Beyond ‘Fiction’ and Beneath ‘Facts’ of Diasporic Life-World: The Gulf Migration and the Cultural Artefacts

Abstract

In the discipline of International Relations (IR), human life-world experiences seldom appear as a critical domain of investigation. Scholars, by and large, tend to ignore the stark realities of migratory spaces in international relations, even as new discourses on ‘Diaspora’ capture myriad events and practices beyond nations and territories. While postcolonial and post-structural theories focus on questions of citizenship, rights, identity, marginality, etc as sites of engagement, the mainstream IR scholars do not reckon with the ontological trajectory of new social and cultural spaces. An attempt is made here to bridge the gap between ‘facts’ (realist artefact) and ‘fiction’ (cultural artefact) by deploying strategies of reading ‘texts’ of ‘fiction’ and the context of ‘facts’–as an interrelated/inter-con(textual) activity.

Plausibly, ‘text’ as a new Level of Analysis in IR would open up immense possibilities for situating critical questions of the life-world (such as identity, marginalisation, discrimination, exploitation, and alienation) in the context of understanding migratory spaces. The emergence of these theoretical constructs obviously provides a green pasture for new IR studies. It assumes that there can be no ‘unbiased’ or ‘objective’ study of IR that the reality of the past/present is always constructed from the accessible ‘texts’ we construe in line with particular historical concerns, and that all histories should be foregrounded, and non-literary texts produced from different orders of ‘textuality’ are part of the ‘inter-texts’ for discussions of history and IR. The culture here is inevitably textual and political and all cultural artefacts are equally the products of discursive practices. Thus, the linkages between ‘history’ and ‘text’ are critical in that it never privileges historicity or textuality to the exclusion of either.