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So go and get some books. Hello. Thank you for joining us. We are proud to welcome you to our special series, Migration, brought to you by Brill, where we talk about creating a more inclusive world by revamping border policies in this rapidly changing global scenario.
I'm your host, Lee Jung-Recko. Today I'm speaking with Sarah Peck. She's a Lever Hume Early Career Researcher at Northumbria University, interested in the connections between migration, development, and civic space. Her article is Reorienting the Diaspora Development Access.
Sarah, thanks so much for sitting down with us. Hi, Lee. Thanks for having me. So just tell us, first of all, what is this concept of post-Diaspora?
Yes, I guess the concept that I talk about with the article, this idea of post-Diaspora, is really trying to respond to how diaspora can be kind of conceptualized within that sort of contemporary context, I guess. So she's unscathed, wrote a lot about post-diaspora, theorizing, and she talks about it, trying to move kind of conversations about place, time, belonging, and displacement into a new conceptual space that goes beyond diaspora. There's some really great work developing those kinds of ideas. By Suzanne, as I mentioned, under her colleagues, Lee Thurn and others.
And I would really encourage anyone who's interested in this idea to have a look at the journal, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. There's a special issue, issue 13, which is all of the articles are really oriented around this idea of the post-Diaspora. And as I said, there are some really, really great articles in that journal and in another journal called The African and Black Diaspora, which is again edited by Suzanne Safe, who you've done. And all these articles, I think, are really trying to respond to concerns about how the idea of diaspora can be employed in the contemporary era, which I think has been marked by this kind of increase in and velocity of globalization and transnationalism.
And the idea of post-diaspora has really been, I guess, deployed to try and get us beyond the idea of diaspora. So thinking about second and third generation families, thinking about these kind of complex processes of simulation, thinking about returns to kind of an identified homeland, and also around forced and conscious distancing of an immigrated population from their country of heritage. So suppose diaspora, I suppose, almost tries to speak to the sort of, I suppose, the different positions, mobilities, entanglements that diaspora communities might find themselves in this kind of world where we're kind of in this sort of constant racial space. And for me, I think the idea really helped highlight some of the sort of more fluid, I guess, sort of geographical fluidities, some of the more kind of temporal complexities and inequalities that may be more current, more sort of older mobilizations of the idea of diaspora, particularly those that are mobilizing in the global development space.
I think they don't always highlight some of those complexities. So I think post-diaspora is almost, it's not separate from diaspora, but it's about extending those boundaries to think about new ways of being. Yes, I suppose really the aim of post-diaspora is to try and extend those conceptualizations by asking to think about contemporary neoliberal globalization a bit more detail. And I guess I'm also just interested, personally, how did you get involved in this space?
What attracted you to migration and development? Was there a specific diaspora community that you were looking at? I suppose my interest really came from sort of previous work that I've done around civil society and global development in the spaces that exist there, and particularly around us with international partnerships and transnational partnerships with global development that operate in the kind of civil society and non-governmental space. And I was doing some work with some civil society organizations in the Caribbean in Grenada and Marlade Doss.
And looking at their links with international development organizations based in the UK. And I was really interested to find out that a lot of their work was being supported by diaspora communities based in the US or Canada and the UK and lots of other places as well. And I guess I guess I'm really interested in this idea kind of transnationalism, specific space and for instance of transnational struggles and how those ideas can cross kind of national borders and boundaries and the people that take those ideas and knowledges with the different places. So I guess that's really how I became interested in this of connections between as a migration and mobility and development and civil society and kind of civic space.
Yeah, and then actually jumping off of that, talking about NGOs and development. How was Western scholarship from the global North and then these multilateral and bilateral organizations shaped our view of the diaspora? Yeah, so I think that's a really sort of interesting point. So I mean, I'm interested in exploring more really.
So I think in this global development space, which is the one that I guess most interested in, the idea of last religion and policy has really become much more visible over the last 20 years or so. So originally there's this idea of this of rain, rain kind of discourse, but I think over the last 20 years it's been a much more much greater attempts to really sort of infer that idea. So in the late, I guess 1990s, maybe early 2000s, thinkers scholars both with an academia and outside of it were starting to recognize the diaspora communities really continue to be quite influential in their homelands in the West Western University, comes in numerous different ways. So the transfer of professional skills to scientific networks to remittances.
And that, you know, I suppose it's kind of transverse I've been going on for a long time and it was only really, I suppose when they became recognized within sort of institutional space that it sort of got shouted at me. And I think the remittances became a very big deal within that. So there was lots of discussion at the time about the quantity and resilience of remittances and they was kind of key for accessing education, healthcare and other social welfare in countries kind of predominantly the global south. So I think that kind of pushed diaspora communities into being seen as these sort of agents of development often connected to the global south in the ice kind of states and multi-natural institutions.
