Circulating
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​Migrating, moving, transporting, trading, intersecting, crossing, sharing, bordering, queering

Railways, markets, borders, music halls, spiritual spaces, solidarities
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Circulating, whether enforced or intended, evokes a multiplicity of spaces, identities and capital flows. It points to spatial entanglements across vast geographies in the service of extractive (colonial) capitalism, and in the form of solidarities and practices of resistance. It speaks of the effort and ingenuity involved in undertaking a journey and the heightening of borders and controls that hinder and impede this movement. In this multiplicity, race is at times destabilised, reinforced and re-imagined. Containers, ports, borders and passports are associated with new practices of empire building, and colonial and neo-colonial violence acted out on racialised bodies. In circulating, the hardships and immense effort of journeys involving multiple displacements do not exclude collective affirmation and solidarity.

Film/ Fiction/ Visualisations
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Patel, Shailja. 2010. Migritude [Performance]. New York: Khaya Press. 

Diop Mambéty, Djibril. 1973. Touki Bouki [Film]. Senegal.

​Diop, Mati. 2013. Milles Soleils [Film]. Senegal/ France.

Chimurenga Chronic. 2018. “The African Imagination of a Borderless World.” [Mappings].

Core Texts

Chua, Charmaine. 2016. “The Container: Stacking, Packing and Moving the World.” The Funambulist: Object Politics. 6.

Ellis, Nadia. 2015. “New Orleans and Kingston: A Beginning, A Recurrence.” Journal of Popular Music Studies. 27:4, 387 – 407.

Gilroy, Paul. 1991. “Diaspora, Utopia and the Critique of Capitalism” There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 200 – 302.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2010. “Reclaiming Black Urbanism” City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movement at the Crossroads. New York: Routledge. 263 – 332.

More Reading

Freeman, Carla. 2001. “Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalisation.” Signs. 26:4, 1007 – 1037.

Garbin, David. “Marching for God in the Global City: Public Space, Religion and Diasporic Identities in a Transnational African Church.” Culture and Religion. 13:4, 425 – 447.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Gunaratnam, Yasmin. 2013. Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care. London: Bloomsbury Press.

Kihato, Caroline Wanjiku. 2013. Migrant Women of Johannesburg. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Matsipa, Mpho. 2017. “Woza! Sweetheart! On Braiding Epistemologies on Bree Street.” Thesis Eleven. 141:1, 31 – 48.

MacGaffey, Janet and Bazenguissa-Ganga, Remy. 2000. Congo - Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McKittrick, Katherine and Weheliye,  Alexander. 2017. “808s & Heartbreak.” Propter. 2:1, 13 – 42.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2016. “Rebellion/ Intention/ Groove.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism. 20, 79 – 91.

Niaah, Sonjah Stanley. 2004. “Making Space: Kingston’s Dancehall Culture and Its Philosophy of ‘Boundarylessness’”. African Identities. 2:2, 117 – 32.

Nutall, Sarah and Mbembe, Achille (eds.). 2008. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Durham: Duke University Press.

Salem, Sara. 2018. “On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: The Case of Angela Davis in Egypt.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 43:2, 245 – 267.


Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004.“People as Infrastructure.” Public Culture, 16, 407 – 429.
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Tayob, Huda. 2019. “Architecture-by-Migrants: The Porous Infrastructures of Bellville.” Anthropology Southern Africa. 42:1, 46 - 58.

Teriba, Adedoyin. 2012. “Using Notions of Beauty to Remember and Be Known in the Bight of Benin and Its Hinterland,” Pidgin Magazine. 11, 246 - 255.