Affective Circuits: African Migrations to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration ed. by Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes (review)

This collective work brings together papers from a conference entitled “Intimate Migrations: Marriage, Sex Work and Kinship in Transitional Migration”, held at Roskilde University, Denmark, in 2013. All eleven chapters, based on multisite surveys conducted by anthropologists in either sub-Saharan Africa or Europe, analyze how distance redefines affective relationships. One of the major strengths of the work is its “bottom-up” transnational approach to interactions between migrants’ daily lives, the context of global inequalities, and circulating cultural models. At the center of the study are iterative two-way migration trajectories through which the migrants in question seek to attain the success standards of the countries they come from (and in which they were socialized). Above and beyond economic concerns, many sub-Saharan migrants leave for Europe in order to attain the status of an adult “modern person” (p. 25). There are two closely intertwined aspects to these representations of becoming “somebody”: realizing one’s personal ambitions and honoring one’s social obligations. While the chapters share a conceptual framework, they address four distinct questions (thereby allowing for selective reading): parent-child relationships, bi-national couple dynamics, religious and ancestral beliefs, and youth and marginal cultures.

The book takes off from the idea put forward in the introduction that is that sub-Saharan Africans have a long history of adapting their kinship practices, a history dominated by social and economic mobility, that is, seasonal, local, rural-urban, intra-African, employment-related, trade-related and/or marriage-related migrations. Whereas much migration literature shows that migration works to rearrange gender relations, marriage practices and parent-child dynamics, the authors here argue that sub-Saharan migrants instead adjust preexisting practices, such as child circulation, multi-parenthood and polygamy, to their new situations. From this perspective, which posits a bi-national dialectic, the book examines the “social regeneration” of family groups based on “affective circuits”, termed thus in order to “capture the way the transactions that constitute them often combine material and emotive elements simultaneously such that love, obligation, and jealousy become entangled with the circulation of money, consumer goods, ideas, and information” (p. 8). These circuits involve connections and disconnections brought about in turn by different types of blockage: migration laws, unemployment, conflicts, etc. The perspective in terms of relationships is explicitly opposed to analyses centered on the individual as a rational economic actor.

The first three chapters study the different parent-child situations that may exist in situations of migration. Cati Coe analyses the famous case of the soccer player Mario Balotelli in Italy, born Mario Barwuah in a family of Ghanaian migrants. Mario was raised by a wealthy Italian family from the age of 3, an arrangement “brokered” by the Italian social services for one year and later renewed, against the will of the parents and in “the interest of the child”. The author shows how sub-Saharan migrant parents faced with difficulties raising their children use the practice of fosterage in three ways: placing a child with family members who have also migrated; sending a child “back” to Africa, or agreeing to let local social services transfer a child to a different family. These arrangements, understood by sub-Saharan families as ordinary and temporary, can put them at risk in the case of dissonant social norms; namely when social and judiciary institutions in European countries interpret the placement of a migrant child as abandonment of that child. In Chapter 2, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg discusses how Cameroonian mothers in Germany maintain and create ties by way of their German-raised children. Last, Pamela Kai explores the performative dimension of photos that circulate between migrant parents in the United Kingdom and their children sent to Gambia: they may be seen as a staging of parental responsibility. Children in Africa integrate a type of social organization that morally validates their parents’ position as material and financial providers...