AFTERWORD: Labor, Race, and Temporality

The migrant plays multiple roles in national stories: from foreign founder to traitor, the stranger can be imagined both as threat and as opportunity for renewal.¹ In the world of contemporary nation-states, migration’s potential to unsettle the national story is often managed by highly partial and decontextualized accounts of certain events and populations, the story of the Windrush generation in the United Kingdom and the Mueda Massacre in Mozambique being two cases in point.² Yet until recently it was still possible to brand forced migration and migration studies as “ahistorical.”³ Historians such as Leo Lucassen, Donna R. Gabaccia, David Feldman,