Invisibility in African Displacements
From Structural Marginalization to Strategies of Avoidance
Simon Turner editor Jesper Bjarnesen editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:29th Oct '20
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
New perspectives on migration governance and its effects on different groups of people on the move in the context of a highly politicised and publicised topic - African migration towards Europe.
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.
An important book that highlights African migrants’ agency in the face of structures of inequality and violence. It offers invaluable insights into the processes of invisibility and visibility that mark the trajectories of African migrant encounters with the global migration industry. The accounts provided challenge the normalization of border enforcing mechanisms that work to exclude and distance Africans while living off the wealth extracted from the continent. * Nina Glick Schiller, University of Manchester *
The book shows, in diverse African situations, migrants’ capacities of negotiation and their genuine agency, even in the most precarious and unfavourable contexts. * Through the use of case studies, the authors question the bureaucratic categories and oppose them with their meticulous understanding of social and political process of categorization. Thus, they implement the necessary independence of research vis-a-vis the powers and the state-centered point of view.' *
[T]his book adds valuable empirical and theoretical empirical insight into the dynamics of in/visibility ... Invisibility in African Displacements is a valuable look beyond categories of displacement, paying attention to the realities of how these legal, political and bureaucratic inscriptions shape people’s lives. ... [T]he book is a success.
* Progress in Development Studies *ISBN: 9781786999207
Dimensions: 236mm x 156mm x 18mm
Weight: 460g
288 pages