Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities
Monday, April 12, 2021Lecture Series
2:00 pm CET
This lecture reflects on the temporalization and territorialization of Africa in response to Europe’s ‘migration crisis.’ Reawakened fears of the African other and its own divisive internal politics have presented Europe’s leaders with a dilemma: how to contain African ambitions to move while remaining true to their self-professed commitment to individual freedom, universal rights, and global progress. To solve it, Europe has updated longstanding colonial narratives and identities by constructing a timespace trap. This trap justifies exclusion as readying Africa for an elusive global future. Employing temporal forms of socio-spatial governance, the Europeans dangle a global and mobile future to Africans willing to mold themselves into externally defined parameters of moral respectability. Adherence to immigration regulations authored and often imposed by Europe, together with a demonstrated commitment to family, community, and country mark one’s suitability to enter a global future. But meeting these legal and moral standards effectively means building a sedentary life dedicated to ‘development at home’. Together with allies across sectors and continents, they are realizing their ambitions through frameworks that morally justify intercepting and pre-empting movement as means of empowering and perfecting Africans. Doing so effectively excludes Africans from a shared, global humanity while discursively shielding Europe’s liberal commitments.
Dr. Loren B Landau is Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford, Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration & Society, and co-director of the Wits-Oxford ‘Migration Governance Lab’. He has previously held visiting and faculty positions at Princeton, Georgetown, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His interdisciplinary scholarship explores mobility, multi-scale governance, and the transformation of socio-political community across the global south. He has consulted with the European Union, the World Bank, UNDP, UNHCR, UNECA, the Cities Alliance, and others. As chair of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (2004-2012) he served on the South African Immigration Advisory Board and is now a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He holds an MSc in Development Studies (LSE) and a PhD in Political Science (Berkeley).
Moderated by BCB Faculty member Marion Detjen
This lecture is part of the OSUN Research Creation on Migration Class and the Global Histories of Migration lecture series.
Further events in the series:
March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan
March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen
March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan
March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti
March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan
April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen
April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti
April 26, 10:45 am
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff
April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan
The event series takes place within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.
* Funded by the Open Society University Network
Email: [email protected]