Contenu du sommaire : Les mots de la migration

Migration's Narratives and Troubles. From Anathema to Praises
Several studies and theoretical paradigms have examined and documented the multiple links maintained by immigrant communities with their countries of origin.  This article focuses on the country of origin to better understand under which conditions the state, the nation and those who remain in the country (re)discover their migrants and describe and relate to the facts and events that embody the experience of the migrant.  More specifically, it analyses how a system of “communication”, events and historical moments redefine the boundaries of the national community, to achieve a “shared meaning” (Strauss) between those who stay and those who left despite their multi-location.

University as an Open-access to the World: between Myth and Mobility
Students and the graduates of the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) have seen their status upset last twenty years.? Although the link between studies, jobs in the administration, and, consumption remains present in their representations and those of their families, their aspirations are increasingly challenged by the situations of unemployment of graduates.? This context provokes some reconfigurations of meaning, which involves the construction of the diploma as a “visa”.? This article will highlight the breaking point in the family transmission linked to the schooling and the progressive development by the students of the diploma as a key to social and geographical mobility. So, the schooling stemming from the colonization will be considered as a preparation time for exile, whether in terms of identity or in terms of acquiring capital necessary to travel.? In addition, it will also highlight the role of certain speech, such as those around selective immigration, in this construction of the myth of the “diploma as a visa”.

From 2005 the waves of the Atlantic Ocean that shatter on the Senegalese coasts, are ploughed by about ten thousand migrants in pirogues (most of them Senegalese) who set off for the Canary Islands, risking their lives to “gagner l'Europe”.  In Senegal the phenomenon of boat migrations has triggered a remarkable production of images and discourses.  In assuming movements as an exception, in the mass-media and official discourses the pirogue migrant is portrayed as a “kamikaze”, a victim or a “naive adventurer” who is driven to leave by the imagination of an idyllic European “elsewhere”, or by the desire to achieve the same economical wealth displayed by returning migrants.  Conversely, numerous ethnographic studies suggest that for millions of Africans being mobile appears rather a “way of life”, a part of their daily experience, implying more than just movement of people in geographical space alone (De Bruijn et al. 2001).  Drawing from the analysis of the ethnographic data collected in Dakar and in the urban areas of M'bour-Saly, in this paper we suggest that boat migrations could be better understood by examining both the manifold forms of social representations of the migrant within Senegalese society, and the meanings conveyed by Senegalese media and narratives of migrants and non-migrants.  The adoption of an historical perspective on the study of M'bour's migratory context will allow us to retrace a locally specific “culture of migration” and underling its importance in order to deconstruct macro-analytical interpretations, and question the official rhetoric on “clandestine migrations” from Senegal.

Female Internal Mobility in Gondar and HIVThis article analyses the experiences of internal mobility of HIV-positive women who at the moment of the ethnographic surveys lived in the city of Gondar, in North Western Ethiopia.  The “biographical experiences” of five women who migrated from rural areas and used to live in conditions of social marginality will be placed in the context of a wider analysis of the main configurations of female internal mobility based on the age and social origin of the migrant subjects.  The article reveals the multifaceted nature and perennially unstable conditions of these women's migration routes, which begin at the time they make their initial plans for departure, and continue through opportunities and constraints along their path towards a future that then becomes crystallized as a “biographical experience” of the time of change.  We will argue that their HIV-positive status, with all its manifestations and consequences, constitutes a pre-eminent conditioning factor that does not constitute a “biographical disruption”.  It does, however, contribute towards the “subjection” of individuals on the margins of society and the action areas of established authority.  Particularly, the analysis of the subjective relationships of these five women with the norms and categories of the dominant discourse that shape their”virtual social identity”, will highlight that the HIV results in both a new opportunity and a constraint to engage with the future.

From Dakar to New York
The contemporary migratory movements of French-speaking western Africa towards the United States seem to have truly begun in favor of political independence in 1960, and the abrogation of the quota system of immigration in America by nationality in 1965.  Since the 1980s, the effects of the accelerated liberalization of economies in Africa have increased the presence of French-speaking entrepreneurs in the cities of the east coast of the United States, including New York.  Yet the historical analysis of logical migration paths and stories of individuals shows that the transatlantic movements, older, actually date back to colonial times. Thus, farmers converted sailors from different areas of French West Africa joined America by the end of the First World War.  Moreover, in the colonial/segregationist context, they allow us to rethink the nature of Africa/ Americas links (usually apprehended in terms of the mobility of intellectual elites) on the one hand and, on the other hand, the profile of migrants.

