Asynchronous mobilities: hostility, hospitality, and possibilities of justice

ABSTRACT

Metrics of success, status, and justice are founded on subjective narratives of spatialized pasts and futures. This article considers three moralised space-times – chronotopes – and their relations to people’s mobility within and from sub-Saharan Africa. The first stems from European efforts to promote ‘development at home’ which places Africans on a separate temporal trajectory. By discursively positioning Africans outside global space and futures, Europe subsequently denies claims to European space or lives beyond African territory. Moreover, coding border crossing as deviant justifies an apparatus to return Africans to their space-time where they can achieve justice. The latter two chronotopes emerge dialogically among citizens and immigrants in South Africa’s ‘global city.’ Amidst Johannesburg’s polyrhythmicity, citizens position themselves in a chronotope of stalled transformation where justice comes by remedying deprivations inherited from an apartheid past. This rubs against international migrants operating in a mode of deferred distanciation: using the city to achieve rights and recognition in future elsewhere. These competing temporalities deny possibilities of a mutually shared definition of justice or spatial claim making. This article ultimately positions chronotopes as critical elements in migration infrastructures that shape movements, conditioning interactions, and foreclosing (or opening) possibilities for justice across or within space.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporality
• mobility
• Africa
• urbanism
• immigration
• infrastructure

Introduction

Global mobility produces heterogeneous and unpredictable temporalities across and within multiple scales (see Urry 2002). These are reflected in chronotopes, subjective constructions that define the appropriateness of individual and groups’ moral conduct in space-time (cf. Blommaert 2017; Bakhtin 2008 [1981]). Produced dialogically, they condition people’s relation to histories, futures, and sites real and imagined. They are the foundations for perceptions of success, status, and justice (see Macapagal 2017; Braun 2007). People subscribing to common chronotopes may find communal recognition across discontinuous geographic space (Hanchard 1999; Bhabha 1990). However, Competing chronotopes can schematically order, include, or alienate others and the self (Turner 2015; Jeffrey 2010; Laguerre 2003). Extending the ‘temporal turn’ (see, for example, Turner 2020; McNevin 2020; Lori 2019; Cohen 2018; Cooper and Pratten 2015), this article identifies chronotopes as critical elements of the infrastructures that shape movement, structure interactions, and foreclose (or enable) possibilities for justice across and within space.

This article considers three moralised space-times – chronotopes – and their relations to people’s mobility within and from sub-Saharan Africa. The first stems from European efforts to promote ‘responsible citizens’ who will ‘develop at home’ that place Africans on a separate temporal trajectory. By discursively positioning Africans outside global space and futures, Europe subsequently denies claims to European space or lives beyond African territory. Moreover, by coding border crossing as deviant, it justifies an elaborate apparatus to return Africans to their space-time where they can achieve justice.

The latter two chronotopes have emerged dialogically among citizens and immigrants in South Africa’s ‘global city’ (see Fu and Murray 2013). Amidst Johannesburg’s polyrhythmicity, citizens position themselves in a chronotope of stalled transformation where justice comes only by remedying deprivations inherited from an apartheid past. While Bhabha (1990) speaks of a kind of national ‘double time’ in which nations look back towards a mythical ‘golden age,’ South African’s look back to shared suffering as the basis for future justice. These were dark but more certain times of oppression and dispossession.

South Africans’ restorative chronotope grates against international migrants’ deferred distanciation where their urban existence is oriented to achieving rights and recognition in future elsewheres. By historiographically denying foreigners access to a history of apartheid deprivations, South Africans effectively write them out of the ‘historico-mythic life of the nation’ and its future (see Johns 2016: 39; Edensor 2006:524; Mosselson 2010). These help shape and memorialise conflicts that frequently arise among these groups (see Chenzi 2020; Misago 2017). Moreover, such temporal incommensurability frustrates appeals to shared ethics of accommodation and justice.

