Adventures in Deportation: Malian Migrant Narratives and Social Transformation

What do we learn by looking at migration policy, international development, and humanitarian politics from the mobile perspective of migrants instead of from viewpoints that presume fixity, such as international NGOs and state-run development schemes? This paper examines these projects as they enter into narratives of Malians who venture abroad for work and commerce. Unlike the nation-state definition of immigration, they define what they call their “adventure” through pathways within Africa and a future-oriented temporality, not the leaving of one bounded entity and the entrance into another. By examining the migration trajectories and political engagement of deportee rights activists in Bamako, I examine how deportees reformulate political and social belonging through their experience of migration. I use the lens of the adventure to challenge typologies and oppositions of migration studies (e.g. success versus failure, uprooted versus rooted, assimilated versus marginal, Europe versus Africa, modernity versus tradition). I argue that these adventure stories interpolate the listener to imagine an alternate future both for one’s own trajectory and for Malian political and social boundaries more broadly. Taken together, the narratives offer a counterpoint to ethnicity politics based on territorial rootedness. Instead, they weave migrant narratives of mobility as part of a larger attempt to redefine the grounds for a belonging through movement instead of fixedness, and through circulation within West and Central Africa as it relates to European border regimes.