We are all Africans here: Race, mobilities and West Africans in Europe Kristín Loftsdóttir. Berghahn Books, 2021. pp. 192.
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| Author | Nina Sahraoui |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13127 |
404 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imigInternational Migration. 2023;61:404–406.
‘We are all Africans Here’ is not simply an ethnography of West African migrants' lives in Europe. The book does
explore Nigerien men's experiences in Italy and in Belgium, but it does so in a unique manner thanks to the author's
long-term engagement with Nigerien respondents and the time spent—a few decades earlier—living in Niger. With
this book, Kristín Loftsdóttir makes an immensely valuable intervention within migration studies towards the histori-
cization of West African migration to Europe and the attached recognition of how racist hierarchies underpin the
social and ideological production of ‘Europe’. Throughout the book, the author, of Icelandic origin, adopts a reflexive
stance about her positionality, unpacking the power relations that shape her respondents' and her own privileged
experiences of life and mobility across European urban settings. For this purpose, the book weaves together chapters
about Nigerien migrants' life experiences with spatial analyses of how Europe's colonial history extends into contem-
porary understanding of Europeanness. Kristín Loftsdóttir thus offers readers a critical examination of who is seen
as belonging within postcolonial European spaces (Ponzanesi & Blaagaard, 2011) and who is constantly relegated to
the position of an unassimilable ‘Other’ through the celebration of privileged mobilities and the criminalization of
racialized mobilities.
The book opens with the author's family trip to an Italian theme park, depicted as a privileged space of whiteness
inaccessible to West African migrants, to introduce the book's focus on the racialized hierarchies that make ‘Europe’.
The first chapter outlines the conceptual framing, with institutional racism underpinning the ‘inequality in who quali-
fies as cosmopolitan’ (p. 18). The chapter weaves in these theoretical considerations with the stories of Nigerien men
who saw others die in the sea and faced living in the street in Italy. The author then engages with issues of border
securitization by recounting personal anecdotes of life at the US-Mexico border, showing how these border practices
enact racialized hierarchies of humanity. Thinking about what life in a divided Europe means, the chapter ends with
the statement ‘they are drowning in the same water we are playing in’ (p. 30).
The second chapter explores discourses around racialized mobilities in Europe in the past two decades, briefly
reviewing discussions around multiculturalism and representations of the so-called refugee crisis. Chapter 3 moves
on to depict the daily lives of Nigerien men in Brussels, emphasizing that, for many, life in Europe became a necessity
rather than a choice after the collapse of the Libyan regime in which France played a major political and military role.
Chapter 4 elaborates on the concept briefly introduced previously of the ‘front stage’ and ‘backstage’ to account for
the divided spaces that different types of migrants occupy in the Belgian capital, with Nigerien migrants living in the
backstage yet often working in the front stage where they remain invisible to tourists and to the ‘expatriates’ who
work in EU-related public and private institutions. Chapter 5 explores the position of Muslims in Europe pointing to
BOOK REVIEW
DOI: 10.1111/imig.13127
Received: 8 February 2023 Accepted: 15 February 2023
We are all Africans here: Race, mobilities and West
Africans in Europe
Kristín Loftsdóttir. Berghahn Books, 2021. pp. 192.
Nina Sahraoui
GTM-CRESPPA, CNRS, Paris, France
Email: nina.sahraoui@cnrs.fr
© 2023 International Organization for Migration.
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