The Chronopolitics of Migrant Temporalities Understanding Migrant Experiences of Time, Journey, and Precarity

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the relationship between migrants’ journeys and time as a distinctly political phenomenon. By drawing on conceptualizations of temporality developed in queer theory and sexuality studies, the chronopolitical continuities of migrant’s journeys are drawn out. Moreover, to better analyze the problematizations which arise from inquiry along temporal lines, this paper takes on scholars Brigden and Mainwaring’s concept of ‘Matryoshka Journeys.’ Understood on these terms, migrant journeys are made up of moments of temporal experience, characterized by interrelated occasions of advancement, deceleration, and waiting. By interrogating the relationships between these temporal aspects of migrant journeys, and by using select examples to further illustrate these relationships, this paper concludes that the chronopolitical nature of migrant temporalities can be understood as a kind of ‘temporal governance’ made possible by the separations between ‘settled’ temporalities and ‘migrant’ temporalities maintained by border regimes which – through cycles of deportation, (de)prioritization, and carcerality – sustain waiting as a fixture of migrants’ journeys, and their (re)victimization.