Abstract: 

Singapore and Qatar are both nation-states that have highly racialised governance and immigration regimes. Citizenship and attendant privileges are disbursed on the basis of ethnicity that is tied to biological notions of heritage, culture and racial identity. Although both states are highly dependent on (im)migrant labour, who is allowed to claim formal and permanent belonging to the nation is tightly controlled by authoritarian and long-running political regimes. The majority of the migrants to these spaces are Asian. They are thus excellent crucibles through which to utilize ‘Asia and method’ (Chen 2010) to understand notions of ethnic and racial difference. 
Looking specifically at the experiences of ethnically Asian migrants and immigrants within Singapore and Doha, this paper suggests that intra categorical notions of ethnoraciality, mediated by class, colour and status need to be taken into account in order to understand formations of race and ethnicity outside Euro-American frames that typically rely on a Black -White binary. 
One of the key arguments that this paper makes is that it is not only colonial relations (between colonizer and colonized) that are central to the formation of ethnoracial difference and hierarchy, but historical (often pre-colonial) and contemporary mobilities, as well as post-colonial nationalist movements. In doing so, this paper decenters Whiteness in the discussion of ethnic and racial studies, and suggests that the project of racial justice within these regions of Asia must involve addressing structural discriminations instituted by (both sending and receiving) states, as well as excavating the mechanisms of racialised nationalist politics that constitute the intra-Asian sphere. 

Bio:

Laavanya Kathiravelu is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. She was previously an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2014-2024). Her research is at the intersections of international migration, race and ethnic studies and contemporary urban diversity, particularly in Asia and the Persian Gulf. Her first book was Migrant Dubai (Palgrave, 2016), which explored experiences of low wage migrant workers in the UAE. She has also published widely on issues of race, inequality and migration in Singapore. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (2011-2014) and a Fung Fellow at Princeton University between 2015-16. In 2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the City University of New York (CUNY). In 2023, she won the John Lent Best Article award at the Asian Studies Association. She comments regularly on public forums and through op-eds on issues of migration, race and diversity.