Postcolonial Africans are creating an inescapable creole future in Europe. Their intra-EU movements may contest the very idea of Europe from within. Boatloads of vulnerable African migrants arriving at the EU’s southern flanks have aroused sympathy and solidarities. At the same time, border control, violent racism and neo-fascist policies and bureaucracies have pegged Africans as not only ‘alien’ but also ‘invasive’ others. From these two discrepant realities of sympathy and antipathy, Africans emerge as agents of geopolitical change. Joris Schapendonk’s book Finding Ways Through Eurospace is a gripping, well-wrought account about the lifeworlds of African people in Europe.
The author asserts that the book ‘is not about migration’ but ‘about migrants’. Taking a cue from the mobility turn, Schapendonk ‘abandons the migration framework’ for two major reasons: first, its terminology resonates ‘with the logic of the nation-state’, making it a cognate for the security paradigm. Second, the migration framework is ‘reductionist and sedentarist’ in its understanding of African mobilities, giving short shrift to their erosive – or rather transgressive – potentialities. The underlying ethos here is that ‘African movers’ erode the national borders of EU member states and transgress systems of mobility control and asylum. Their capacity to reground themselves circuitously in a post-national Europe, the author argues, grants them the accolade of ‘Afrostars’ (a play on Adrian Favell’s ‘Eurostars’).Footnote 1 They not only ‘navigate Europe as a truly integrated socio-economic space’ with relative ease, but also ‘contribute to a further “integration”’ of this space, as well as redefine it through their ‘worlding’ movements, social networks, businesses and imaginations (p. 2).
Finding Ways draws attention to moments when African people are under the temporal duress of stasis, insomniac waiting, failure and despair. Schapendonk’s discomfort with Agambian frameworks, which lock down the horizons of agency and resistance of African mobility within the EU, is a praiseworthy move and yields a much-needed scholarship. No less impressive is his methodological tour de force, a trajectory ethnography, which allows him to revisit places and keep track of African movers’ ‘changing, and sometimes remarkably unchanging, situations’ in Europe and further afield (p. 7). The author starts with three entry points in Europe to trace the contours of such (im)mobility trajectories. As you turn the pages, it is admirable how the author, his informants and his narratives about them move back and forth in time and space, revealing the extensive use of mobility in the book. Embracing stream of consciousness as a narrative device, the text is a jigsaw of scattered narrative threads running through different chapters with different thematic foci.
The book brings key conceptual frameworks to bear on its rich empirical reflections. The first chapter, ‘Worlding departures’, leans on AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of ‘worlding’ to show how the culture of African mobility is intimately tied to practices of informality, hustling and improvisation. In Chapter 2, ‘Moving through affective circuits’, Schapendonk deploys the concept of affective circuits to capture not only the smooth forms of social navigation of African movers in Europe, but also ‘the potential for disconnection and conflict’ (p. 54). The argument here is loosely tied to the assertion made in Chapter 3, that forms of conviviality, deceit, distrust and exploitation permeate social relations in complex and unpredictable ways. Such affective frictions are also produced by systems of mobility regimes – such as asylum systems – that mobilize individual migrants as ‘double agents’ to operationalize Orwellian surveillance (p. 121).
Finding Ways makes a bid for openness, multiplicity and non-linearity as conceptual antidotes to the straitjacketing lexicon of migration studies. It is an immensely engaging, well-informed text. It makes an important contribution to the future of African mobilities in Europe. The book will be of great interest to scholars working on return migration, humanitarian practices that foreground the agency and resistance of migrants against humanitarian borderwork.
While Finding Ways reveals how African mobilities hold the promise of re-viewing Europe, it fails to conceptualize this ‘re-viewing’ as – wittingly or unwittingly – a decolonizing practice. African mobilities within Europe ‘actively contribute [not only] to a further “integration” of Europe’ but also to its disintegration through what Paul Gilroy calls ‘agnostic belonging’ in a postcolonial Europe, or through abolitionist politics of geography.Footnote 2 This resounding silence about the entanglement of contemporary African mobilities with colonial racism reduces the book to a presentist account. The book also has little to offer critical scholarship in anthropology, postcolonial studies, decolonial studies and critical border studies. Although the author acknowledges that African movers ‘are pushed to the margins of “Eurospace”’ (p. 2) as a ‘structural eventuality’ of their trajectories, and how such structures may ‘produce room – for navigation, gambling and escape’ (p. 152), he has grafted Favell’s Eurostars onto African people (Afrostars) with little to no problematization or critique, claiming the ‘book is a parallel world to Favell’s’ (p. 186). Coupled with this is the reluctance to engage with (West) African scholarship on the linkage between mobility, sociality and conviviality. Still, Finding Ways remains an important contribution to mobility studies and opens up new research horizons on intra-European African mobilities.
