African Migrations
Patterns and Perspectives
Publication Year: 2013
Spurred by major changes in the world economy and in local ecology, the contemporary migration of Africans, both within the continent and to various destinations in Europe and North America, has seriously affected thousands of lives and livelihoods. The contributors to this volume, reflecting a variety of disciplinary perspectives, examine the causes and consequences of this new migration. The essays cover topics such as rural-urban migration into African cities, transnational migration, and the experience of immigrants abroad, as well as the issues surrounding migrant identity and how Africans re-create community and strive to maintain ethnic, gender, national, and religious ties to their former homes.
Published by: Indiana University Press
Cover, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
Contents
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pp. ix-x
Acknowledgments
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pp. xi-xii
This volume emerged from a conversation on a plane to the annual African Studies Association meeting in 2004. Like many projects of this sort, the gestation period has been long but made bearable by the patience of our contributors and support of our colleagues. The editors wish to thank the staff of the Center for African Studies at University of Florida ...
Introduction: African Patterns of Migration in a Global Era: New Perspectives
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pp. 1-16
Migration within countries, between countries and between continents, is a central characteristic of the twenty-first century. Castles and Miller (2003) have characterized the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries as “the age of migration,” referring to population movements across national, regional, and continental borders. ...
Part 1. Psychological, Sociocultural, and Political Dimensions of African Migration
1. Overcoming the Economistic Fallacy: Social Determinants of Voluntary Migration from the Sahel to the Congo Basin
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pp. 19-34
Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, is of modest size by world standards, with a population currently estimated at somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million. It is also in many respects typical of cities throughout Africa and the global South, characterized by rapid population growth, high unemployment, and shrinking public resources. ...
2. Migration as Coping with Risk and State Barriers: Malian Migrants’ Conception of Being Far from Home
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pp. 35-58
Death, starvation, overexploitation, poverty, life sans papier, states’ barriers (arrests and imprisonment), unemployment—just to name a few—are the words most used to redefine migration in order to discourage young Malians from undertaking dangerous trips to Europe or large African cities. ...
3. Navigating Diaspora: The Precarious Depths of the Italian Immigration Crisis
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pp. 59-77
The immigration crisis commands center stage in Europe as reconfigured notions of sovereignty, territory, and community challenge traditional concepts of national and cultural belonging. The advent of this post-national world raises illuminating dilemmas concerning European relations with other nations, ...
4. Historic Changes Underway in African Migration Policies: From Muddling Through to Organized Brain Circulation
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pp. 78-90
This chapter takes a step back and examines the new state of play in Africa with respect to brain circulation or the deliberate attempt among southern nations to utilize emigration to advance their socioeconomic development. Numerous modalities exist that illustrate the existence and dimensions of brain circulation on the continent. ...
Part 2. Translocal and Transnational Connections: Between Belonging and Exclusion
5. Belonging amidst Shifting Sands: Insertion, Self-Exclusion, and the Remaking of African Urbanism
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pp. 93-112
In the diversity of African cities, dynamic and overlapping systems of exchange, meaning, privilege, and belonging are the norm. These systems stem from longstanding patterns of political and economic domination— apartheid, indirect colonial domination, monopolistic party rule (Zlotnick 2006) ...
6. Securing Wealth, Ordering Social Relations: Kinship, Morality, and the Configuration of Subjectivity and Belonging across the Rural-Urban Divide
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pp. 113-132
When Francis Lukio died in Dar es Salaam in 1999, he had been the main pillar of support for his rural and urban extended family.1 When the harvest in his home village failed—or when school fees or hospital bills had to be paid—his relatives relied on Francis’s financial support. Other family members—especially the young men from his patrilineage, ...
7. Voluntary and Involuntary Homebodies: Adaptations and Lived Experiences of Hausa “Left Behind” in Niamey, Niger
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pp. 133-157
This chapter explores the important roles played by Hausa communities in Niamey, Niger, in the ongoing creation of the global Hausa diaspora.1 For centuries Hausa have been a “traveling culture” (Clifford 1997) famous for their skills in building long-distance trading networks. ...
8. Strangers Are Like the Mist: Language in the Push and Pull of the African Diaspora
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pp. 158-172
Issifi Mayaki is a stranger in New York City. Born in a small village near Tahoua in north central Niger, Issifi has lived in New York City for almost twenty years. He comes from a Hausa family of religious clerics who, besides having taught the Koran to the children of the village, have long been engaged in long distance commerce. ...
9. Toward a Christian Disneyland? Negotiating Space and Identity in the New African Religious Diaspora
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pp. 173-194
On July 17, 2005, under the headline “African Church Plans Christian Disneyland,” Scott Farwell of the Dallas Morning News reported that “the Redeemed Christian Church of God—Africa’s largest and most ambitious evangelical church—plans to build a 10,000-seat sanctuary, two elementary school-size lecture centers, ...
10. International Aid to Refugees in Kenya: The Neglected Role of the Somali Diaspora
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pp. 195-208
This chapter focuses on the neglected role of transnational assistance provided within refugee communities in understandings of international aid to refugees in Kenya.1 It builds on earlier work that argues that international aid systems that provide relief aid or technical assistance to refugees fail to respect the complex gift-giving norms in refugee communities ...
Part 3. Feminization of Migration and the Appearance of Diasporic Identities
11. The Feminization of Asylum Migration from Africa: Problems and Perspectives
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pp. 211-229
One of the accepted characteristics of contemporary migratory flows from Africa to countries of the global North is “feminization.” The newness and extent of this feminization are matters of some debate, but one area where there is a clear increase in women migrants is in asylum migration. ...
12. Migration as a Factor of Cultural Change Abroad and at Home: Senegalese Female Hair Braiders in the United States
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pp. 230-247
Hair braiding has become the leading profession of Senegalese female immigrants in North America.1 It is also embraced by male immigrants working as managers of hair salons. This scorned profession that was traditionally reserved for women belonging to endogamic craft corporations (castes in Senegal) ...
13. What the General of Amadou Bamba Saw in New York City: Gendered Displays of Devotion among Migrants of the Senegalese Murid Tariqa
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pp. 248-269
Moments after the shaykh disappeared behind the darkened windows of his SUV and his driver began to pull out of the Marriott Marquis Hotel, a frantic young man in a patchwork cloth ensemble bolted from the crowd. He threw his lanky body across the hood of the car as it pulled into the dense theater-going traffic of Times Square. ...
14. Toward Understanding a Culture of Migration among “Elite” African Youth: Educational Capital and the Future of the Igbo Diaspora
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pp. 270-286
Starting in the mid-1990s, I have had several informal conversations with older teens and young adults in the United States whose parents had emigrated from Nigeria. With a few notable exceptions, these youth speak little to no Igbo, despite their parents’ own fluency, and despite having been raised in a closely watched and carefully monitored immigrant home. ...
Contributors
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pp. 287-288
Afe Adogame is Associate Professor in World Christianity/Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches Indigenous Religions, African Christianity, and Religion in the New African Diaspora. He is General Secretary of the African Association for the Study of Religion. ...
Index
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pp. 289-301
E-ISBN-13: 9780253005830
E-ISBN-10: 0253005833
Print-ISBN-13: 9780253003089
Page Count: 316
Publication Year: 2013
