A poetics of sensuality: Xenophobia and same-sex intimacy in cane/cain

This article offers a reading of the ways in which the short film, cane/cain (directed by Jordache Ellapen, adopts a poetics of sensuality to both unsettle and undergird its themes of South Asian migration, sexual intimacy and xenophobia in South Africa. While both homosexuality and xenophobia are not uncommon sites of public discourses in South Africa, cane/cain unearths the less visible faces of both by centring Brown bodies in corporeal collisions of sexual intimacy and of xenophobic violence to disrupt normative and binary categories of sex, race and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. Utilizing the symbolic currency of sugarcane as an aesthetic and narrative pivot, cane/cain constructs a tension between the cinematic pleasure elicited by its poetics of sensuality and its discomfiting themes of homosexual intimacy and xenophobic intolerance to insert the South Asian subject into the discourses of race, sexuality and nationality in South Africa.

Editorial: Focus on Indian migrations

In this issue, we have brought together articles focusing on Indian and South Asian migration experiences and patterns. India has been a major player in international migration, including remittances flows, but also a major scene of internal migrations. This is to an extent perhaps expected as the second largest population in the world residing across a vast geography rich with ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. The 2018 United Nations World Migration Report states that the Indian diaspora is the largest in the world, with over 15.6 million people living outside the Sub-continent. International migration from India can be traced back even before indentured labour flows initiated under the British colonialism. India is a leading country of origin and a major supplier of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled work force. These migration flows from India has attracted significant interest among scholars of migration studies. In this editorial, we are offering some insights and an overview of Indian migrations since the British era.

Asian Migrants of the Middle in Local and Global Context

This chapter establishes the empirical context of migration from Asia to Australia in the 21st century and makes a set of arguments around the empirical value of studying these middling forms of migration. It explores the wider contexts of 21st-century, middle-class Asian migration, as well as establishes the use of the term 'middling mobility' to describe the experiences of the research participants. It argues that an analysis of more 'middling' forms of mobility can be useful in drawing out some of the paradoxes and tensions of mobile lives in which friction and fluidity, hypermobility and immobility, and precarity and security, often coexist and intertwine at different stages and in different ways. It seeks to show that researching migrant lives 'in the middle' can usefully highlight often hidden nuances around the interrelationships of temporality and mobility, and of spatial mobility and social mobility, by opening up analysis of the uneven experiences that exist between the liminality of the migrant precariat and the fluidity of the mobile elite.

“Behind the white curtain”: Indian students and researchers in Australia, 1901–1950

PurposeAcademic scholarship on the White Australia Policy (WAP) has highlighted the history of Asian migration, early perceptions and policy-making initiatives. Prominent scholars have also pointed out the impact of the British Empire and WAP on Australia–India relations and early Indian migrants in Australia. Drawing on the debate concerning international students in Australia, our purpose in this article is to recover the role of Indian students in the story of Australian–Indian connections.Design/methodology/approachThe article aims to highlight the reasons behind the involvement of the Australian government in the provision of scholarships and fellowships to Indian students and researchers at Australian universities during the period of WAP. To achieve this, it uses contemporary Australian newspaper reports to explore the popular representations of sponsored Indian students and researchers in Australia from 1901 to 1950.FindingsThe article concludes that the prevalence of this racially discriminatory immigration policy created a dissatisfaction among Indians, and some Australian sources of agitation, that helped chip away at the Australian government’s admission policies and the gradual demise of WAP.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the historiography and the effects of colonialism on Australian–Indian relations and debates on policy formation based on ideas of whiteness.

Asian perspectives of migration: a commentary

This commentary discusses the scope of institutionalization by providing a regional dimension of migration studies. A pivotal weakness of the article is its lack of understanding of Asian migration scholarship which has thrived in the past two decades and has been a great impetus for the development of migration studies.