Return: Migrants, Nation-States and Biopolitics in Asia

Date: 9 April 2009
Time: 10- 11.30am
Location: Research Clusters Meeting Room A, The Shaw Foundation Building, Block AS7 Level 6, FASS, NUS (Kent Ridge Campus)
Chairperson: Prof Brenda Yeoh, Department of Geography, FASS, NUS.

The recent years witness a heightened policy interest in return migration worldwide. In Asia, the compulsory return imposed by temporary labor migration programs, the forced return of the irregulars, the implicitly encouraged ethnic return migration (e.g. in South Korea), and the celebrated return of the highly skilled, are part of this global trend. Return migrations represent a tendency of re-territorializing sovereignty and regrouping people (working out who is “really” who and belongs to where) after two decades of intensifying globalization and regional integration. But return is not against mobility. Return is mobility itself. It is a mobility of such a kind that it tames, regulates and curtails mobility.

When return helps accommodate transnational mobility into the nation-state framework, it also brings tensions into the system (e.g. bilateral readmission agreements turn conflicts between a foreigner and the destination state into tensions between a subject and an alliance of states). Apart from its regulative functions, return also produces new desires, claims and relationships. Return is thus constitutive of the larger biopolitics—the ordering and production of social life in general—on a regional, and even global, level. In this sense, the ambiguity of the notion of return renders the concept analytically productive. By examining how this vague notion becomes a central idiom in imagining journeys, articulating one’s relations to a nation, and justifying particular policies (e.g. deportation), we seek to disentangle the cultural logic of how certain structural order emerges from highly heterogeneous and dispersed migration flows.

About the speaker:

Dr Xiang Biao is a Research Council United Kingdom Academic Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. He is the author of Making Order from Transnational Migration(Princeton University Press, forthcoming), Global “Body Shopping” (Princeton University Press, 2007; winner of 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize), Transcending Boundaries(Chinese by Sanlian Press, 2000; English by Brill Academic Publishers, 2005) and over 30 articles in both English and Chinese. A number of articles were translated into French, Spanish and Italian.


Registration

Admission is free. Persons interested in attending the seminar should email their name, affiliation and email address to: Ms Sharon Wok (fasswe@nus.edu.sg)