Through its engagement with temporality and the precursors for Derridean justice, this paper complements Xiang and Lundquist’s Latourian treatment of ‘migration systems’ (see, for example, Meeus, van Heur, and Arnaut 2019; Van Hear et al. 2018). It moves beyond the material and institutional connections facilitating the movements of people and material objects, instead surfacing the socially constructed channels linking people with space-times and their occupants. These temporal infrastructures afford or inhibit recognition of ‘the other’ and the subjective sense of a common temporal trajectory necessary for practicing hospitality and justice. These potentially connect people across geographies, in archipelagos of belonging and membership. They can also divide those who are geographically proximate. The article ends by questioning whether in a world of heightened mobilities and migration fears, temporal infrastructures exist to enable accepting others in time-space claimed as one’s own.

Building on Derrida’s (1994: 27–28) assertion that hospitality is the foundation for all other forms of justice, I argue that justice can only be achieved – whatever form it takes – when individuals or groups wilfully (i.e. consciously and by choice) accept others within their chronotope (see, also Westmoreland 2008; Naas 2003). Chronotopic exclusion, including both self-alienation and othering, fragments infrastructures and inhibits possibilities for justice in space. Ultimately, competing chronotopes work against the institutionalisation of norms through shared memories and conceptions of collective futures (cf. Falk Moore 1978).

Reading justice across space and time

As it draws on illustrative examples from multiple sites and scales, this paper’s aims remain largely conceptual. Its explorations of migration infrastructures and justice rely on adapting Bakhtin’s (2008 [1981]: 250) analysis of chronotope from literary to socio-political analysis (see Çağlar 2018). Doing so draws attention to the epistemological and normative reflections regarding space and time exposed and reproduced through personal and public dialogue. While not overlooking material conditions it recognises that language shapes cognitive schema (cf. DiMaggio 1997). In this way, chronotopes delineate ‘specific times and places [that] placed conditions on who could act, how such actions would be normatively structured, and how they would be normatively perceived by others’ (Blommaert 2017: 96).

In positioning temporality as means of connection and exclusion, it follows Adam’s (1998: 202) call to explore the ‘tempo, timing, duration, sequence and rhythm; as the mutually implicating structures of time and politics.’ Few approaches are more suited to studying the socialities of human mobility which are inherently rooted in space-time compressions, temporal imagining, and waiting. When applied to questions of justice across or within space, such a perspective reveals chronological foundations for hospitality, solidarity, and alienation that might otherwise remain unseen.

My empirical illustrations derive from two sets of sources: one secondary, one primary. In describing forms of European chronotropic exclusion, I draw on an evolving body of scholarly, political, and public texts revealing intersections of spatial and temporal control within migration management. Where possible, I reference reports and policy positions promulgated by the European Union, the European Commission, European agencies (e.g. FRONTEX), or member states making reference to Europe or European values and beliefs. In supporting this analysis, I rely on news reports, press releases, and public debates. These include reports compiled by critics, African governments, and civil society north and south of the Mediterranean. Together these form a dense, sometimes confusing, and often contradictory archive. My task here is to identify the underlying ethos.

The discussions of urban temporalities and justice relies on fifteen years of research migration in urban Africa and, more specifically, thirteen oral histories collected and constructed as part of a larger book project, I Want to Go Home Forever (Landau and Pampalone 2018). These histories were generated over much of 2016 and 2017 by a team of researchers engaged in a loosely structured process intended to produce unexpected encounters and awkward, unsettling accounts. Conversations occurred in a variety of languages and at locations across Gauteng province. (Where translation into English was required, the interviewers did this.) The materials employed here are not interview transcripts, but assembled stories. These texts have been previously published without commentary in a form that exclusively employ the narrators’ words. Narrators reviewed the co-produced texts and gave their final approval.

Migration infrastructures and Derridean justice

In breaking from the migrant-centrism often informing scholarly accounts of geographic mobility, Xiang and Lindquist (2014:124) propose to explore ‘systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility.’ Their holism draws attention to multiple dimensions that stitch together various sub-fields within migration studies (e.g. migration law and policy; labour brokering; supply chains and markets; or the material and strategies of exclusion and incorporation). While heuristically appealing, they largely overlook the subjective orientations of migrants and the people with whom they interact. Despite mention of social networks, there is little emphasis on the sociality of networks or their connections to space, desire, or mobility (cf. Collins 2018; Turner 2015; Kathiravelu 2012).

