to 'imaginative action' as that which 'enables human beings to forsake the current courses of their worlds in the constitution of a new one'. Establishing their own critique of some studies of postcolonial governmentality, Mezzadra et al. argue that 'rather than simply explain the way postcolonial regimes of governance debase political subjectivity', they might explore how people facing such regimes 'can and do resist, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance that seek to remove them of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight and defiance'. By adopting strengths-based approaches, practitioners working with people seeking asylum are doing just this-resisting and defying modes of governance in creative ways, reflecting a desubjectivation', though more akin to Whitlock's 'soft weapons' than Puggioni's violent bodily reactions. Practitioners are also reflecting Foucault's 'possible difference' and 'imaginative action', transforming the present as they 'practice' the constitution of a time to come. To attend to the temporal possibilities of prefigurative expressions in practice is to add further critical purchase to existing literature in Foucauldian governmentality and postcolonial studies. Temporalising postcolonial governmentality opens up the present in ways that offer new insights, resistances and agency enacted -in this case, through anticipatory practices for a better world for people seeking asylum in Australia.
- Subject
- postcolonial studies; Foucault; government; asylum seekers; Australia
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1418319
- Identifier
- uon:37328
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781786606822
- Language
- eng
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