Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities

Abstract

This paper interrogates the structural conditions, macropolitics and governmentality of family ‘regroupement’ in France in an era of shifting immigration policies in Europe and the imaginative possibilities that Senegalese immigrants exercise to maintain family and kinship ties with those left behind. It argues that while the need to maintain ties from diasporic locations is mediated by policies, material and emotive transnational practices, the materiality of displacement as well as the state's politics of immigration render more elusive possibilities of maintaining family in situ. What tensions and creative strategies emerge? How is ‘home’, the primordial site of family structure, reimagined and reconstituted? Taking into account state's politics and immigrants’ entrapment within multiple spheres of power and their active agency as determinants, this paper uncovers how displacement gives rise to multiple ruptures while simultaneously motivating a search for active agency to reconstruct and reimagine kinship, family and conjugality across multiple temporalities and spatialities.

Keywords:

• family reunification
• governmentality of migration
• separation
• agency
• France
• Senegal

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Families on the Fault Lines: Re-Imagining Race, Kinship, & Care Conference, organized by the Center for Race & Gender, University of California Berkeley (28–30 April 2010). The author thanks Dr. Alisa Bierria and Prof. Juana Rodriguez for their initial comments, the Center for Race and Gender, the informants who enriched this paper with their life histories, and the reviewers for their insightful review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Tirailleurs sénégalais refers to West African soldiers who fought in the French colonial army, WWI and WWII.

2. The suburbs of Paris, for instance, Clichy-sous-Bois is a low income neighborhood, marked by its high-rise housing projects and large immigrant population. The banlieues in general are often depicted as hotbed of youth riots, social unrest and activism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marieme Soda Lo

MARIEME SODA LO is Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies and African Studies, New College, University of Toronto.

ADDRESS: Women and Gender Studies and African Studies, New College, University of Toronto, 40 Willcocks St, Toronto, ON M5S 1C6, Canada.Email: [email protected]