Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction [Paperback]

Kesha Fikes (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0822345129 | ISBN-13: 978-0822345121 | Publication Date: November 17, 2009

In Managing African Portugal, Kesha Fikes shows how the final integration of Portugal’s economic institutions into the European Union (EU) in the late 1990s changed everyday encounters between African migrants and Portuguese citizens. This economic transition is examined through transformations in ideologies of difference enacted in workspaces in Lisbon between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s. Fikes evaluates shifts in racial discourse and considers how both antiracism and racism instantiate proof of Portugal’s European “conversion” and modernization.

The ethnographic focus is a former undocumented fish market that at one time employed both Portuguese and Cape Verdean women. Both groups eventually sought work in low-wage professions as maids, nannies, and restaurant-kitchen help. The visibility of poor Portuguese women as domestics was thought to undermine the appearance of Portuguese modernity; by contrast, the association of poor African women with domestic work confirmed it. Fikes argues that we can better understand how Portugal interpreted its economic absorption into the EU by attending to the different directions in which working-poor Portuguese and Cape Verdean women were routed in the mid-1990s and by observing the character of the new work relationships that developed among them. In Managing African Portugal, Fikes pushes for a study of migrant phenomena that considers not only how the enactment of citizenship by the citizen manages the migrant, but also how citizens are simultaneously governed through their uptake and assumption of new EU citizen roles.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Fikes convincingly links new regulation enforcement to the emergence of novel notions and practices of citizenship. Her focus on citizenship governmentality enables a fruitful articulation between a macro-perspective
(on state legislation and economic reform) and the micro-level approach to individual motives and practices cherished by anthropologists. Managing African Portugal is an interesting. . . exploration of the social consequences of modern European integration on ‘race’ ideologies and relations.” - Ana Mourão, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Association

“[ A] brilliantly written book. . . . This is an important book that finally puts Portugal on the map of an English readership interested in questions of modernity, race, citizenship and nationalism.” - Bernd Reiter, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“Fikes’ book is a thoughtful assessment of how colonial legacies impact contemporary social relations in an EU context and is a poignant critique of how government-sponsored ‘multiculturalist’ programs can increase the marginality of the people they purport to help.” - Samuel Weeks, Etnografica

“Managing African Portugal is a well-developed ethnographic account of migrant experiences in Portugal. Kesha Fikes’ political economic perspective brings to light the performative interactions involved in the fashioning and refashioning of citizens and migrants alike. . . . Fikes nuanced discussion of gender, race, transnational migration, and citizenship helps demonstrate the value of ethnography.” - Brandon D. Lundy and Jessica Lopes, African Studies Quarterly

“Managing African Portugal is a moving ethnography of the fraught but persistent lives of Cape Verdean peixeiras (fishmongers) caught between the cultural logics of citizenship, remittances, and migrant labor. But it is also a searing account of how state-organized anti-racist campaigns, meant to free citizens like the peixeiras from racial violence, can be one of the means of locking them into new forms of class violence.”—Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality

“Managing African Portugal is a timely and invaluable contribution to the study of African migrants in Europe. Kesha D. Fikes offers a thoughtful examination of how colonialism’s legacies inform the social politics of a European nation-state now significantly embedded within the contours of the European Union. In so doing, she illuminates interpretations of race as historically constituted effects of different political regimes and policies.”—Paulla A. Ebron, author of Performing Africa

From the Publisher

"Managing African Portugal is a timely, invaluable contribution to the study of African migrants in Europe. Kesha D. Fikes offers a thoughtful examination of how colonialism's legacies inform the social politics of a European nation-state now significantly embedded within the contours of the European Union. In so doing, she illuminates interpretations of race as historically constituted effects of different political regimes and policies."--Paulla A. Ebron, author of Performing Africa

"Managing African Portugal is a moving ethnography of the fraught but persistent lives of Cape Verdean peixeiras (fishmongers) caught between the cultural logics of citizenship, remittances, and migrant labor. But it is also a searing account of how state organized anti-racist campaigns, meant to free citizens like the peixeiras from racial violence, can be one of the means of locking them into new forms of class violence."--Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (November 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822345129
• ISBN-13: 978-0822345121
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,587,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > History > Africa > Cape Verde

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Value of Ethnography, January 30, 2011

