Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe

Examines the paradoxes of kinship in the lives of unauthorized African migrants as they struggle for mobility, employment, and citizenship in Europe.

In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between "siblings," assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine. Through unusually close ethnographic work in West African migrant communities in Amsterdam, Apostolos Andrikopoulos reveals the unseen dynamics of kinship through shared papers, the tensions of race and gender that develop in mutually beneficial marriages, and the vast, informal networks of people, information, and documentation on which migrants rely. Throughout Argonauts of West Africa, Andrikopoulos demonstrates how inequality, exclusionary practices, and the changing policies of an often-violent state demand innovative ways of doing kinship to successfully navigate complex migration routes.

Author: Apostolos Andrikopoulos
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 05/10/2023
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.69lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.48d
ISBN13: 9780226822624
ISBN10: 0226822621
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | African Studies
- Social Science | Emigration & Immigration
- Social Science | Black Studies (Global)

About the Author
Apostolos Andrikopoulos is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and at the University of Amsterdam.