On Theory and Praxis in Migration Studies and Settler Colonial Critique
摘要
In Australianama (2018), Samia Khatun reminds us that ‘[u]nderstanding the past as a place crisscrossed by the tracks of numerous people and creatures is crucial if we are ever to glimpse futures beyond blank spaces’ (p. 105). Khatun’s account of the South Asian odyssey in Australia is an expansive one, and it is all the more wondrous given its historiographic novelty. Drawing on Aboriginal and South Asian language texts and oral traditions, including Dreaming stories, travelogues, and epic poems and folk tales, Australianama narrates a singularly unique story of migration and settler colonialism. In the process, the reader is transported to a world teeming with human and non-human actors and agencies. Indeed, Khatun’s reference to ‘people and creatures’ is a capacious one. Alongside hawkers, camel drivers, and indentured laborers, the animals and commodities that journeyed with them, and the traditional owners of the lands they traversed, the story also traces the paths of traveling mura and creatures from the Dreaming as well as South Asian folk traditions. Following the many tracks left in the wake of these knowledge holders, the story affirms the multiplicity of knowledge relations, insisting that these ‘have the capacity to radically change the routes readers use to imaginatively travel to the past’ and ‘transform the very grounds from which we view the past, present, and future’ (p. 4).