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Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction

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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.

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.