From Migration Miseries to the Promotion of Local Development
In 2006, a few thousands Senegalese have attempted to reach the Canary Islands from the Senegalese coast.  Against a tense diplomatic background, the Senegalese government has been using development as an argument for negotiating compensations from the Spanish authorities in relation to forced returns of migrants.  Assuming that negotiations between Spain and Senegal regarding migratory control are taking place within the “development/migratory flow control” discursive framework, we will consider here the way in which such a framework is taken into account by forced-back migrants' organizations in their argumentation repertories.  On one hand, we will shed light on the conditions required for generating a discourse which promotes development as an “antidote” to emigration, and on the other hand, we will highlight the local power stakes among which this discursive strategy has to operate.

An Analysis of International Narratives on the “Brain Drain”Migration-related issues have, since approximately 2000, been the object of increased attention at the international level.  This has led, among other things, to the production of international narratives, which aim both at understanding migration and at proposing policy recommendations on how to address it, with the objective of improving the governance of migration at the global level.  But this implies overcoming dilemmas stemming from the diverging interests of states and other actors (such as NGOs and the private sector).  This article examines the way in which international migration narratives address skilled migration, which is characterized by some of the clearest political trade-offs between stakeholders.  It argues that these narratives attempt to speak to all parties and conciliate contradictory arguments about what should be done to discursively overcome policy dilemmas and create a consensus.  Although this is line with the mandate of international organizations, it depoliticizes migration issues.

Dramatic and spectacular images of destitute African migrants suffering in their attempts to reach European shores in ramshackle boats have become endemic in European media.  However, these images rarely do more than produce the migrant as a political subject, a bare life from a destitute continent portrayed at the height of his suffering.  Through ethnographic case material stemming from an ongoing research project documenting undocumented migration from West Africa to Europe, this article describes significant events in the migrants' lives, which predate the departure from the African continent, thus providing rare ethnographic data from the perilous crossing of the Sahara desert.  The article describes and argues how photography can be used as a productive research tool in ethnographic research and how it enables a particular form of collaborative storytelling, which holds promises for a new form of conceptual ethnography.  Through the article, it is demonstrated how undocumented migration is essentially a matter of social becoming, which paradoxically involves an inverted becoming, in that those who migrate must continually denounce themselves, becoming nobody so as to avoid becoming nobody in the eyes of their families back home.

This article studies the ways migration narratives are being produced and reproduced. Such stories shall be treated not only as sources of the ethnographical research and journalistic enquiry, but also as specific ways of understanding and shaping the experience of migration. This way I intend—more than feeding the methodological debate of how to use the biographical materials in a research—to highlight the multiple effects of this phenomenon over society, in terms of creation of a market of migrational stories. In this market, migrants, acting as true narrative experts, can exchange their stories for social recognition, prestige, or even money.

Books of Passageways
Through the comparison between four contemporary West African migration narratives (1998-2010), fictional or autobiographical, and a number of now classic francophone African literary works (1937-1958), this paper argues that the passage through Dakar acts as a catalyst for West-African mobility, similar to the role played by Paris in immigration narratives.  This article first analyses how migration trajectories are woven into biographies, before going on to explore how the city is depicted both as a spatial and symbolic locus of possibilities, and as an interface between regional imagined worlds and diasporic consciousness.  Finally, the very presence of allegorical motifs, which are ever revived in the narration of migration itineraries, sets into focus the fact that in South-South migration narratives, just as much as in South-North emigration narratives, fundamental existential issues are at stake.

Mobilities and Migrations in Moose Speeches and Oral Literature (Burkina Faso). This paper analyzes speeches dealing with the migrations of the Moose people of Burkina Faso towards the Ivory Coast or to the capital city Ouagadougou, gathered from oral literature collections (songs, proverbs).  Thus this corpus is enunciated in a same language, Moore, but it presents different outlooks on mobility, depending if they originate from men or women who have already migrated once or, on the contrary, from people who stayed “at the village” but are nevertheless some kind of keepers of this form of oral literature.  These different forms of speeches—collected in very different contexts of enunciation, from rituals to interviews, including theatrical performances—are compared in order to examine the social representations surrounding migrations and mobility toward the Ivory Coast and Ouagadougou.

Mobility, Migrations and Literary Networks
This paper questions the relations between african-language literature and globalization. It stresses the consequences on a theoretical level for the understanding of the globalization of literature, of a transnational or a multi-local approach of what is usually considered as an epiphenomenon of world literature. The first part of the paper describes the current state of research on this issue and brings out the limits and the inconsistencies of literary critics when it comes to take african language literature into account. The recent disclosure of transnational african-language literatures, with books published in Africa as well as out of Africa, should lead to a less linguistically compartmentalized approach of african literary studies. It also shows the importance of the interconnection of local, national and international scales in apprehending those phenomenons. As an obvious manifestation of a “glocalisation” of cultures, those literatures ask questions which do concern not only minor literatures but also world literature as a whole. They point out the limits of a purely institutional approach of literature which may reveal some power issues regarding their poor institutionalization, but is unable as an explanatory scheme to take into account the intensity of the relation between written expression and life which is manifested in those literatures. The second part aims to exemplify the preceding by studying the case of the poulâr modern literature. This literature rose in a context of mobility and had to meet the specific needs of a world in a state of globalization. We will show how this literature, by the means of writings, establishes a net of potential relations between the members of the poulâr community scattered all over the world. Facing this case, the searcher has to put the concepts of mobility, connectivity and reflexivity at the heart of his thinking and see the poulâr literature as a poineering way of extending social links in a context of globalization.

