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  5. Volume 13, Issue 1, 2022

Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Night Stories: Urban Narratives of Migrant Lives in Europe, Apr 2022

Night Stories: Urban Narratives of Migrant Lives in Europe

Night Stories: Urban Narratives of Migrant Lives in Europe, Apr 2022

Language: English
  • Introduction

      • Night stories: Urban narratives of migrant lives in Europe

        https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00051_2

        This introduction provides an overview of this Special Issue: ‘Night Stories: Urban Narratives of the Migrant Lives in Europe’, which originates from work undertaken within the collaborative HERA-funded research project ‘Night spaces: Migration, culture and integration in Europe’ (NITE). It argues that experiences and representations of the urban night are often overlooked in Humanities research. It contends that understandings of this overlooked dimension of the urban night can provide important and more nuanced insights into questions of migration. It surveys the collection of academic and artistic contributions to the Special Issue, which provides a transdisciplinary survey on the storytelling that emerges from diverse experiences of migration and their connections to the urban night.

  • Articles

      • Producing locality at night: From Lagos hometown meetings to Galway’s G Afro Vibez

        https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00052_1

        This article charts the life experiences of Mitchell Okeke, a party organizer who runs the monthly night-time event ‘G Afro Vibez’ in the city of Galway, Ireland. Throughout, Okeke explores a range of diverse experiences gathering for music events and parties across his life as he moves between Lagos, New York and Galway. In doing so, Okeke shows how moments of gathering around music in migratory contexts were ‘watering his roots’, building the foundations for the development of ‘G Afro Vibez’, a large-scale nocturnal event designed for Galway’s youth, inclusive of Black-Irish and Afrodiasporic communities. By exploring the development of G Afro Vibez event, this article further details Black-Irish youth’s experiences of discrimination and exclusion in Galway’s nightclub scenes.

    • Temporary Autonomous : Free parties and migration on the margins of the urban night

      https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00053_1

      This article explores the relationship between migration, do-it-yourself late-night leisure and integration in the margins of the urban city. While the study of migration and leisure has been widely addressed, a focus on underground ‘free parties’ within migrant communities remains unexamined. This article draws on the notion of ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’, which grasps the horizontal and momentary time-spaces of self-organization, creativity and freedom that articulate the ‘free party’ culture. Departing from this notion, the concept of TAH (‘Temporary Autonomous Home’) explores the night and how these are felt and articulated for a group of migrants from southern European countries in the city of Bristol (United Kingdom). Using the TAH as a live metaphor, this article argues that these are non-traditional ways of participating in the foreign culture that pluralizes the processes of integration in contrast with the scarce sense of integration participants otherwise feel.

  • Articles

      • Sex work and the city: Liminal lives in Chika Unigwe’s

        https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00055_1

        Chika Unigwe’s 2007 novel centres on the lives of four women illegally trafficked from Nigeria to the sex district of Antwerp. Documenting how these characters negotiate the dark spaces of the city, Unigwe highlights the structural inequalities and legislative failures that keep these women in a state of exception. The novel offers a portrait of the contemporary city and the precarious position of those locked out of legal protection of the state. This article focuses on the urban spaces of Sisi, Efe, Joyce and Ama, and how they become commodities of underground migration system. Visible in the windows of the red-light district each night, they are considered persona non-grata by the legal infrastructure that fails to protect them.

    • Meaning-making strategies on the balcony: The night sky in K. Taha’s (‘Portrait of a wandering crab’)

      https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00056_1

      The meaning-making system of the sky has persisted for millennia (Peters 2015). Yet, many of us do not relate to the importance of the connection with celestial sky anymore. One of the many contributing factors is our relation to urban systems, as well as densification and, consequently, the verticalization of living. As an example of the power of place-making strategies and its friction with the architectural set-up in high-rise mass dwellings and estates, the novel by Karosh Taha makes use of the night-time sky in idiosyncratic spaces of the high-rise, such as the balcony. Here, the links between relations of time and space, the here and there (Perez Murcia 2019), as well as inside and outside spaces, become apparent and show a connection of the liminality of post-migrant identities. In an analysis of the access to the night-time sky and its concluding place-making strategies by one of the protagonists of the novel, I show how the balcony functions as a liminal space that is idiosyncratic for the mobile and mediatized identity in the western European high-rise dwelling.

  • Articles

      • Night spaces and stories of the Cape Verdean diaspora in the Netherlands: Belonging and cultural activism

        https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00058_1

        This article discusses the significance of night-time spaces associated with the Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam, home to the third largest Cape Verdean diaspora in the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches including interviews with key figures in music production and nightlife, mapping of key historical and contemporary sites, and close analysis of artefacts and music lyrics, this article considers how music practices of huge historical and cultural significance have been deeply embedded in the night-time cartography of the city. Following Doreen Massey’s formulations, it considers urban space as a mobile junction of historical, sociopolitical and cultural layers, in constant transformation, and argues that night-time spaces were, and continue to be, integral to the development of a political–cultural consciousness among the Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam, in colonial and postcolonial contexts. These discussions are also relevant given current debates on the value of the ‘night-time economy’ in Rotterdam’s post-industrial landscape.

    • Storytelling nights: Performing (post)memory of Cape Verdean migration to Rotterdam

      https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00059_1

      The Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam (the third biggest Cape Verdean diaspora in the world) have left a clear imprint on Rotterdam’s culture especially in terms of music production. Recently, this cultural and historical legacy has been gaining more recognition. In the field of performing arts, which constitute a relevant aspect of the urban nightlife (when not impacted by the current COVID-19 restrictions), the stories of migration circulating among the community have inspired Dutch-Cape Verdean artists to create thought-provoking plays on diasporic identity negotiations and belonging. In this regard, two theatre storytelling pieces by second-generation Dutch-Cape Verdean female artists, Lena Évora’s (‘Music and stories from my homeland’) (2018) and Sonya Dias’s (‘The story of my mother’) (2017), engage with the notions of ‘home’ and ‘story’ in a particularly thought-provoking way, especially in what concerns night aesthetics. By close reading these two plays within the framework of Diaspora and Critical Archival Studies, this article aims to address how arts play a role in creating imaginary records of Cape Verdean migration history and contribute towards a more inclusive recognition of Rotterdam’s multicultural social texture and its nightlife.

    • Scars in the soil

      https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00060_1

      The city of Lisbon has scar tissue, a reminder of pain and trauma that administrations often gloss over as urbanization. The demolition of dozens of neighbourhoods has been documented in cinema, both documentaries and feature-length conventional films. Even more stark is the footage from grassroots archivists, who have accompanied since the beginning the raw despair of displacement, an internal uprooting after a generation or more of Luso-African migrants making place in the Lisbon area, especially in the adjacent municipality of Amadora. Over a decade ago, I followed a few of the displaced former residents of Fontaínhas to Casal da Boba, a social neighbourhood, to inquire and record memories about such scars. In late 2020, I reconnected with these interlocutors and discovered more storytellers who have a curious relationship with the former improvised neighbourhood of Bairro de Santo Filomena. This article is a piece of ethnographic fiction based on those experiences.

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