Abdoulaye Kane
Anthropology and Center for African Studies
Africans Abroad
I intend to introduce a new undergraduate course, “Africans Abroad”, to be taught on a regular basis in the Center for African Studies. This course will examine the flow of African labor migrants and refugees to Europe and Northern America and the various ways in which these migrants incorporate themselves into Western cities. The course will be divided in two parts each focusing on one main theme: 1. the insertion of African communities into European and American cities and 2. the maintenance of relations between African communities abroad and their home countries.
The first theme will look at how African migrants organize their life in their host country. It will analyze the various modes of professional, social and religious insertion into urban life. How do African workers and traders, who barely speak English, find their way in a highly global city such as New York or Paris? What happens to their cultural and religious practices in their host countries? The course is interested in questions of social and cultural processes by which African migrants and refugees find themselves in “global cities” and how they negotiate to reproduce or recreate cultural enclaves within those cities. The course will use case studies to highlight the appearance in Western cities landscapes of African businesses, religious forms and informal economic activities. For example in 116th Street in Harlem, the visibility of Senegalese businesses, traders, religious forms and cultural activities led people to talk about it as being “Little Senegal”, and Fulton Street in Brooklyn was renamed Fouta Street because of an important presence of Fulani migrants from Senegal, Mauritania, Mali and Guinea.
The second theme will focus on the relations which African migrants and refugees maintain with their home countries. It will look at the financial remittances of African migrants and refugees to their home countries. The course will examine the role that African migrant networks such as village based associations or religious based associations play in financing local development of sending areas.
The primary goal of the course is to have students become familiar with theoretical approaches to questions of labor migration and transnational processes, and to engage in critical thinking about problematic terms such as “integration”, “acculturation”, and “transnational identities”, especially with regard to African migrants and refugees.
In terms of geographic scope, this course will examine cores of migration from all parts of sub-Saharan Africa to France, Italy and the United States.