Beyond the bounds of the ethnic: for postmigrant cultural and social research

Abstract

This article draws on an ongoing self-reflexive debate in German migration research. It is considered that migration research has much contributed to (re)produce subject categories and concepts of the nation-state which it, at the same time, aims to criticize. With its specific focus on diverse figures and formations of the migrant, on ethnic minorities and transnational diasporas, the respective counterparts of a white, national majority and the hierarchical relations between these are being implicitly coconstructed. Especially, the plethora of accounts of migrants’ lives and migrants’ worlds tend to limit themselves to a more or less exclusive “migrantology”—thus petrifying rather than challenging and transgressing the inner boundaries of the nation-state. New approaches of critical migration research, however, aim at broadening that perspective and at reversing its viewing direction: From the perspective of its ethnicized and racialized “margins” the naturalized “centre” can be explored as being part of a postmigrant, postcolonial space of cultural dynamics and social struggles. Extending its scope in this way, beyond its conceptual limits, migration research would be cosmopolitanized and turned into a general study of cultural and social realities crossing ethnic and national bounds.