Abstract
In this paper I engage with the debates in political geography in EU since early 2000s on deconstructing regional identity and especially Anssi Paasi’s 2002 article "Bounded Spaces in the Mobile World: Deconstructing ‘Regional Identity’”, that continues to influence research agendas today in mobility, migration and border studies. I argue that such critiques of borders, regions and identity reproduce a dominant gaze that assigns colonialism, slavery, imperialism, apartheid, genocide to a linear past and linear space of “Europe of regions” before and after the formation of EU. Such a dominant gaze also keeps the categories of migrant, refugee, displaced, marginalised Other as an object of study within the linear space-time of such a “Europe of regions”. Instead, I call for a research agenda to build knowledges coming from (historical) experiences of movement understood through two angles: a) Movement as making one’s own time in resistance to the partitioned time of capitalism, (settler) colonialism, legal time of citizenship, nation-state borders, b) Movement as Moving out of one’s place assigned by relations of domination around race, gender, class, and caste, among others. Such an agenda is inspired by Black feminist and Third World feminist agendas of writing and theory building as part of the liberatory struggle of moving out of one’s place and against the time assigned by relations of oppression and violence.
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