Given the intersubjectivity underlying conceptions of justice, understanding it in mobile spaces and times means explicitly considering the diverse perceptions of multiple migrants and ‘hosts’ (see Thomaz 2021; Barzilai 2003; also, Clarke 2009). These include elements both spatial and temporal. While sticky, these subjective infrastructures are malleable; transformed through education, propaganda, museology, and other socialising mechanisms and socio-economic interactions (Levitt 2015; Mitchell 1991). At varied paces, these perennially generate and modify infrastructures of meaning, self-understanding, and relations to space, time, and the other (see Sibeon 1999; Lukes 1997; Latham 2000). Akin to law, policy, or contracts, these too limit and shape movement (cf. Lubkemann 2008).

This approaches rest on an established anthropological literature (e.g. Sorokin and Merton 1937; Geertz 1973; Turton et al. 1978) revitalised by contemporary interest in intersections of geography, temporality, and justice (see Baas and Lori 2019; Baas and Yeoh 2018; Cohen 2018; Robertson 2014). Much of this literature engages with chronological time as a governing practice. It examines, for example, how delays in issuing documents, allowing passage, or accumulating resources works to shape the lives of migrants and those around them. More recent scholarship emphasises the temporal disruptions associated with structural forces (e.g. economic precarity), violence (domestic, criminal, or military), or institutional incapacity (see Oldfield and Greyling 2015; also, Jeffrey 2010; Appadurai 2002; Bayart 2007; Mains 2007; Katz 2004; Siddiqi 2017; Corthouts 2016).

It is the literature on mobility and life course that interests me here. In particular, how relations to past and future orient people towards geography and potential occupants of specific spaces. As people find themselves unable to progress, they often experience a distinct sense of ‘stuckness’, grief, or disruption (see Jefferson, Turner, and Jensen 2019: 3; Turner 2020, 2015; Ramakrishnan 2014: 755). This may occur due to lost opportunities, shifting circumstances, or forms of enforced sedentariness (cf. Lubkemann 2007; Ferguson 1999; Polzer and Hammond 2008). Following McNevin (2020), this work situates multiple life courses in relation to subjective and inscribed social categories.

It is divergent chronotopes cum spatialized life courses that links temporality, injustice, and human mobility. In this regard, disrupted and competing temporalities operate in at least two ways. The first is more obvious. For many, perceived injustice stems from an inability to further an expected life course or the collective ‘progress’ of their ethnic, national, or religious group. Real or fictive obstacles to such progress (e.g. labour competition, colonialism, or other forms of violent or oppressive incursion or exclusion) then become the locus of animosity and opprobrium: demons blocking the road to subjective sanctuary and salvation (see Dean 2001; Pagels 1996). The anger this generates stems from frustrated desires and subjective righteousness that potentially feeds frustration, mobilisation, and violence (see Neuman 2018; Landau 2010). Such frustrations appear in my subsequent discussion of South African reactions to international migration.

The second link is more fundamental, if less evident. It stems from Derrida and his approach to ‘hospitality’: ethically informed and wilful accommodation of the other. The challenge comes from how asynchronous temporalities limit possibilities for hospitality. His approach turns on the proposition that ‘hosts’ must feel able to set the general parameters of welcome: the terms on which varied groups engage. Otherwise, in his words, outsiders are demanding ‘absolute’ or potentially unbounded hospitality which existentially threatens those previously claiming dominion (Derrida 2000: 25; Derrida 2003: 129; Derrida 1999a: 90). In other words, radical openness risks destroying the host’s mastery and the rules of engagement that enable hospitality. If this is so, then hospitality – and justice – become impossible without some restrictions and regulations that enable the sovereign decision to welcome and which are accepted as legitimate by all those to whom they apply (Derrida 2000:14).¹

It is this underlying premise that concerns us here: that hospitality and openness rely on values or norms accepted (if not embraced) across groups or individuals. Such tenets underlie Massey’s (2005: 71) optimistic ‘sphere of coexistence’ in which a multiplicity of trajectories, involving previously unrelated subjects and objects, people and things, become entangled. Their coexistence rests on basic rules of engagement delimiting space and allowing people to set the terms of engagement. This is imaginable in a neutral ‘nowheresville’ (Bauman 2002: Landau and Freemantle 2016), but in practice, such mutual recognition may require those claiming ‘host’ status to surrender a sense of ownership to the space they occupy. Hypothetically possible, it is also a recipe for conflict and resentment. Fragmented and differing temporalities further frustrate possibilities for hospitality. Where chronotopes do not overlap or allow some degree of spatio-temporal alignment, shared principles for engagement become elusive. Without this foundation for engagement, there is little chance of subjectively shared metrics or methods of justice.

