The Global Horizon
Expectations of Migration in Africa and the Middle East
Samuli Schielke editor Knut Graw editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Leuven University Press
Published:11th Dec '12
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Although contemporary migration in and from Africa can be understood as a continuation of earlier forms of interregional and international migration, current processes of migration seem to have taken on a new quality. This volume argues that one of the main reasons for this is the fact that local worlds are increasingly measured against a set of possibilities whose referents are global, not local. Due to this globalization of the personal and societal horizons of possibilities in Africa and elsewhere, in many contexts migration gains an almost inevitable attraction while, at the same time, actual migration becomes increasingly restricted. Based on detailed ethnographic accounts, the contributors to this volume focus on the imaginations, expectations, and motivations that propel the pursuit of migration. Decentering the focus of much of migration studies on the receiving societies, the volume foregrounds the subjective aspect of migration and explores the impact which the imagination and practice of migration have on the sociocultural conditions of the various local settings concerned.
As a whole, the book is beautifully written and produced. It is a significant contribution to migration studies, in situating international migration within the context of other migration circuits, emphasizing the impossibility of
calculating losses and gains beforehand, and examining how 'The Global Horizon' becomes significant material for personal repositories, struggles, and imaginaries.
Cati Coe Rutgers University, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) Issue 20:4
The focus here is on the deep existential dilemmas of migration; how young people at great peril to their lives set out to take part in a globalized world that reaches them only in the form of 'absence' or as Knut Graw argues, as a 'non-arrival of change' (p. 33). [...] At the heart of many African migration journeys, even the high-risk forms that we see today in the Mediterranean and in the Sahara Desert, lies a continues struggle for a life worth living that is in a constant flux between local and global, between tradition and modernity, between what one has been given and what one must achieve in order to make the world one's own. In this excellent book, the dilemmas are given ethnographic context and challenge what we know about African migration.
Hans Lucht, Ethnos, 2015 (pp. 1-;2), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1069366
ISBN: 9789058679062
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 57g
200 pages