Race, Waiting and Bordering Practices of Young African Migrants

This study is about race, waiting and bordering practices of young African migrants in Turkey that receive little attention within the global South scholarship. The vast majority of the literature on migration from Africa has focused on Europe and overlooked African migration towards the global South. However, most African migrations are not directed towards Europe, but towards Africa, the Gulf and Turkey. Founded on seven years of ethnographic research from 2016 to 2023 with young African migrants in Istanbul and Izmir, where I documented their everyday lives, settlement practices, and responses and resistance to racism, waiting and criminalisation, the study answers the questions of how the intersections of migrant status, race, class, gender and religion shape the experiences of young African migrants in Turkey; how young African migrants position themselves within a range of locations where they face racial and class hierarchy, racism and discrimination and how solidarity among young African migrants is maintained to overcome racism, deportation and police violence. I argue that waiting is a racialised phenomenon and concomitantly when it intersects with migrant status, class, gender and religion, it makes some young Africans exploited more. It aims to provide a conceptual tool highlighting a need to focus on the intersection of race and migration in exploring the experiences of migrants in mobility. It also reflects on the intersection of race, class, and gender by examining how the complexities of their intersection impact young Africans’ mobility and immobility. It aims to contribute to the construction of ‘non-Western’ forms of knowledge in migration scholarship by showing that there is a need to focus on racialised forms of everyday experiences such as waiting, exploitation, oppression, racism, and inequalities in exploring young Africans’ experiences, and most importantly hierarchies among them that have emerged from different class backgrounds, gender and religious beliefs.