Hospitality and justice across seas and cities

Temporally shaped mobility infrastructures work across multiple geographic scales. Precisely for this reason, Bulley (2015: 5) demands justice be seen as ‘a spatial, relational practice with affective dimensions; [for] this is what makes it a complex interplay of ethics and power relations.’ Within limited space it is impossible to explore such interplays fully. I instead offer two interrelated illustrations demonstrating how competing chronotopes structure mobility – attached as they are to coercion, imagination, and outcomes – and possibilities for hospitality.

I turn first to what I have taken to be the ‘chronotope of containment’ collaboratively authored between European and co-opted African political leaders in response to the 2015–2017 European ‘migrant crisis’ (see Andersson 2019). What began as a crude, coercive effort to exclude (see Kounalakis 2015) has given rise to what Kotef (2015:15) would term ‘a different mode of being’ that racially and spatially fragments futures. Within it, the uninvited arrival of Africans on European territory becomes inherently unnatural and unjust. More specifically, it codes all those arriving – or who might even consider a journey north – as existentially threatening to Europeans and themselves. By narratively constructing futures for Africans almost exclusively within Africa, their arrival is necessarily unwelcome and unnatural. It not only presents a resented demand for hospitality, but one Europe cannot offer without denuding its own humanity and that of their would-be African guests. Exclusion, in this schema, ceases to be racist or fearful, but is instead an act of protection. As Africans’ natural space-time is beyond Europe, returning them to or emplacing them within Africa allows them to flourish.

The conceptual realignment has given rise to ‘containment development’, a defensive assemblage of coercive controls, sociologies of knowledge, and education initiatives designed to normalise sedentarism by geographically localising Africans’ desires and imaginations. Under this emerging spatio-temporal epistemology, development success is disconnection in which Africans are removed from global imaginations and developmental time.

Although sedentarization strategies are not novel (see Andersson 2014; Bakewell 2008), gone now is the chronotope of modernity, entanglement, and hypermobility that infused World Bank and other celebrants linking global mobility and progress (see Ratha et al. 2018). While past chronotopes reinforced spatialised paternalism, they nonetheless placed Africans within global, potentially convergent, developmental trajectories. Their displacement from even this remedial position with a global telos reflects both a reterritorialization and retemporalization of the African development narrative. Once framed as a critical means of overcoming spatial inequality and promoting economic development, within the chronotope of containment development, movement reads as self-defeating delusion. In this vision, successful development is underscored by a concept of ‘aiutiamoli a casa loro’ (‘let’s help at home’) (Curzi 2016). Whereas Europeans officially associate security and progress with global mobility (they are the world’s most mobile continent (see UNDESA 2019)), they imagine African futures contained by continental boundaries (see Knoll and de Weijer 2016:18–19). For Africans at least, developmental progress has become sedentary.

One sees this in Europe’s ready replication of well-trodden narratives legitimising itself as the driver and reference point of progress, of what it means to be mature, rational and modern. By contrast, Africans are acted upon, unready to take responsibility for themselves. Indeed, their repeated disrespect of Europe’s dominion through unauthorised mobility demonstrates their recklessness, petulance, and immorality. Every overturned dingy or marooned desert convoy offers further evidence that Africans need instruction, reform, guidance, and role models. In this narrative, Africans are victims of themselves, threatening their own futures with mobility desires. As reported by a German delegation, ‘the model of western democracy, based on the politically mature individual who takes his or her own decisions independently on the basis of pragmatic preferences’ is culturally unsuitable for West African countries (Essam et al. 2019). And Africans are unsuited for countries founded on enlightenment principles. They must be guided into their future (Atkinson 2009), ones where they can flourish. Ones outside of Europe.

