Spurred by major changes in the world economy and in local ecology, the contemporary migration of Africans, both within the continent and to various destinations in Europe and North America, has seriously affected thousands of lives and livelihoods. The contributors to this volume, reflecting a variety of disciplinary perspectives, examine the causes and consequences of this new migration. The essays cover topics such as rural-urban migration into African cities, transnational migration, and the experience of immigrants abroad, as well as the issues surrounding migrant identity and how Africans re-create community and strive to maintain ethnic, gender, national, and religious ties to their former homes.

The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration. The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary research projects of scholars from various social science and humanities disciplines, this book explores how African migration to Western countries after the neo-liberal economic reforms of the 1980s transformed West African states and their new transnational populations in Western countries.

“Engaging case studies . . . add to understanding the social processes of voluntary and forced displacement within the continent and across the seas.” —Choice Spurred by major changes in the world economy and in local ecology, the contemporary migration of Africans, both within the continent and to various destinations in Europe and North America, has seriously affected thousands of lives and livelihoods. The contributors to this volume, reflecting a variety of disciplinary perspectives, examine the causes and consequences of this new migration. The essays cover topics such as rural-urban migration into African cities, transnational migration, and the experience of immigrants abroad, as well as the issues surrounding migrant identity and how Africans re-create community and strive to maintain ethnic, gender, national, and religious ties to their former homes.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary research projects of scholars from various social science and humanities disciplines, this book explores how African migration to Western countries after the neo-liberal economic reforms of the 1980s transformed West African states and their new transnational populations in Western countries.

In recent decades, Africans have migrated to Europe in larger numbers than ever before; Africans are now a visible part of Europe s multiethnic landscape. The present volume brings together essays by an international group of social scientists which focus on economic and affective flows of goods, resources, and people, with careful attention to the regulatory forces of state and non-state (kin/friends/partners) actors. The aim is to integrate a scattered, but overlapping, set of literatures addressing care and intimacy in a variety of different ways among which are marriage migration, domestic labor, global care chains, romance travel, and moving for health resources. While any one paper may focus more on what the editors call affective circuits --the circulation of migrants, kin and goods--or on regulatory regimes, for example regulation of migration, labor, and material flows through state apparatuses, each addresses the complex intersections of the two dimensions of African migration to Europe. Each chapter focuses on the spaces between Africa and Europe and backs up arguments with ethnographic data and descriptions ranging across numerous different countries. This volume promises to become a benchmark in the burgeoning field of migration studies in anthropology. "

While migration out of Africa has become the subject of growing interest and concern, there has been much less research into patterns of international migration within the continent, only a small fraction of which may result in journeys to Europe, North America and beyond. African Migrations Research addresses this gap by showcasing the sheer diversity of African migration patterns and the various ways they can be approached empirically. It explores a variety of less conventional research methodologies and addresses different methods of data collection.