Superdiversity's entanglements: postcoloniality, migrant precarity and the politics of encounter

ABSTRACT

Superdiversity is best approached as an interpretive lens and a generative lexicon that encourages an appreciation of the complex, multidimensional diversity characteristic of the human condition in the twenty-first century. I take the term out of its European and North American home ground and use the concept to zoom in on key questions pertaining to migration-led diversity in the Asian context. In doing so, I explore three themes to highlight superdiversity's entanglements: the “postcoloniality of migration-and-diversity” to underscore the inextricable relations of present-day diversification with colonial categories and cartographies; the “production of precarity in migration-and-diversity” to recover superdiversity's asymmetrical power structure; and the “spatial politics of migrant encounter” to foreground the embodied experience of living in superdiverse settings created by cross-streams of “old” and “new” migrations.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity
• postcolonial migration
• precarity
• spatial politics
• encounter
• Asia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.