Exploring (transit) migration through a postcolonial lens: Tibetans migrating to India and beyond

Geographies of migration II: Decolonising migration studies

“…Gross-Wyrtzen and Gazzotti’s (2021) special issue on Morocco gathers other insights from a north African perspective, decentering the significance of European actors and narratives, identifying the importance of informality, highlighting alternative accounts of what migration involves and questioning the presentism that positions African migration as ‘new’ because of its relationship to Europe. Frilund’s (2020) account of transit migration between Tibet and India extends insight into South-South migration highlighting how Indian and Chinese framings of Tibetans as exotic and underdeveloped constrain migrants aspiring to move elsewhere, including through uneven relations with Western lifestyle migrants, while also being a source of subaltern agency for survival. Accounts of educational migration into China (Ho, 2018; Mulvey, 2021) also show how shifting global geopolitical and economic settings are generating alternative migratory geographies that link regions while constituting African and other students as racialised subjects and creating conditions for hybrid identities and cultural connections.…”