Verify if you are human: what is the ‘human’ in ‘human migration’?

This special issue explores the instability of different migration categories from perspectives in the Global South. This contribution argues that ‘human’ is a category that hides in plain sight in Migration Studies and that it should be brought out of hiding. Sylvia Wynter’s work on ‘being human’ provides a helpful way to approach this migration category from a subaltern perspective, which unsettles the epistemic foundations of the ‘human’. She shows how ‘the human’ has been used to legitimise elite interests in relation to migration in the past and present, and how it could be re-imagined for more equitable purposes in the future. Current injustices in migration governance are reproduced because of rather despite the ideology of post-Darwinian liberal humanism that underpins ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘human rights’. As a contrast to this critical analysis, the paper develops Wynter’s view that humans are a hybrid of biological species (‘bios’) and social story-teller (‘mythoi’). This redefinition is species-based, but culturally plural: the diverse global stories of what it means to be a human are equally valid. The paper ends by showing what attending to the category of the ‘human’ reveals about migration from southern perspectives using a short case study from Cameroon.