By 

Anthromaniac "To The Rescue" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction (Paperback)

This is an important scholarly contribution, one of the best new books on globalization, race/racism and "the neoliberalist dispensation" (as some have labeled it) to come out of anthropology (or any other social science discipline) in quite some time. Many scholars "theorize" globalization, but too often these offerings seem to serve as little more than overly abstract claims about global capital with somewhat weaker degrees of direct ethnographic engagement with its impact on local lives (rhetorical flourishes that are sometimes not rigorously bolstered by substantive methodological frameworks). In many respects, this reminds me of the difference between "the Black Atlantic" as a mere metaphor (in sometimes trite academic theories of Diaspora) vs. more substantive and grounded examinations of the cross-fertilizing links (historically, culturally, materially, and symbolically) between, say, Brazilians and Yoruba practitioners in West Africa (J. Lorand Matory's concrete and provocative research), or between African-Americans in South Carolina and Orisha worshippers in Cuba or Ghana (Kamari Clarke's powerful project). Like Matory and Clarke, Fikes carefully operationalizes neoliberalism and globalization, profferings specific linkages to questions of race and nation, migration and citizenship. It is a careful rendering of the policed borders between socially recognized citizens and erstwhile foreigners, between the poor and the wealthy, between the irremediably African and the modernizingly European.

Kesha Fikes wants to bring a decidedly anthropological sensibility to the controversial discussion of what racism looks and feels like in contemporary Portuguese society (how it is challenged, denied, and/or reproduced). This is an ambitious and important project, and it demands a strong academic footing in several intellectual domains at once. For instance, even though Fikes pitches much of her ethnographic tent at the level of microsocial/dyadic exchanges between individuals forced to negotiate Portugal's complex investments in racialized logics of belonging (at places such as the now-defunct Docapesca, a former fish market in Lisbon), she does a compelling job casting such small-scale interactions within a more expansive framework that examines Portugal's place in the European Union as partially constitutive/determinative of the structured boundaries within which such agents operate. Race, gender, status, and occupation all congeal into a dense landscape that is only explicable, she argues, with requisite knowledge of Portugal's complicated relationship to a changing Europe.

This project, however, isn't just an important anthropological gesture within European Studies. Fikes demonstrates the undeniable extent to which debates about the absence or presence of racism in Portugal's former colonies demand concomitant critical attention on the part of any serious ethnographer working in urban Portugal. Her work is also informed by a genuine appreciation of Lusophone anthropological literature on race/racism in the New World and a related recognition of on-going, cross-fertilizing links between Europe and South America. She combines several fault-lines of investigation compellingly, meshing theoretical sophistication with ethnographic substance. It is a tour de force, and a stellar example of what anthropology can still add to important contemporary scholarly and popular debates.

-John L. Jackson, Jr.

5.0 out of 5 stars Managing African Portugal, January 25, 2011

By 

Andrea M. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction (Paperback)

What is so original and imaginative about Managing African Portugal is that it captures the complex dynamics of citizenship and migrant-making under one analytic frame. Citizens and migrants are, according to Kesha Fikes, always locked into an intimate, awkward embrace - an embrace that paradoxically allows for the often violent distancing of one from the other. While the migrant serves as a catalyst for Portugal's "modernity" as well as Portuguese "whiteness" and "middle-classness", the emergent category of the Portuguese "European" fixes and traps the increasingly racialized and classed bodies and practices of migrants. Yet this book is more than a story about "marginal" Europe and its racisms in an age of political correctness. It is, more broadly, a story about citizenship as something that must be achieved on an every-day basis, and as something that comes to light through both banal everyday encounters with Europe's Others as well as through the violence of the police. It is thus also a story about the state, whose differentially violent operations orchestrate distinctions between newly emergent categories of people, making them legible to each other. In Fikes's narrative, the migrant and the citizen emerge not as stable categories, but as positionings within a long, complex, and ever-changing relationship mediated by the purportedly anti-racist state - the result of which has been the inscription and stabilization of difference along racial, classed, and spatial axes. This is, in sum, an intensely thoughtful book that is theoretically dense and yet accessible, ethnographically moving and thus also extremely teachable. I highly recommend it to those interested in reading and teaching about citizenship, migrancy, racism and the state in Europe and beyond.