In institutionalising its fragmentary chronotope across space, the European Union relies heavily on varied forms of educational interventions. These involve narratives of plentiful opportunities at home (kickstarted by small European investments) available to Africans who abandon delusional dreams of distant lands. In a European-funded three day ‘business training’, Nigerian Osemene discourages young Nigerian returnees from attempting to migrate again. For this, he claims, they must ‘re-engineer ‘ their ‘old and destructive mindset ‘ to become ‘someone who has a future ‘ (Howden 2019). A European funded IOM Report mobilises the words of African migrants to discourage others. In it, a Gambian returnee states, ‘the advice I have for those who embark on the backway, is to not even try the journey. Because with the money you spend on the journey, if you invest the money in The Gambia, within three months, or within three or two years, you can become a millionaire. This is what I didn’t know’ (West and Africa 2019a).

Going further, the European Union and its partners have introduced a series of public awareness and education campaigns designed to reshape Africans attitudes towards mobility. Programmes in Ghanaian schools ask high schoolers to commit to staying at home and only consider migrating when they are mature, materially secure, and can legally do so (West and Africa 2019a). In the meantime, they must be content and build communities at home. A similar campaign in Cameroon encourages young Africans to embrace the motto that ‘mon avenir c’est ici’ – my future is here (West and Africa 2019b). In June 2019, Pastor and Human Rights Lawyer Simon Mbevi rhetorically asked Kenyans assembled at the ‘Fearless Summit’ in Athi River,² ‘What choices have you made … Have you run away?’ As they pondered, he followed his own prompt, ‘I submit to you, the divine instruction is we must make do with what we have.’ Although perhaps not sponsored by Europe, he amplifies and domesticates the chronotope. This form of spatial, racial moralising helps frame global desire as something for others, something unpatriotic and ungodly (see also Mayault 2017). If, as Bauman (2002) suggest, movement is intrinsic to contemporary global membership and political freedoms, discursive and coercive mechanisms designed to sedentarise Africans effectively excludes them from a legitimate space in global post-modernity. Isolating people from the right to move codes them as different kinds of humans. Temporally cleaving a population means creating a divide in which they literally cannot share space-time.

The question here is not whether the chronotope successfully subjectifies Africans, but whether it subjectifies Europeans. More precisely, is the narrative suitably authoritative to hospitality to the chancers, frauds, and threats coming from Africa? Indications are that Africans are being re-inscribed as a people whose future must be elsewhere. For Europeans, Africans exist in an alternative chronotope in which movement to Europe locates them out of place and out of time. Apart from high skilled elite who are excepted, it is impossible for Europe to welcome the African other. Mutual obligation or recognition within Europe ceases to be possible. Instead, the humanity of Africans and Europeans demands Africans stay put.

Temporalising urban mobility

Shifting scales, I turn now to one of Africa’s most dynamic, diverse, and mobile city regions. Johannesburg and its surrounds are an enormous ‘estuary,’ shaped by the meeting of people from all eleven of South Africa’s language groups, refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and temporary migrants from across Africa, China, and South Asia. Like natural estuaries, it is a space shaped by oscillating movements and exchanges in, out, and through space (see Landau 2018). Because the city was historically off-limits to the vast majority of its current population (Posel 1991 [1997]), it lacks the kind of embedded cultural norms, practices, or shared temporality that serve as foundations for hospitality. Instead, its polyrhythmicity, reflected in the narratives of those interviewed, hint at the almost infinite rhythms at work within the city as contests continue over the content and meaning of state and local citizenship in South Africa’s post-Apartheid era. Within this environment, appeals to national territory, time, and justice evoke forms of solidarity among some while categorically excluding others. To capture these tensions, I begin by summarising a South African chronotope which relies on overcoming apartheid’s injustices as a foundation for progress and hospitality.

Dislocated futures are most evident among newly urbanised ‘Black’³ South Africans. With few exceptions, these are people that faced decades-long exclusion from full socio-economic and political membership in the country’s urban centres (see Bonner and Nieftagodien 2008). For them, urban residence represents a stage in overcoming apartheid’s exclusions and deprivation. Their movements to and within the city, often accompanying extended periods of economic and physical insecurity, reflect both a step into a previously forbidden global space of privilege and a failure to realise the promises of the post-apartheid dispensation (see Goodman 2017). Many feel suspended in linear histories of deprivation and redemption in which the promised future remains beyond reach. This often manifests itself in aggrievement over the delivery of services or, more acutely, the course of justice (see Valverde 2014). In this case, justice takes on a multi-temporal dimension in which proximate violations (a felony, a bureaucratic concern) become metonyms infused with historical injustices arching over decades or even centuries.

