Hold the Cloth That Absorbs Tears—Migration, Money, and Mutuality in African-Australian Relationships Roundtable on Global Woman

Abstract

Through analysis of a local configuration of race and gender in the global migration picture, this essay picks up on one of the important themes discussed in Global Woman: the challenges, complexities, struggles, and dilemmas of the “micro” West/non–West contact zone. Using data from my research into relationships between (black) African migrants and non-African Australian women, I explore the way my interlocutors (and I) are often, as Susan Cheever writes in her chapter in Global Woman, “strung out between the old ways and the new, between the demands of money and the demands of love.”