The Human in Postcolonial Criticism Today. Summary Essay

The second part of Chakrabarty’s essay is about immigrants, refugees, illegal workers and asylum seekers. He is dividing people within one country into “insiders” and “outsiders”. Outsiders are those people who are comers from different countries and cultures and they are separated from insiders who are citizens of particular country.

He gives these two antonymic terms as survival and full civic participation. Survival means group of people from left their states and came to other country to work, to live. So we can’t define them as social members of country, they don’t have no rights, no security in future. And thus who are full civic participation members are documented people, to have political and economic rights.

Further he talks about the work by Hannah Arendt viewpoint of modernity as creator of “savages” people who are forced to be stateless. Also ideas of Mike Davis and Abahlali baseMjondo are given. They say that the failure of state correctly organizing its political and economic system creates these “surplus population”. On the other hand these very people are significant in developed countries capitalistic structure, because they are cheap labour.

He says that European borders turned into frontiers nowadays. Europe is pushed by America and Australia to keep its gates open for refugees and immigrants accordingly to UN declaration. Here the result is: Europe is dotted with growing number of detention centres. Some scholars think that as Europe is developed because they colonized and robbed resources from undeveloped countries, it has to pay back and be tolerant to these endlessly coming people.

Nowadays case of subaltern studies is about these immigrants, refugees and illegal workers. The reason for that is: surplus population is caused by past colonial activities in the world. Now they are subalterns. And this matter should be considered and solved.

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