Mobility, Transnationalism and Contemporary African Societies

Mobility, Transnationalism and Contemporary African Societies PDF

Author: Tilo Grätz

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2010-01-08

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1443818852

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The book is meant to shed new light on migratory processes pertinent to Sub-Saharan Africa. It starts out from the position that contemporary migratory movements can only be assessed by employing an appropriate theoretical framework which helps with conceptualising both localised strategies of migrants, i.e. their modes of adaptation, economic and social integration into host societies and the way they maintain relationships back home, across places and nations, i.e. translocal aspects of their mobility in terms of networking, communication or economic as well as cultural transfers. It this respect, the book contributes to the current debate on processes and effects of worldwide mobility, addressing causes and effects and the various aspects of a “culture of migration” relevant for the African continent. Additionally, the book tries to go beyond the usual structural discussions and reflections on mobility and migration by looking at actual migrant practices, their social creativity, the employment of flexible responses to often restrictive governmental policies. Finally, the volume also discusses the often neglected issue of (involuntary) immobility, as well as the significance of borders, in both limiting mobility and in creating new “borderline” strategies, to employ a notion by Ines Kohl with regard to migrants’ transnational strategies. The book addresses a wide readership in Human Sciences; especially from African Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, and Political Sciences.

African Transnational Mobility in China

African Transnational Mobility in China PDF

Author: Roberto Castillo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-29

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1000338096

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Considering the African presence in China from an ethnographic and cultural studies perspective, this book offers a new way to theorise contemporary and future forms of transnational mobilities while expanding our understandings around the transformations happening in both China and Africa. The author develops an original argument and new theoretical insights about the significance of the African presence in Guangzhou, and presents an invaluable case study for understanding particular modes of transnational mobility. More broadly, it challenges forms of (re)presenting and producing knowledge about subjects on the move; and it transforms existing theorisations and critical understandings of mobility and its shaping power. Through an ethnographic approach, the book brings us closer to a number of practices, features and objects that, while characterising the lives of Africans in Guangzhou, are also evidence of the interplay between individual aspirations, and the structural constraints embedded in contemporary regimes of transnational mobility. Raising critical questions about ways of (un)belonging in the precarious settings of neoliberal modernity and the future of African mobilities, this book will be of interest to scholars of transnational, African and Chinese Studies.

Mobility between Africa, Asia and Latin America

Mobility between Africa, Asia and Latin America PDF

Author: Ute Röschenthaler

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1786990830

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Trade connections and cultural exchange between Africa and the rest of the global South have existed for centuries. Since the end of the Cold War, these connections have expanded and diversified dramatically, with emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil becoming increasingly important both as sources of trade and as a destination for African migrants. But while these trends have attracted growing scholarly attention, there has so far been little appreciation of the sheer breadth and variety of this exchange, or of its deeper social impact. This collection brings together a wide array of scholarly perspectives to explore the movement of people, commodities, and ideas between Africa and the wider global South, with rich empirical case studies ranging from Senegalese migrants in Argentina to Lebanese traders in Nigeria. The contributors argue that this exchange represents a form of ‘globalization from below’ which defies many of the prevailing Western assumptions about migration and development, and which can only be understood if we consider the full range and complexity of migrant experiences. Multidisciplinary in scope, Mobility between Africa, Asia and Latin America is essential reading for students and scholars across the social sciences interested in the interconnected economic and social make-up of the global South.

Forging African Communities

Forging African Communities PDF

Author: Oliver Bakewell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1137581948

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This book draws renewed attention to migration into and within Africa, and to the socio-political consequences of these movements. In doing so, it complements vibrant scholarly and political discussions of migrant integration globally with innovative, interdisciplinary perspectives focused on migration within Africa. It sheds new light on how human mobility redefines the meaning of home, community, citizenship and belonging. The authors ask how people’s movements within the continent are forging novel forms of membership while catalysing social change within the communities and countries to which they move and which they have left behind. Original case studies from across Africa question the concepts, actors, and social trajectories dominant in the contemporary literature. Moreover, it speaks to and challenges sociological debates over the nature of migrant integration, debates largely shaped by research in the world’s wealthy regions. The text, in part or as a whole, will appeal to students and scholars of migration, development, urban and rural transformation, African studies and displacement.

Mobility and Family in Transnational Space

Mobility and Family in Transnational Space PDF

Author: Tatiana Ferreira

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-02-29

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1443889652

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This book brings together a range of papers on transnational lives, mobility and gender studies from various disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, including European, African and American countries. The thirteen contributions to the volume provide insights into transnational migration and family issues, offering a renewed theoretical approach to the differing conditions in migration access in origin societies and the scope of social inclusion in the receiving countries. The diversity of the authors’ backgrounds and the range of geographical contexts allow a wider understanding of the family in the transnational space, one that considers mobility as a developmental opportunity for individuals, whose consequences in the contemporary world have not yet been sufficiently studied.

