Invisibility in African displacements : from structural marginalization to strategies of avoidance

Open Access

Abstract

African migrants have become increasingly demonised in public debate and political rhetoric. There is much speculation about the incentives and trajectories of Africans on the move, and often these speculations are implicitly or overtly geared towards discouraging and policing their movements. What is rarely understood or scrutinised however, are the intricate ways in which African migrants are marginalised and excluded from public discourse; not only in Europe but in migrant-receiving contexts across the globe. Invisibility in African Displacements offers a series of case studies that explore these dynamics. What tends to be either ignored or demonised in public debates on African migration are the deliberate strategies of avoidance or assimilation that migrants make use of to gain access to the destinations or opportunities they seek, or to remain below the radar of restrictive governance regimes. This books offers fine-grained analysis of the ways in which African migrants negotiate structural and strategic invisibilities, adding innovative approaches to our understanding of both migrant vulnerabilities and resilience. ; CONTENTS: Introduction: The production of invisibility in African displacements / Jesper Bjarnesen and Simon Turner -- SECTION 1: Humanitarian in/visibilities -- 1. Renegotiating humanitarian governance: challenging invisibility in the Chad–Sudan borderlands / Andrea Behrends -- 2. Encamped within a camp: transgender refugees and Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya) / B Camminga -- 3. An unsettling peace: displacement and strategies of invisibility in post-war Burundi / Andrea Purdeková -- 4. Sufficiently visible/invisibly self-sufficient: recognition in displacement agriculture in north-western Tanzania / Clayton Boeyink -- SECTION 2: State in/visibilities -- 5. War refugees in Northern Cameroon: visibility and invisibility in adapting to the informal economy and the 'tolerant' state / Trond Waage -- 6. Entangled hypervisibility: Senegalese migrants' everyday struggles for a place in the city / Ida Marie Savio Vammen -- 7. Paths to Paris: hodological space and invisibility among Malian migrants without papers in the French capital / Line Richter -- 8. Invisibility as a livelihood strategy: Zimbabwean migrant domestic workers in Botswana / Joyce Takaindisa and Ingrid Palmary -- 9. The Nigerien migrants in Kaddafi's Libya: between visibility and invisibility / Oriol Puig Cepero -- 10. Violence, displacement and the in/visibility of bodies, papers and images in Burundi / Simon Turner -- SECTION 3: Social in/visibilities -- 11. (Dis)Connectivity and the invisibility of mobile Fulani in West Africa / Roos Keja, Adamou Amadou and Mirjam de Bruijn -- 12. Fugitive emplacements: mobility as discontent for wahaya concubine women with slave status in the transnational borderlands of Niger–Nigeria, 1960–2016 / Lotte Pelckmans -- 13. The paradoxes of migrant in/visibility: understanding displacement intersectionalities in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso / Jesper Bjarnesen -- Afterword: the times of invisibility / Loren B. Landau -- Index