Migration, memory, and the insurgent temporalities of sanctuary

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in time within human geography. This temporal ‘return’ is especially pronounced in areas of migration research, where current scholarship examines the ways that asylum seekers are forced into racialized spaces of waiting and uncertainty. There has been less attention to the temporalities of resistance, the multiple ways that migrants and migrant activists disrupt the temporal frameworks of migration governance. In this paper I explore the ways that sanctuary practices achieve these forms of temporal disruption. Sanctuary challenges the flow of modern, progressive time by altering time’s rhythm and direction. It does so through four alternative time trajectories–historical-memory, legal, collective, and spiritual–that effectively challenge state hegemony over the meaning and control of migrant time. This challenge enables new forms of resistance to normative disciplinary temporalities associated with the control of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. It also explodes the linearity and stability of the modern present, revealing a constellation of subaltern movements contesting both the violent flows and blockages of racial capitalism. Through recognizing and refracting these global movements in what Allan Pred termed ‘a montage of the present’, an alternative spatio-temporality of modernity may be glimpsed.