Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants

Abstract

Reviewer: Gregory J. Goalwin, Aurora University In Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, Nandita Sharma develops a theory of international migration that situates current political debates within a deep postcolonial history of biopolitics, population control, and citizenship policies. Tracing patterns of colonial relations, Sharma emphasizes the postcolonial nature of the modern world system. Nations, she argues, are the core of a Postcolonial New World Order that have turned us all into National-Natives of some place, creating an expectation that each person belongs to a sovereign separated nation state. Such a system necessarily draws borderlines between members of the nation and everyone else, a distinction that is of critical interest to Sharma. By limiting national membership and creating “people of a place,” Sharma argues that the nation state system creates a new class of people as well, those “out of place” who lack their own sense of national membership or who can be found outside of their “natural” territory. It is this new form of governmentality and biopolitics that forms the core of Sharma’s argument. In tracing how these processes function in the postcolonial world, Sharma identifies a discourse of autochthony that restricts national membership even further: the only “true” nationals are what Sharma calls “National-Natives”: those who can in some way show they are Native to the nation. But this National-Nativity is native in a very specific way, that is, native to the postcolonial nation state itself, not the territory it occupies. This thus creates two other categories of humanity “Indigenous-Natives,” those who predated the nation state and thus do not share fully in its community, and “Migrant-Natives” subsequent settlers from outside the nation state’s territory. This distinction, Sharma argues, is central to modern discourses of migration. By reconceptualizing national communities in this way, indigenous peoples are set aside in favor of new National-Natives who themselves often argue that Migrants represent a new form of colonialism, one that threatens their “rightful” claim to national sovereignty.