Migration History

"African Migration in Childhood: Individual trajectories caught between local and global institutions.

While African children are massively involved in migration, they remain occluded in grey as well as scholarly literature. Based on a critical review of the literature, this article explores the reasons for this situation by examining the common themes at the heart of the historical construction of the African child paradigm. Despite the common confusion between “children” and “youth”, the domination of the male labor migratory model or the oscillation between vulnerability and agency, the complexity, diversity and specificity of these migrating children and their trajectories cannot be ignored. The articulation between individual trajectories and institutions requires that the notion of “voice” be truly examined in the case of these specific actors.

Keywords: migration ; children ; youth ; agency ; local and global institutions, individual trajectories.

Les migrations africaines dans l’enfance, des parcours individuels entre institutions locales et institutions globales

Bien que concernés massivement par la migration, les enfants africains sont encore peu visibles dans la littérature tant grise que scientifique. A partir d’une revue critique de la littérature, cet article explore les raisons de cet état de fait en suivant le fil rouge de la construction historique du paradigme de l’enfant africain. Qu’il s’agisse de la confusion entre enfants et jeunes, de la domination du modèle migratoire masculin de travail ou encore de l’oscillation entre vulnérabilité et agency, la complexité, la diversité et la spécificité des enfants migrants et de leur parcours ne peuvent plus être ignorées. L’articulation entre parcours individuels et institutions mérite que la notion de « voix » soit réellement interrogée pour ces acteurs particuliers.

Mots-clefs : migration ; enfants ; jeunes ; agency ; institutions locales et globales ; parcours individuels

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"Centré sur la région de Kayes au Mali, l'ouvrage de Marie Rodet s'attache à analyser les formes de mobilité féminine au sein du pays et vers le Sénégal à l'époque coloniale (1900-1946). En élargissant le concept de migration, l'ouvrage met en évidence que les migrations féminines dans la région de Kayes ont été nombreuses, et ce dès les débuts de la colonisation.
Ce livre montre en particulier que les femmes esclaves étaient majoritaires dans les mouvements migratoires que connaît la région au début du XXème siècle, qu'elles furent les premières migrantes dans la ville de Kayes.
A partir d'une étude précise de sources coloniales a priori peu loquaces mais ingénieusement confrontées à des enquêtes de terrain, Marie Rodet resitue donc ici l'histoire des migrations de la région de Kayes à l'époque coloniale dans une dynamique de recherche genrée. Cet ouvrage constitue un outil essentiel pour repenser la question des migrations féminines en Afrique et déconstruire le discours androcentrique ambiant sur les migrations."

"This article seeks to shift the frame of analysis within which discussions of Indian indentured migration take place. It argues that colonial discourses and practices of indenture are best understood not with regard to the common historiographical framework of whether it was ‘a new system of slavery’, but in the context of colonial innovations in incarceration and confinement. The article shows how Indian experiences of and knowledge about transportation overseas to penal settlements informed in important ways both their own understandings and representations of migration and the colonial practices associated with the recruitment of indentured labour. In detailing the connections between two supposedly different labour regimes, it thus brings a further layer of complexity to debates around their supposed distinctions.

FULL TEXT .PDF available via link below to the Leicester Research Archives (scroll down to bottom of the page for link to .pdf)."

This article analyses the position of labour migrants from Russia in East Prussia in the end of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th century. The author considers legal and economic assistance provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire to its citizens on the basis of recently discovered reports of Russian consuls in Königsberg.

The repopulating process that took place in the Kingdom of Granada after the Castilian conquest, at the end of the 15th century, saw the arrival of new settlers from abroad, including the Crown of Aragon, the Catalan nation in our documents. Although their presence was not significant in the overall process, it is however interesting to examine with care their settlement pattern, which is different from other foreign nations' pattern, mainly the members of the Italian merchant republics. Thus, we analyze the origin of these Catalan settlers and their distribution throughout the Kingdom of Granada, looking for the ultimate reasons. We also have the opportunity to examine the percentage of permanence as well as the socioeconomic background, when the sources allow it

In October 1875 the Canadian government reserved a tract of land along the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg for the exclusive use of Icelandic immigrants. This was part of a larger policy of reserving land for colonization projects involving European immigrants with a common ethno-religious background. The purpose of this policy was to promote the rapid resettlement and agricultural development of Aboriginal territory in the Canadian Northwest. The case of the Icelandic reserve, or Nýja Ísland (New Iceland), provides a revealing window into this policy, and the ways in which it intersected with the larger processes of colonization in the region during the late nineteenth century. The central problem that this study addresses is the uneasy fit between "colonization reserves" such as New Iceland and the political, economic and cultural logic of nineteenth-century liberalism. Earlier studies have interpreted group settlements as either aberrations from the "normal" pattern of pioneer individualism or communitarian alternatives to it. This study, by contrast, argues that colonization reserves were part of a spatial regime that reflected liberal categories of difference that were integral to the extension of a new liberal colonial order in the region. Using official documents, immigrant letters and contemporary newspapers, this study examines the Icelandic colonists’ relationship to the Aboriginal people they displaced, to other settler groups, and to the Canadian state. It draws out the tensions between the designs and perceptions of government officials in Ottawa and Winnipeg, the administrative machinery of the state, and the lives and strategies of people attempting to navigate shifting positions within colonial hierarchies of race and culture

""Ces essais s'efforcent de mettre en miroir deux vagues migratoires aux Etats-Unis, aux tournants des XXe et XXIe siècle. Ils mettent en perspective une histoire souvent controversée et permettent d'appréhender les débats actuels sur l'immigration. Sont abordées : les mobilisations politiques et syndicales des Italiens d'hier, des Hispaniques d'aujourd'hui ; l'insertion de certains groupes dans la globalisation ; l'ombre portée des idéologies nativistes sur les politiques d'immigration.

Auteurs: Aurélie Puybonnieux, Steve Brier, Nando Fasce, Fraser Ottanelli, Dirk Hoerder, Mathieu Bonzom, James Cohen, Sandrine Baudry, Hélène Christol, Pilar Gonzalez, Fanny Jedlicki, Isabelle Vagnoux, Aurélie Godet, Nick Salvatore, Donna Kesselman.""