Migrations of the Human

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. In an age marked by mass displacement, border violence and ecological crisis, what does it mean to be human? And who has the authority to define humanity?Migrations of the Human: Decolonial Subjectivities in the Long Present offers a bold rethinking of the human through the figure of the migrant. Moving across the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, Mina Karavanta reads contemporary literature, film and theory to argue that migration is not merely a sociological phenomenon but an onto-political event—one that unsettles the colonial grammar of being and challenges the overrepresentation of “Man” as the measure of the human. Bringing decolonial thought into conversation with deconstruction and postcolonial critique, the book engages the work of thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant and Walter Mignolo alongside texts by Toni Morrison, Amitav Ghosh, Patrick Chamoiseau, J.M. Coetzee, Shailja Patel and Behrouz Boochani. Through figures such as the citizen-xenos, the rogue migrant and the ecological subaltern, Karavanta traces emergent forms of co-citizenship and planetary relationality that resist racialized and neoliberal regimes of exclusion. Attentive to histories of slavery, colonialism and environmental dispossession, Migrations of the Human redefines the human as a relational and planetary condition. In doing so, it offers a timely and compelling contribution to debates on migration, citizenship and the democratic future.