Chronicling Kenyan Asian diasporic histories: ‘newcomers’, ‘established’ migrants, and the post-colonial practices of time-work

Recent studies of international migration have observed its increasing complexity. Circular, return and temporary migration between India and Kenya, arising from the economic and political multi-polarities of increasing SouthSouth partnerships, is one example of such complexity. These flows are distinct from the migration patterns of the longer-established Kenyan Asian diaspora, who settled under the auspices of the British Empire from the 1890s until the beginning of the 1960s. This paper explores how these transformations are negotiated through the dynamics of Kenyan Asians’ ongoing post-colonial liminalities and ambiguities of citizenship, focusing in particular on the temporal production of distinctions between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants, even when in practice these distinctions are much more fluid. This article highlights the regulatory practices of ‘time work’ that that enfold the migratory chronologies of ‘established’ migrants into the time of the nation, whilst excluding those of ‘newcomers’. It explores the selective remembering, forgetting and reworking of the colonial past, a process informed by the dynamics of modernity, diaspora, nation and postcoloniality in contemporary Kenya. It argues that whilst distinctions between ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ migrants might reflect different positionings in transnational social fields, differences are also negotiated in contradictions between the experiences, meanings and understandings of time. This demonstrates how space on its own is itself a inadequate conceptual lens with which to examine relationships between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants, and that further research is needed that attends to the temporal dynamics mediating the temporal dissonances of contemporary transnational social fields.