Social Spaces of African Societies

Social Spaces of African Societies PDF

Author: Jürgen Ossenbrügge

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9783825878504

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Transnational social spaces" have emerged in recent years as a research area within migration and area studies. This volume is about African social spaces. It incorporates examples of Central and Western Africa as well as of African-European relations. Contributors from different disciplines, such as anthropology, geography, and political and educational sciences outline their interpretations of transnational social spaces, based on theoretical and empirical work within a wider research project at the University of Hamburg about contemporary transformations of African societies. Jrgen O?enbrgge is professor of economic and political geography at the University of Hamburg. Mechthild Reh is professor for African Studies at the University of Hamburg

Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration

Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration PDF

Author: Nauja Kleist

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-11-25

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1317335481

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This volume examines the relationship between hope, mobility, and immobility in African migration. Through case studies set within and beyond the continent, it demonstrates that hope offers a unique prism for analyzing the social imaginaries and aspirations which underpin migration in situations of uncertainty, deepening inequality, and delimited access to global circuits of legal mobility. The volume takes departure in a mobility paradox that characterizes contemporary migration. Whereas people all over the world are exposed to widening sets of meaning of the good life elsewhere, an increasing number of people in the Global South have little or no access to authorized modes of international migration. This book examines how African migrants respond to this situation. Focusing on hope, it explores migrants’ temporal and spatial horizons of expectation and possibility and how these horizons link to mobility practices. Such analysis is pertinent as precarious life conditions and increasingly restrictive regimes of mobility characterize the lives of many Africans, while migration continues to constitute important livelihood strategies and to be seen as pathways of improvement. Whereas involuntary immobility is one consequence, another is the emergence and consolidation of new destinations emerging in the Global South. The volume examines this development through empirically grounded and theoretically rich case studies in migrants’ countries of origin, zones of transit, and in new and established destinations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Latin America and China. It thereby offers an original perspective on linkages between migration, hope, and immobility, ranging from migration aspirations to return.

Regimes of Mobility

Regimes of Mobility PDF

Author: Noel B. Salazar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-08-25

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1317747259

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Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This book builds on, as well as critiques, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, it challenges conceptual orientations built on binaries of difference that have impeded analyses of the interrelationship between mobility and stasis. These include methodological nationalism, which counterpoises concepts of internal and international movement and native and foreigner, and consequently normalises stasis. Instead, the book proposes a ‘regimes of mobility’ framework that addresses the relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and transnational connection, experiences and imaginaries of migration, and rootedness and cosmopolitan openness. Within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the various contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although they examine nation-state building processes, the anthropological analysis is not confined by national boundaries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

African Diaspora Identities

African Diaspora Identities PDF

Author: John W. Arthur

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2010-08-20

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0739146394

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African Diaspora Identities provides insights into the complex transnational processes involved in shaping the migratory identities of African immigrants. It seeks to understand the durability of these African transnational migrant identities and their impact on inter-minority group relationships. John A. Arthur demonstrates that the identities African immigrants construct often transcends country-specific cultures and normative belief systems. He illuminates the fact that these transnational migrant identities are an amalgamation of multiple identities formed in varied social transnational settings. The United States has become a site for the cultural formations, manifestations, and contestations of the newer identities that these immigrants seek to depict in cross-cultural and global settings. Relying mostly on their strong human capital resources (education and family), Africans are devising creative, encompassing, and robust ways to position and reposition their new identities. In combining their African cultural forms and identities with new roles, norms, and beliefs that they imbibe in the United States and everywhere else they have settled, Africans are redefining what it means to be black in a race-, ethnicity-, and color-conscious American society.

African Roads to Prosperity

African Roads to Prosperity PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-11-24

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9004306056

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This book brings together in a comparative analysis the results of studies of the various cultural, social, economic and historical aspects that are formative in African societies’ experiences of how people negotiated the spaces and times of being in transit on the road to prosperity. The book analyses the various outcomes of the process of mobility and the experience of spaces and times of transit across gender, generational, and class-differences. These experiences are explored and give insight into the socio-cultural and economics transformations that have taken place in African societies in the past century. Contributors are: Akinyinka Akinyoade, Walter van Beek, Marleen Dekker, Ton Dietz, Rijk van Dijk, Isaie Dougnon, Jan-Bart Gewald, Meike de Goede, Benjamin Kofi Nyarko, Samuel Ntewusu Aniegye, Taiwo Olabisi Oluwatoyin, Shehu Tijjani Yusuf, Augustine Tanle and Amisah Zenabu Bakuri.

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