Accessible to the majority of black South Africans who share histories of socio-spatial racism, this chronotope is nationally inclusive and radically exclusive. It is a discursive infrastructure binding groups and excluding others. In creating space for the country’s various ethno-linguistic and religious groups, it draws boundaries around the deserving citizenry and excludes those who do not share their penurious past. A delayed sense of the promised transformation infuses almost all of the South African accounts.

Nowhere is this more acute than in the story of Nombuyiselo Ntlane, a long time Johannesburg resident who worked throughout her youth to bring down apartheid. As with others, she often speaks allegorically about the conditions in which they live. Describing a night her house was robbed, she began:

You know those black, black winter nights, the kinds when you put your hand out and can’t even see your fingers? That’s how it was … I’d been calling the city for months complaining about the streetlight outside … it’s not safe for a street to not have a light. But in actual fact, things can take a long time to get fixed in Alex, things can take a long time to change … (Moleba 2018; 43).

In her case the police arrived, but this served only to heighten a sense of futility: ‘Two cops came back with me to the house and started asking me questions … They wrote all the answers in a tiny notebook … Then they were gone … Those cops never came back.’ (op cit). Others speak of frustrations in accessing housing or jobs, resources they felt entitled to when the ruling African National Congress (ANC) took power from the newly fallen apartheid government in 1994. It was under the new dispensation – scripted explicitly in the much-lauded 1996 national Constitution – that the denials associated with racism, economic exclusion, and violence would be remedied. Yet for those who were not politically or socially connected, lucky, or otherwise gifted, progress has stalled (see Sulla and Zikhali 2018). The murder rate may have fallen, but insecurity and fear nonetheless infuse people’s lives. Unemployment among the ‘black’ population is not only close to 40% (depending on how one counts) – a frustration on its own – but there appear few realistic possibilities of improvement for the next generation. This is troublesome for almost everyone, but leads to deep frustrations for those, men most acutely but also women, who bear the social responsibility of caring for themselves and families. The results are both anger at the present and a deep sense of loss. Not for any material goods or opportunities they once held, but at the possibilities that are now lost to cynicism and stagnation. For South Africans, their temporality of justice introduces what Valverde (2014) might call a ‘forensic gaze’: a constant look back, trying to right some wrong that was done so that a better future might be achieved.

Most important for current purposes is how narrators imbricate frustrations over lost futures with non-nationals’ presence. Echoing common sentiments, Ntombi Theys reflects that: ‘They made us feel like our human rights were meaningless you know? If the Constitution says a man must be given a dignified wage and then a foreigner comes and she he will do it for less than what does that right mean at all?’ (Brown 2018, 52). She continues:

Our people are frustrated because there was this better life they were promised and instead the government keeps letting in foreign people, letting them have the jobs and the houses that we have been waiting for … They’re taking the money they make and sending it back home, while meanwhile there are South Africans all around them who are starving, who can’t find a single job that will take them. It’s a burden for us. It’s not an easy thing. It’s just not (Brown 2018; 53-4).

In statements such as these, one finds present threats to justice along the grounds previously outlined. First, because migrants are blamed for a lack of progress. More importantly, it forecloses foreigners joining citizens in a shared future. As their mere presence threatens progress, justice in their presence becomes impossible. While some citizens remain open to outsiders, their incorporation demands migrants align with the South African chronotope in ways that abandon their own temporal and spatial trajectories.

