Fixed abodes: Urban emplacement, bureaucratic requirements, and the politics of belonging among West African migrants in Paris

Abstract

International audienceFoyers, housing facilities for male migrants, are well-known institutions of postcolonial France and critical nodes in West African migratory networks. A nationwide plan to renovate the foyers presents distinct challenges to the arrangements established by the generations of migrants who live in them, arrangements that have long sustained the social reproduction of transnational migration. In response, residents foreground their long-established presence in Paris to stake claims in the renovation process. Their stories of urban dwelling are punctuated by postal addresses, bureaucratic tokens of identification that play a pivotal role both in migrants’ historical imagination and in the administrative modes of granting residency rights. The foyers are sites of emplacement, albeit fragile, and spaces from which West African migrants contest their political exclusion in present-day Franc

Contractual dependencies:

“…Rather than reflecting reality, the formal petition document was a tool to be employed as a means to an end; as Matthew Hull (, 253) has pointed out, bureaucratic documents are not “neutral purveyors of discourse, but mediators that shape the significance of the signs inscribed on them and their relations with the objects they refer to.” For the documentaires , what mattered was what the document did . While giving is often presented as relatively indeterminate despite the necessary time interval between gift and countergift (Bourdieu ), bureaucratic regulation can provoke affective interactions (Mbodj‐Pouye ; Navaro‐Yashin ), and it ties transactions to a calendar (Graeber ; Guyer , 491). Obligation and debt became matters of regulation, allowing for a temporally regulated relationship with a donor, translating the act of begging into mutually acceptable, legitimate “disability taxes.” In the process, documentaires attempted to transform what donors viewed as a voluntary gift into an entitlement (Bornstein ).…”

Peripheral humanitarianism: Ephemerality, experimentation, and effects of refugee provisioning in Paris

“…Certain popular neighbourhoods experiencing a cycle of (racialized) underinvestment have become sites of ‘slumification’ (Damon, 2017), as emergency shelter is only available to those classified as most vulnerable (women, children, and minors), forcing hundreds of asylum seekers in waiting onto the streets. The inadequacy of housing facilities for predominantly male migrants in Paris 8 (Mbodj-Pouye, 2016) and the broader struggles of those without papers against bureaucratic exclusions (Ticktin, 2016) are not recent phenomena: rather, we point to peripheral spaces in the city that formed new ephemeral, concentrated sites of migrant arrival, where a contradictory co-presence formed: of (incomplete) municipal investment in infrastructures of ‘arrival’, makeshift settlements, and the French National Police. As Bhagat (2019: 2) observes, ‘the ongoing displacement of refugees … reflects the racialized dynamics of expulsion present in Paris’ history …’.…”

“Will They Always Have Paris?”: Observing, Understanding, and Informally Engaging with Undocumented African Souvenir Sellers at the Eiffel Tower

“…Nepotism and corruption across Francophone Africa served as inhibitors of a stable economy for many citizens, which in turn helped to stimulate migration north to France by legal and illegal means [8,9,16]. Moreover, as France's former territories transitioned to independent countries throughout the 1960s, the migration of tens of thousands of Africans towards France for employment and education occurred [12][13][14]17,18]. This new presence of workers was especially important during the French era of les trentes glorieuses that marked three decades of economic and cultural growth following the Second World War that lasted into the late 1970s [8,9,12,16,17].…”