From wasteland to reflexivity: Theorising migrant labour through critical realism in postcolonial capitalism

Abstract

This article critically engages with the theoretical challenges of conceptualising the “migrant subject” in postcolonial India by tracing traditions of duality existing in the postcolonial development discourse. Through a synthesis of Kalyan Sanyal’s theorisation of postcolonial capitalism and Margaret Archer’s framework of critical realism, the paper describes the persistence of structural exclusion despite developmental inclusion and the everyday agency of the migrant worker. Sanyal’s capital–non-capital complex and the figure of the wasteland are deployed to rethink the logic of primitive accumulation and its reversal, while Archer’s concept of morphogenesis is introduced to reinstate the subjective agency of the flux migrant—an individual oscillating between exclusion and aspiration. The article presents two key conceptual interventions: flux migrants and reflexivity traps, offering a process-based model to account for migration instability in the absence of economic absorption. This model re-politicises the subject and attends to the relational ontology of late capitalist exclusion.