“God Wants Us Here...”In various contexts of contemporary mobility, religious narratives and others practices accompany believers in the different stages of the migratory process. Taking into account space and identity in the movements (or non-movements) of transnational religious actors, this article is engaged in reframing and reinterpreting experience by investigating the articulation of migratory and religious experiences as expressed by religious actors in movement between sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe. The actors narratives concerning two specific migratory moments of the process will serve the analysis: the narrative of migration of the pastors and the religious speech of a category of believers concerning one impossible return to the country of origin. By redrawing the genesis and the contents of these narratives, we want to unveil a complex and interwoven process of geographical shifts and “divine” actions that lead to consider the way Pentecostalism transforms and subverts their immigrant experience by allowing for an alternate narrative of this experience.

The Unfindable “Migrant”This article highlights a narrative trajectory of Abdou Khadre, Young Senegalese with Guinean origin. The interest in this typical story is, both in its form and in its subjective experience. Specifically, this study seeks to examine the polyphonic status of that biographical memory. We try also to take into account the tension here between spaces (Guinea, Senegal) and territories (birth, nationality, identity and citizenship). This article is also the story of the anthropologist faces a field that is constantly modified: losing its geographical evidence without being reduced to the exclusive story of Abdou Khadre.

“We Are Travelers”This essay examines the ways in which new theatrical practices provide innovative understandings of the circulation of discourses on migration in Africa. To do so, the essay focuses on Essingan, a play written and performed, for the first time in 2006, by deportees in Bamako, Mali. By examining how the play has problematized former conventional discourses on the experience of migration, the essay demonstrates that the play's significance draws from the alternative militant approach adopted by its creators and actors, generating a new range of theatrical modalities, discursive propositions and, ultimately, challenging and renewing codified discourses on migration.

The Gaze between two Shores
This article is exploring the discourse of contemporary Senegalese rappers in relation to migration and life in exile. Since the 2000's, rappers are generally seen as examples of success. However, their ability to mobilise the youth to amplify their message in the public sphere is increasingly being threatened by the rising number of young Senegalese leaving the country in the hope of finding a better life. Some take part in this migration movement by becoming active in international artistic networks. As a consequence, migration and life in exile is now a recurring topic in their songs. Although their lyrics depict themes, such as the adventurer leaving by sea, or the biblical journey to the promised land, reality still prevails through the stories of migrants and “illegal aliens”. Most choose to describe the harshness of the journey and the bitterness of life in a hostile foreign land. The draw attention to the repressive immigration policies of the northern countries and the ambivalence of the southern countries in that matter. They are still a voice for the voiceless in spite of their status of well to do cosmopolitan artists.

African Migration in Creation Films on TV5 Monde
Comparison between creation films that focus on African migrations and journalistic discourses in the programming of TV5 Monde helps to show the role of counterparty owned works by the rest of the programming.  Films allow encounters with migrants and their families, through their journey, their emotions, their motivations.  Portraits provide access to experiences rather than a phenomenon, and then put these works highlight the challenge of disseminating views refocused in a global media and cultural context.

The notion of “entextualization” proposed by R. Bauman and C. L. Briggs (1990) can be used, from a linguistic anthropology perspective, as a means of interpreting the processes of migratory circulation through the analysis of linguistic productions of migrant subjects.  Drawing upon the musical-narrative performance of a young griot coming from the Casamance region and living in Italy, the article examines the discursive and metaperformative strategies of “decentering” and replacing an allegedly “griot's discourse” in a different context he performs.  The tension between a process of essentialization of “the griottisme tradition” on the one hand, and the subjectification of the migratory experience through performance on the other hand, highlights the importance of taking into account the ideological aspects of the linguistic productions, in analyzing and interpreting social dynamics.

“Listening to Koukan Kourcia: Performative Cinema on Migration in Niger”The film Koukan Kourcia ou le Cri de la Tourterelle (Magori 2010) is the result of a project of social intervention with the aim of influencing the migration practices of men born in Niger that provokes emotional, social and economic problems.  With the help of a popular singer, the main actor and director of the film, Elhadji Sani Magori, tries to make the migrants return to their place of origin.  This article presents the semiologic and discursive analysis of the particular staging of the social intervention on the diegesis and its transformation into an audio visual narration, with the aim of researching the conditions of performativity of the interventionist social project as developed by the implied actors.