The Dynamics of Emerging De-Facto States. Eastern Ukraine in the Post-Soviet Space Tetyana Malyarenko et Stefan Wolff, New York : Routledge, 2019, pp.104

Abstract

while continuing to practice the racist refusals of "brown bodies" (121). In this way, the book does an exemplary job of considering the Komagata Maru as an event that sheds light on the restrictions to the movement of brown working-class bodies across borders, historically and in the present. At the same time, the authors illuminate historical and contemporary anti-imperial struggles for self-determination. Thus, there are chapters that consider how, far from Canadian shores, the Komagata Maru circulated as a galvanizing narrative for Punjabi anti-imperialists and provided impetus to the struggle against British colonialism in India and worldwide. Other chapters gesture to the nascent solidarities between Indigenous peoples and racialized migrants on lands claimed by the Canadian state, as when the Xet'suiwet'en nation hung a banner saying "We welcome refugees" (132) to protest the Canadian state's detention of asylum seekers in 2010. Indeed, one intention of the colonial analytic conceptually and methodologically central to this book is to recognize Indigenous peoples on lands claimed by Canada-and to thereby signal political complexities, tensions and potential solidarities among racialized Canadians, racialized migrants to Canada and diverse Indigenous peoples. This ambition is not fully realized, since several chapters do not acknowledge Indigenous peoples at all, and other chapters do so fleetingly in a few sentences largely disconnected from the analysis. Davina Bhandar's chapter arguably comes closest when she explores how, in the early twentieth century, dispossessed Indigenous peoples were employed "at the periphery" of the Canadian labour market, while the Indian migrant was integrated as a temporary worker-a "sojourner" (153-54)-in a racialized labour hierarchy. This may reflect the broader reality that the Canadian social sciences are just beginning to develop the vocabularies needed to conceptualize the "intertwined" (52) futures of Indigenous peoples, "itinerant subjects of colonialism" (5) or migrants, and white settlers both in Canada and around the globe. If not wholly successful, this ambition remains important in stimulating necessary, ongoing theoretical and political work. Overall, this book is a well-written, rich and complex exploration of an event that illuminates Canadian nationalism and racisms and the transnational disciplining of brown bodies across borders, as well as historical anti-imperialist and contemporary anti-racist and anticolonial struggles. As a book that makes a vital contribution to political science and, indeed, the social sciences more broadly, Unmooring the Komagata Maru deserves an important place in university classrooms and research libraries across Canada and beyond.