Full Description
Although contemporary migration in and from Africa can be understood as a continuation of earlier forms of interregional and international migration, current processes of migration seem to have taken on a new quality. This volume argues that one of the main reasons for this is the fact that local worlds are increasingly measured against a set of possibilities whose referents are global, not local. Due to this globalization of the personal and societal horizons of possibilities in Africa and elsewhere, in many contexts migration gains an almost inevitable attraction while, at the same time, actual migration becomes increasingly restricted. Based on detailed ethnographic accounts, the contributors to this volume focus on the imaginations, expectations, and motivations that propel the pursuit of migration. Decentering the focus of much of migration studies on the receiving societies, the volume foregrounds the subjective aspect of migration and explores the impact which the imagination and practice of migration have on the sociocultural conditions of the various local settings concerned.
Contents
Introduction: Reflections on migratory expectations in Africa and beyond
Knut Graw and Samuli Schielke
Why migrate?
On the cause of migration:Being and nothingness in the African-European border zone
Knut Graw
Bushfalling: The making of migratory expectations in Anglophone Cameroon
Maybritt Jill Alpes
Departures and non-departures
City on the move: How urban dwellers in Central Africa manage the siren's call of migration
Filip De Boeck
Spaces in movement: Town-village interconnections in West Africa Denise Dias Barros
Migration, identity and immobility in a Malian Soninke village Gunvor Jonsson
"God's time is the best": Religious imagination and the wait for emigration in The Gambia
Paolo Gaibazzi
Horizons in the making
The Eiffel Tower and the eye: Actualizing modernity between Paris and Ghana
Ann Cassiman
Literacy, locality, and mobility: Writing practices and 'cultural extraversion' in rural Mali
Aissatou Mbodj-Pouye
Engaging the world on the Alexandria waterfront
Samuli Schielke
Afterword
Michael Jackson
Contributors
