Affective Circuits

In recent decades, Africans have migrated to Europe in larger numbers than ever before; Africans are now a visible part of Europe s multiethnic landscape. The present volume brings together essays by an international group of social scientists which focus on economic and affective flows of goods, resources, and people, with careful attention to the regulatory forces of state and non-state (kin/friends/partners) actors. The aim is to integrate a scattered, but overlapping, set of literatures addressing care and intimacy in a variety of different ways among which are marriage migration, domestic labor, global care chains, romance travel, and moving for health resources. While any one paper may focus more on what the editors call affective circuits --the circulation of migrants, kin and goods--or on regulatory regimes, for example regulation of migration, labor, and material flows through state apparatuses, each addresses the complex intersections of the two dimensions of African migration to Europe. Each chapter focuses on the spaces between Africa and Europe and backs up arguments with ethnographic data and descriptions ranging across numerous different countries. This volume promises to become a benchmark in the burgeoning field of migration studies in anthropology. "