And I think I suppose the dominant ways that diaspora, or this idea of the diaspora is being mobilized in some position within the global development. So I suppose really focuses on diaspora communities from the global south again, obviously that can be problematic term residing in the global north. But I suppose the relationship really framed by this idea of transferring often entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, investments in order to offset the global inequalities which have been kind of premised by and accentuated by the sort of neoliberal world model. And I think conceptually I suppose this idea of the diaspora option often seems to be built on quite limited ideas of what constitutes the diaspora.
So presuming this kind of attachment to a very static and unchanging home place or entrepreneurial success in the country of residence. And I think really those sort of sorties kind of insights coming out of academia and other institutions, they come inside of the sort of policy environment within the global development space that was shifting as well. So we saw more discussion on the good governance agenda, ideas of social capital, the securitization of development, this is the importance of partnerships and skills development. So this is a really memorable paper that I read and fairly is the trotts and definitely Mullins.
And they talk about the World Bank describing diasporuses like discovering an untapped pool of oil. So the World Bank was thinking about diasporuses as kind of resilient, active, entrepreneurial sort of human capital who could repair I think some of the damage done by macroeconomic reforms. So the World Bank was this kind of really early and sort of vocal advocate for what they call the diaspora option and they often true on Israel and China to kind of back up their argument. So diaspora was sort of diasporic communities were seen as having this advantage.
So they had the local knowledge, they could be flexible, they could transcend the biocosys that might be associated with the state. And I think then that kind of followed through to bilateral institutions, say the USAID, DFID, GIC, and lots of others. And they started to develop and fund these kind of diaspora development programs, which I think really reinforced this idea of diasporuses is kind of form of mobile human capital that could be really sort of leveraged and enhanced. So diaspora must be kind of instrumentalized in I think some of these narratives.
So that's a really interesting point about the World Bank and I do have a question on that, but before I get to that, I'm curious, why do they cite Israel and China when they were talking about diaspora communities? What was it about those examples that stuck out to the World Bank? I think I've seen, they were seen as sort of very sick of the states that have very successfully harnessed what was seen as their diaspora populations to support their own developments. And I think they probably were used as examples to demonstrate how important a diaspora population can be to a state's development.
So obviously I guess Israel has a particularly significant and I guess a complex diaspora, but tapping into their diaspora to support development of the Israeli nation. And I suppose the World Bank probably realized that actually those examples show how states could mobilize their diaspora for their own, to leverage their own benefit as well. So yeah, as I said, that leads to one of my questions, just wondering how these international development agencies like the World Bank, for example, reinforce diasporic inequalities and racial hierarchies. And I just find that phrase so interesting.
I think you said that they view them as valuable as oil reserves seems a bit cynical. So just wondering if you can talk about those concepts a little bit. Yeah, thanks. I think that adding that phrase really kind of stood out to me as well as sort of the other comparison with oil and associate recent oil is particularly particularly sort of crude and like so instrumentalized.
I suppose there's lots of critiques of the sort of diasporinatives that I was talking about before. So Michelle Aguirre in his book about the post-asporic condition talks about the idea of diaspora being kind of synonymous with racialized hierarchies and belonging, they make boundary maintenance and sticking with borders and projecting this idea of deserving migrants. So he argues that the idea of diasporic can create exclusions and actually further discriminations and how Panawilson has written loads on this so just direct anyone to her 2012 book, Race, Racism and Development, which he discusses in more detail. And there's also a school of thought that diasporinatives such as those organized by the World Bank or the European Union, I guess can be seen as projects that are primarily attempting to kind of modernize and reproduce Western values in the global South.
And I suppose that within that school of thought, you'd see the development of the diaspora led initiatives can be understood as part of an extension of Western governmentality onto states in the global South. So you try to sort of an attempt to kind of normalize economies and states that are seen as threatening and as a means through which to really securitize development. And I think I guess those critiques of those sorts of programs having the potential to reinforce and reproduce inequalities and racial hierarchies. So for example, they might reproduce ideas of what it means to be kind of good migrants in universities' comments.
The contributions required to be kind of respectable in Britain or maybe the Global North. And as I said before, this desire to promote this kind of very particular Western or maybe white version of modernity. So Capano Wilson has argued this, I guess, very, particularly for the Muslim community in Great Britain who are sort of repeatedly given the job of civilizing again, using that word kind of carefully and inverted comments, those at home, and taking these ideas of Western values with them whilst paradoxically being excluded from British society through themes such as prevents. They prevent anti-government anti-terrorism strategy.
And other Islamophobe kind of rhetoric. So what I suppose we can see then is we've got these sort of racial logics that can be seen in total to the diaspora development nexus. And they're perhaps, I suppose, almost contradictory to the way that the nexus has been positioned. So I guess sometimes it's been positioned as this almost as antidote to the whiteness of development.
