Affective Circuits: African migrations to Europe and the pursuit of social regeneration ed. by Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes (review)

Migration within the African continent is part of everyday life, with more than 80 per cent of migratory movements occurring intra-regionally. However, what has caught the imagination of academics and the public in the global North has been the images and stories of Africans risking everything to migrate to Europe in order to seek a better life. They do so despite the perilous journey, hostile reception, increasing xenophobia, and stricter policies for guarding Europe's borders. The essays collected in this volume examine the experience of African migrants in Europe and offer a refreshing perspective. By unpacking transnational kin relationships, the essays aim to explore how relationships are maintained, changed or created as migrants attempt to navigate European immigration laws and bureaucratic practices.

Migrant kin relationships are not exclusively about sending and receiving remittances. Rather, they involve the exchange of ideas and emotions with the aim of maintaining kin relations through continued journeys between countries of origin and settlement (p. 5). This insight emerges in Feldman-Savelsberg's essay on Cameroonian women in Berlin, who, when they become mothers, are often the recipients of gifts, advice and other forms of support from their grandmothers in Cameroon – a remote form of support, as they cannot physically be with them. Feldman-Savelsberg writes: 'Affective circuits with kin operate on the logic of nonspecific delayed reciprocity. When migrant mothers are young and have just given birth, they send happy news, upbeat words, and photos back home to kin. In exchange, they receive informational, emotional, and material support' (p. 73). Kin relations are not static; when new affective circuits are created in Europe, these can transform the relationship with kin in countries of origin. An example is Mozambican poor young women who have few routes to 'valued personhood'. While wanting to fulfil familial obligations, they also seek to maintain their independence by not getting married, yet marriage has increasingly become one of the few routes for non-Europeans to reside in Europe: 'One of the most frequent fears [young Mozambican women] expressed was that, by marrying, they would lose their independence and not be able to live up to their own ambitions and their families' demands' (p. 181).

The essays contained in this volume provide a window onto the strategies adopted by African migrants in an increasingly hostile environment, and how migrants use affective circuits to maintain emotional links with kin across borders and fill emotional voids in their new homes. This point is demonstrated by the case of Lassana, a young migrant in Paris who receives alternative 'older brother' support and advice using the 'Gare du Nord method', a cycle of 'affective circuits that men manage to connect the short-term transactions conducted in the Gare du Nord to the long-term transactional order associated with the reproduction of their families back home' (pp. 248–9).

At the same time, emotional links with one's kin can break down, as illustrated in Cati Coe's essay on child circulation among Ghanaians abroad as a norm to provide opportunities for children. As she demonstrates, in the European context, different challenges arise as people attempt to manage not just cultural but also legal hurdles. One example provided in the essay is the case of footballer Mario Balotelli, who chose to associate with the Italian family that adopted him as a child (p. 27). Coe highlights how the consequence of the 'Western institution's failure to recognize West African practices of child circulation is that children are shifted out of the care of transnational migrants' (p. 51).

One of the book's failings is its unwillingness to unpack how migrants manage the expectations of their kin while also managing relations with the society of settlement, especially their proximal hosts or co-migrants. However, what...