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Markus' scholarly interest was informed by the Anthropology of South Asia, with a theoretical focus on questions of colonial and postcolonial intricacies in representing authority, processes of identification and experiences of diasporic communities. This theoretical focus is strongly reflected in his Masters thesis, which critically examined the dialectic between coercive constraint and individual/collective creativity among indentured migration of Indian labourers to the British colony of Fiji between 1879 and 1930.
His current multi-sited research on the secondary international migration of Indo-Fijians to the Pacific Rim concerns features of self-consciousness and active and strategic participation of people who are affected by migratory movements. Through a stress on diversity and choice as expressed in everyday life as well as narratives this work confronts the popular and scholarly representation of 'mass migration', or 'exodus'. The multiple migratory movements of Indo-Fijians and the articulation thereof echo the diversity of histories of deterritorialisation along with practices of translocal networks, and thereby interrogate the individual and more collective constraints that affect Indo-Fijian familiarity with moving lives.
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