Yet also the attempts to challenge that can also be understood at the same time reproducing the kind of those kind of racialized hierarchies are belonging. And there's been lots of arguments that the nation states when they employ diaspora strategies and infrastructures. They can also produce these kind of exclusion relations of the longing so that they are creating, I guess, an idealized, diaspora community based on a socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, or other kind of factors that equate with respectability. I think it's really important as well to kind of think about these policies and these strategies, not necessarily an isolation from other kind of immigration policies and discourses.
So Helen, Pellegrin and Dudley Mullins argue that particularly in Europe, another factor that motivated support for this by diaspora option was the belief that emerging immigration security concerns could be solved through these types of interventions. So I think there are probably questions that need to be asked about how, so for example, the UK, how we can continue to encourage those working-getchered development, but at the same time implement kind of increasingly hostile immigration environments, you know, the sort of paradox there, I think. So I suppose we're seeing these discourses and policies associated with hostile environments increasing in security discrimination and marginalization felt by racialized communities, for example, living in Britain with artists at their immigration status. Yet there remains this kind of emphasis on what diaspora should do as part of development.
And I think it seems important to try and explore some of that paradox in more detail. So how do conditions after movement shape forms of diasporic civic engagement? You mentioned the example of Stephen McQueen's fairly recent film, Mangrove. Can you talk about that?
Yeah, sure. So I suppose the, I think one of the main ideas that comes out of post-daspora thinking is this ability to shift its kind of temporal focus. So I suppose while diaspora maybe is more normally associated with movements, journeys, looking back. I think post-daspora gives a little bit more emphasis on this kind of idea of the conditions after movement and a panel of solo in hair, paper in the African and Black diasporous journal.
Talks at these kind of intertwined processes of settling, looking back and looking forward. And I think one example of this is how a socialist association of life and a diasporic community might be constrained in the countries they move to and how the kind of civic space available for diasporic activities and struggle may be more greatly constrained. So it might be through legal, cultural, society, societal, kind of financial measures. And I think as much as Stephen McQueen's film, Mangrove, and I felt that was a really good example of this kind of squeezing of a socialist nation of life being portrayed in popular culture.
So the film details, police violence, which was directed towards black community organizers in London in the 1970s. And it's part of our biology series called Small Lacks. And the Mangrove episode in particular is about the Mangrove restaurant, which was a restaurant in London set up by a Jackal Frank Cricheli. He would come to the UK from Trinidad.
This was in the late 1960s or early 70s. And became a hug for the Mangrove restaurant, became a hug for community organizing. It became a meeting space for black activists, radicals, intellectuals. But it was soon the target of racial discrimination.
And was unjustly and unfairly targeted by the police as a series of violent race, despite absolutely no evidence any wrongdoing. So it had been to stop these destructive rates, Frank, his friends in the wider community organized a peaceful protest, which was met by police aggression and violent provocations. So nine of the protesters were arrested and charged with a serious crime riot in the fray. These protesters became known as the Mangrove line, and went to trial in 1970.
And the trial was as soon as this kind of landmark trial in itself as two of the defendants, Althea, James, Lacont, and Darkett's How, are to defend themselves. And they also demanded that the trial was heard by an all-black jury. That sort of plea was eventually unsuccessful. But after rejecting a total of 63 candidatures, the defendants did find and ensure that two of the 12 years were black.
And after trial lasting 55 days, they were all cleared at the main charge. And the trial was the first time a judicial acknowledgement of racial prejudice in the Metropolitan Police. So I say this is a huge and key aspect of British history. But I think also highlights the importance of spaces like the Mangrove restaurant as a community hub for black community organizing.
And just shows how threatened and attacked these spaces have been, and I think can continue to be perhaps in different ways. Yeah. Have you seen any recent threats to those physical spaces that are happening in the past? I'm thinking especially when you see a lot of these immigrant communities that become gentrified over the years, wondering how that factors in.
Yeah. I think that's an interesting point around how gentrification is squeezing space for community organizing. And I think in areas of London in particular, that is something that's happening in Canada also. Maybe in area in which that's happening, where you see this as an increase in gentrification and the squeezing of community space, both physical and I suppose in more subtle ways as well as the community organizing.
I think it was some interesting discussions, certainly in the UK around the Black Lives Matter protests that occur during the coronavirus pandemic and about how sort of space for organizing space were protest within those conditions and what that led to. And I think there's also been some interesting examples, I suppose from the sort of mid-2000s, where scholars have written about Islamic community associations becoming as ideal legitimized through unfounded connections with terrorism and again using this idea of threats completely unjustifiedly as a way of squeezing kind of civic space for those sorts of forms of organizing and making much more difficult to be legitimate within those spaces. That's Sarah Peck. Her article is Reorienting the Dias for Development Nexus.
Sarah, thanks again. Thanks, Sue. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcast.