While much has been written about decolonisation as a theoretical tool in migration studies, less empirical work applies decolonial theory to contemporary transnational movements. Taking ‘Asia as method’ (Chen, 2010), this chapter starts from research on Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf on contemporary Indian Ocean mobilities of middle-class migrants. It explores how the figure of the migrant can be problematized and deconstructed to explore imperial raced agendas in epistemological formations of the notion of the migrant and the citizen. In doing so, this paper calls for understandings of the migrant and non-migrant to be seen as part of a continuum or sliding scale of belonging and affiliation. This exercise exposes the particularities of mobility trajectories with the Asian continent, as a means of speaking back to conceptual paradigms that have emerged primarily from North America and Western Europe.
Decolonising the figure of the ‘migrant’: non-binary categorisations and intra-Asian mobilities
