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research-article2015
Article
Homing Guangzhou:
Emplacement, belonging
and precarity among
Africans in China
Roberto Castillo
Abstract
Over the last decade, countless Africans have been moving between China and Africa. While
Africans in Guangzhou have been generally portrayed as a wave of immigrant traders, they
arrive in China for myriad reasons, occupy multiple (usually transient) emplacements, and engage
in diverse activities. By following the stories and insights of two Nigerian community leaders, this
article explores the place-making processes through which individuals and collectives negotiate
their everyday lives in Guangzhou under conditions of uncertainty. Throughout the article, I
suggest that despite different trajectories and emplacements, precarity is a common thread
running through most accounts of Africans in the city. While sometimes paralysing, I argue that
this precarity functions as a trigger encouraging individuals to develop structures of solidarity
and networks of support (i.e. sporting clubs and community offices), which are crucial sites for
individual and collective attempts to feel at home while on the move in China.
Keywords
Africans in China, belonging, emplacement, Guangzhou, home, homing, Nigerians, place-making,
precarity, transiency
made to define the types and origins of individuals in the city (Bodomo, 2012; Li etal.,
2012; Zhang, 2008), extant research has tended to represent Africans as a mass of traders
(see Bertoncelo and Bredeloup, 2007; Bredeloup, 2012; Haugen, 2011; Mathews and
Yang, 2012; Muller and Rainer, 2013) and to conflate their presence in the region with a
wave of immigration (see Haugen, 2012; Lan, 2014). Drawing on my fieldwork in
Guangzhou (conducted between 2011 and 2014), I contend that these representations fail
to account for the complexities associated with the multiple trajectories, stories and
mobilities of individuals in the city. Indeed, if one considers the diverse rationales behind
the multiple forms of mobility that drive individuals into transnational movement/activities between Africa and China, then a different perspective emerges: one in which
Africans from diverse walks of life arrive in Guangzhou for myriad reasons, and then
subsequently occupy various (usually transient) emplacements. Taking these multiple
emplacements and trajectories into consideration leads to a more thorough understanding of the dynamics informing place-making processes and the experiences of Africans
in the city, and renders representations of the African presence in the region as a wave of
immigration problematic. While I suggest that the immigrants label should be avoided,
it is in no way my intention to characterize these mobile subjects as having no connection
to place. Indeed, through ethnographic analysis and the deployment of analytical constructs, I endeavour to describe and discuss how individuals on the move attempt to
home themselves while navigating through their transnational journeys.
Most migration-related literature on place-making has focused on the ways in which
immigrants forge collective identities when facing discrimination or poverty in a host
society (Gill, 2010) less effort has been directed towards assessing how people moving
in transnational circuits might (or might fail to) feel at home throughout their journeys.
This article is an attempt to bridge this gap by bringing together the place-making strategies and the structures of feeling that intersect in the notion of home. Following Ahmed
(2000), I contend that to better understand the ways in which people on the move structure feelings of at-homeness, we need to pay closer attention to the affective, material
and symbolic processes through which place-making and homing during transnational
journeys occur. Home, I argue, is not necessarily a place to go back to. It can be a process and a feeling (an embodied experience) that can be (re)produced while on the move,
and emplaced in several locations. Moreover, I maintain that under certain modes of
transnational movement, home can be emplaced within transiency, and it is by using
this notion of emplacement within transiency that I highlight how individuals are differently emplaced and how they often attempt to (re)produce a feeling of being at home
while on the move. I do this by following the stories and insights of two Nigerian community leaders, Tony Ekai and Ojukwu Emma, and by exploring some of the strategies
that individuals and collectives employ to negotiate their everyday lives in Guangzhou
under conditions of transiency and precarity.
As in many cases of transnational mobility,3 the precarity experienced by most
Africans in Guangzhou is predicated on economic uncertainty; in this particular case,
however, the precarity is heightened by the logics of surveillance and control imposed on
populations by the Chinese state. While sometimes paralysing, precarity can, nonetheless, function as a trigger encouraging individuals to develop structures of solidarity and
networks of support. These networks, structured by (and structuring) the emergence of
Castillo
grassroots forms of organization (i.e. sporting clubs and community offices) are crucial
sites for individual and collective attempts to feel at home in Guangzhou. Throughout
this article, these attempts to (re)create a measure of stability, familiarity and security
under conditions of transiency, migrancy and precarity are referred to as precarious
homing. As I will show, precarious homing is intrinsically connected to the notion of
emplacement within transiency. This connection not only helps to elucidate the conditions under which individuals are emplaced while on the move but also makes their
everyday efforts to (re)create a sense of being at home clear. Indeed, through particular
place-making practices and homing projects some Africans have managed to generate
the necessary spaces where senses of belonging to communities emerge.