As South Africans claim space and futures, the city’s immigrant population often operates within a chronotope of deferred distanciation. Moving to South Africa to overcome varied persecutions, poverty oxford, or personal stagnation, Gauteng reflects a gateway to respectability and opportunities unattainable in their communities of origin. Yet for almost all international migrants, Gauteng is only a station, not a permanent destination. Due to social and legal discrimination in South Africa or the desire for social recognition elsewhere, Gauteng becomes a site of accumulation for a deferred or distant life. For them, their everyday interactions with Gauteng and its people are shaped by these varied imaginations, visions of home, diasporas and other ‘multiple elsewheres’ (Mbembe 2004). This is more than translocalism or oscillation (see Bank, L.J 2011; Potts 2011; Portes 2007; Geschiere 2009; Cohen 1969). Oscillations continue, but this temporal strain reflects structural, institutional, and social formations that are far less stable due to uncertainties of employment, housing, and local hostility. Many migrants share the temporal and material uncertainties identified by Cwerner (2001), Robertson (2014), and others. These uncertainties limit the possibilities for solidarities or structured, overt resistance. Consequently, foreigners are often careful in forging or fragmenting relationships (see Landau 2018).

Rather than hunker down or find ways of aligning themselves with South Africans’ spatio-temporal trajectories, they author modes of being compatible with a future life to be lived elsewhere. These are perhaps best illustrated by contemporary African Pentecostalism. Such churches regularly generate communities founded on progress, individualism and an almost radical disdain for locals and the city they occupy. They allow parishioners to distance themselves from local connections and obligations (Landau and Freemantle 2016; Turner 2015; Simone 2009). They can incorporate citizens who are themselves willing to break from family and enter their denationalised space. Such chronotopes produce both longings and frustrations: an awareness of processes and possibilities elsewhere and a constant fear of being unable to achieve them.

For many, finding their way in and around Johannesburg, movement is subjectively connected to progress and forms of Deleuzian becoming through their interactions with space and time (cf. Biehl and Locke 2010). This begins close to home. Lucas Machel, a young man from Mozambique, remembers that, ‘When I got to grade eight, I had to move to Chibuto because there were no high schools in my village … There, things became different’ (Nkosi 2018: 59). Moving to Johannesburg is often a natural step, even if it is a big one. One that allows the possibility of escaping a temporal staticity elsewhere and the possibility of joining in South Africa’s progress. Take Azam Khan, for example, who described life just after graduating high school. ‘ … I wasn’t working. I stayed at home just hanging out with friends. Then I made friends with a guy who was visiting Pakistan from South Africa … He said it was a place I could start my life and make a bit of money. There were stories that this country had a bright future, so I thought also that maybe this would be helpful for me’ (Pophiwa 2018; 33). Machel, now with a child and girlfriend both living with his parents, too speaks of mobility as progress. ‘I was a burden to my parents then … I decided I should go to Johannesburg to hustle and see what I can come up with’ (Pophiwa 2018; 59). These patterns reflect Madsen’s (2004) earlier description of moving as a ‘rite of passage’ in which the city is a conduit to being recognised as an adult elsewhere.

Among the non-nationals interviewed, there were only a handful who had decided to embed themselves firmly in South Africa’s future. Most hoped to navigate spatial and temporal currents that could take them to greater prosperity and security while eluding South African authored socio-temporal constraints. They are instrumental, learning to distance themselves from entangled spatialized futures as they prepare for lives elsewhere or, at least, on their own terms.

The translocality embedded in many accounts is not surprising (see Potts 2011; Geschiere 2009), but it highlights the combination of translocal moral economies and local precarity generate distanciated deferral – a waiting for life elsewhere negotiated by distance from the city and its citizen-residents. For many, daily lives and interactions become categorised by necessity, while they remain subjectively outside a chronotope that aligns space and place. The exclusions people face from their own objectives and local hostilities means there are no means for them to become part of a black South African temporality awaiting transformation and justice. Over time, those who remain outside a spatially bound future, self-denigrate and alienate in preparation for a life and recognition in a potentially elusive elsewhere.

Many of the accounts reflected here suggest people living spatially proximate lives with only minimal sense of shared values or rules. This is indicative of life across many of Africa’s ‘urban estuaries’ and the churning spaces of many ‘Southern’ cities. Sometimes these settle in to a kind of pragmatic conviviality (see Landau and Freemantle 2016) but without possibilities of an inclusive, spatially bound justice. This is often easier in ‘no man’s lands’ where everyone consciously feels an outsider and makes no claims to hegemonic temporalities. While cities have ‘no internally produced, essential past’ (Massey 1992: 14), they may nonetheless come to have multiple temporalities which variably position residents in relations to historically informed futures. In Johannesburg, temporal-spatial infrastructures necessarily distance ‘the other’, generating fear of incorporation from both migrants and would-be hosts. For South Africans, accepting foreigners becomes a form of permanently denying or deferring one’s birth right. Even where South Africans are open to including immigrants, doing so binds new arrivals to a spatialized future at odds with their ambitions.

