Telling Tales of Missing Men
Telling Tales of Missing Men
This chapter focuses on the most tragic of Dakar’s bottlenecked flows: in 2006 alone, tens of thousands of clandestine migrants, the vast majority of whom were men, departed from West Africa’s shores aboard rickety fishing boats called pirogues, headed for “Europe”—despite the well-known fact that nearly all of these voyages ended in repatriation or death. Why participate in a voyage—one that required a steep financial investment—that was almost certain to end in failure and loss? At first glance, these doomed voyages may appear to be evidence of the state’s or neoliberalism’s failure or, seen from another perspective, as the epitome of entrepreneurial risk taking and casino capitalism. Taking a different approach, this chapter uses the concept of embouteillage to analyze the vibrant if volatile economies, identities, and programs that pirogue voyages produce. It pays specific attention to the lively rumor and storytelling conventions that publicly criticized and celebrated clandestine migration. These everyday efforts to come to terms with and manage “crisis,” this chapter argues, in fact query the utility of that term in the first place, drawing attention instead to the modes of self- and state-making made possible by these failed voyages.
Keywords: clandestine migration, failure, entrepreneurialism, risk, crisis, rumor, storytelling, state, West Africa
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
