Minor keywords of political theory: Migration as a critical standpoint

The present exercise is a provisional effort to dedicate serious critical reflection to a variety of keywords operating within contemporary discourses of power and resistance, which nonetheless retain the status of “minor” terms. By minor keywords, we have in mind the sorts of concepts, categories, and other notions that are often widely used in both public political discourse and political theory, which therefore must be apprehensible as undeniably part of the working lexicons of both state power and political theory (hence, keywords), but which remain remarkably under-theorized (at least outside of critical migration studies). In this respect, paradoxically, to the extent that they remain “minor” and thus un-remarkable, these “keywords” tend to retain the status of mere words. Therefore, our task here is to de-sediment these apparently banal and routine fixtures of the dominant political language in order to subject them to critical reflection, to de-naturalize their apparent transparency, and re-politicize the de-politicization that ensues from their mundanity. The criteria we have adopted for selecting these keywords are, first, precisely the ubiquity of these terms within the discourses of politics, alongside the fact that they nonetheless have gone relatively unnoticed by political theory and, second, the relative absence of any extensive political and historical genealogy of these concepts or the practices that they name and describe.