Comment on chronotopes as infrastructures of mobility and justice

Through its exploration of temporalities and mobilities at multiple scales, this paper adds important subjective and temporal dimensions to discussions of infrastructures of justice. These somewhat paradoxically include the inability to claim rights outside of scripted homelands (the containment chronotope), the limited desire to do so (temporal deferment), and the seeming inability to claim justice in the presence of others absent a hegemonic temporality.

By identifying shared temporality as a condition for hospitality, it also furthers debates about ‘integration’, solidarity, and justice for migrant and mobile populations. It builds on the Durkheimian recognition that, as Greenhouse (2014: 141) summarises, ‘social time might facilitate social coordination and the symbolic dimensions of government and political discourse, but its primary function is its symbolic power in relation to the idea of society itself.’ In this way, shared time – temporality in the ways used here – becomes as much a part of social infrastructure – as producer and product – as families, schools, networks, factories, or professional associations.

As von Benda-Beckmann, von Benda-Beckmann, and von Eckert (2009) argue, the construction and variabilities of social time underlie divergences in forms of legal discourse, conceptions of justice, and social norms. As dialogues among equals or across immense hierarchical chasms, chronotopes reflect the mental architectures of space-time that shape human mobility. These emerge by design – as is the case of the containment chronotope – or through street level action that comes to be historicised and spatialized in ways that have precedents, but are nonetheless unpredictable and contingent. Such decentring also exposes how human mobility may be a factor in injustices – real or perceived – among populations who might normally be considered hosts.

This is an era of evolving forms of mobility and increasingly complex and sophisticated strategies to govern movement. Whether in urban centres, oceans, borders, or transit zones, the article ultimately suggests the need to understand chronotopic divisions that lead to a polyrhythmic understanding of justice. It recognises that inter-subjectively understood justice – founded on a first principle of hospitality – requires mutual recognition rooted in shared space-time. Fragmented times resulting from conscious efforts to exclude or varied histories and priorities mean that even those with proximate geographies are often unable to develop the shared rules of engagement that allow for future recognition and co-existence.

Acknowledgments

This article was originally presented as part of the “Infrastructures of Injustice,’ Cambridge-Singapore-Princeton Network workshop series. I subsequently shared versions at Temple University Law School, the University of the Witwatersrand, and Oxford University. The paper is stronger for the feedback I received along the way. I am particularly grateful to Sandra Brunnegger, Sandra Bermann, Janie Chuang, Laavanya Kathiravelu, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Tamara Last for their direction. The work has undeniably been strengthened by ongoing discussions with Tendayi Achiume, Aysa Çağlar, Alexandra Delano, Pablo Dominguez, Noora Lori, Kathryn Mathers, Sherally Munshi, and Anne McNevin and multiple years of collaborative work with Iriann Freemantle, Jean Pierre Misago, and Tanya Pampalone. As much as I would like to blame them for my shortcomings, those are all on me.

Disclosure statement

The author of this article has no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest (such as honoraria; educational grants; participation in speakers’ bureaus; membership, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, or other equity interest; and expert testimony or patent-licensing arrangements), or non-financial interest (such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, knowledge or beliefs) in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the South African National Research Foundation.

Notes

1. Kant’s ethics of hospitality shares a similar approach to incorporating difference (see Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann 1997). Similar strains of thinking appear in the work of Habermas and others who argue, if only implicitly, that the social and political recognition of diverse peoples and positions demands a common language and set of values that can structure interactions and provide the frameworks through which differences and conflicts are negotiated.

2. According to their website, the fearless summit ‘is an annual gathering of church and marketplace leaders who are passionate about bringing godly change in every sector of society.’ https://fearlesssummit.org/ (accessed 16 November 2019).

3. This paper employs South Africa’s official racial categories – White, Black, Asian and Coloured – because of how they are socially and politically inscribed within South Africa. This is not to endorse these categories, but to reflect how these terms have been naturalised within the narratives of those the paper seeks to describe.