The Ambivalences of Return: Diasporic Utopias and Anti-Migrant Policies

"Return" is a central notion for thinking about the diasporic condition in general (W. Safran). In the "radical imaginations" (R.D.G. Kelley) of the Black Americas of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Black nationalism to Pan-Africanism, as well as in African anticolonialisms, "return" refers to a shared political dream: making Africa a land of hospitality for all Africans and/or Black people dispersed across the world. Return carries an ideal of reparative justice: reuniting, on the land from which they were torn, those whom slavery and colonization had separated. Within these traditions, however, the idea is fraught with tensions, and for those who experience return to the continent, it often appears as a myth (S. Hartman, M. Condé). In the aftermath of the Second World War, the idea of "return" was elevated to the status of a right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 recognizes everyone's right to return to their country, and that same year, in the context of the war in Palestine, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 affirmed it for Palestinian refugees. From then on, the term became the object of competing claims to the same land, as illustrated two years later by the Israeli Law of Return.

This term, born of the experience of violence and carrying a constantly renewed desire for justice within diasporized communities separated from a homeland, whether real or imagined, takes on a radically antithetical meaning in twenty-first-century migration policies, particularly in Europe. In 2026, in the European Union's "Return Regulation," which complements the Pact on Migration and Asylum, "return" appears as a euphemism for "removal" or "deportation," to a land that is not necessarily the land of origin.

This lecture will therefore examine the antithetical uses of a term that lies at the heart of any reflection on the migratory condition, where reparative diasporic imaginations and contemporary migration and asylum policies in many countries pursuing externalized borders policies invest similar signifiers with contradictory meanings. I will analyze the ambivalences of the term "return," drawing specifically on twentieth-century African and Black diasporic imaginaries and on contemporary European migration policies.