A ‘new Black Atlantic’? West African itineraries through Latin America
Topics: Migration
, Africa
, Latin America
Keywords: Diaspora, border securitization, asylum law, modernity
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 81
Authors:
Pedro Ortega Roa, Ibero-American University (2018-2020); National Autonomous University of Mexico (2006-2010)
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Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic interviews conducted with West African men in Tijuana in 2019, this paper offers insights into the sociocultural networks and relations that enable Trans-Atlantic and Inter-American itineraries, expanding the scope of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. These Black African transnational mobilities defy and embrace the political-kinetics of modernity (Sloterdijk, 2020); circulations through the limes (Wabgou, 2016) imposed by the nation-state, which allow or promote the concretion and continuity of sociocultural, political, and economic relations — while (co)responding to the ever-growing pressures by US hegemony, so much as the influence of non-national and non-state entities.
Over the past twenty-five years, transnational human mobility in Latin America has changed significantly concerning transit routes, places of destination, and sociological composition. Besides its diversity — including flows from the Caribbean (Haiti and Cuba), Black Africa (Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo-Kinshasa, Somalia, and else), the Middle East (Syria and Iraq), and other parts of Asia (Afghanistan, the Indian Subcontinent and China), as well as Central (Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua) and South America (Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador) — this shifting trend features ‘new’ strategies of communitarian self-defense (such as the so-called ‘migrant caravans’ during the 2016-2018 period) in contention with relentlessly vicious national and border securitization paradigms. This presentation emphasizes the ambiguous and contradictory policies that Latin American governments have been enforcing to fulfill their particular geopolitical agendas, a broad array that spans from relatively open responses to fierce security filters, heavily bureaucratized legal regimes, dubious humanitarian assistance, institutionalized corruption and State violence.
A ‘new Black Atlantic’? West African itineraries through Latin America
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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