Abstract
The book Migrants, Thinkers, Storytellers: Negotiating Meaning and Making Life in Bloemfontein, South Africa, edited by Jonatan Kurzwelly and Luis Escobedo, is the result of a seemingly successful postdoctoral initiative at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. Its success is to have attracted a good mix of talented international scholars who could dedicate time to cooperate in researching and drafting this manuscript. It involves scholars from Latin America, Europe, and Africa with a sprinkling of Bloemfontein-based academics. The book finally edited by Jonatan Kurzwelly from Göttingen and Luis Escobedo from Peru (but now residing in Romania) is well crafted and well balanced.
It provides the reader with nine narrative accounts of “foreigners” who grapple with the sense of “reification” and “violent categorization” as “Others,” as the editors insist, in entering the social life of a post-apartheid city. The interviews and the book were put together at a time of serious xenophobic tendencies in the country. The storytellers—one from Poland, two from Romania, a Peruvian, a South Korean, an Argentine, three Zimbabweans, a Cameroonian, and an Ethiopian—tease out their agency in negotiating social space in the city. The fact that each more or less has a chapter devoted to her or his plight makes the book a user-friendly text for students and lecturers.
The editors and chapter authors make a series of theoretical and methodological claims: violent categorization (in a racially polarized society) makes sense and so does the insistence on migrant mobility and change or flux, and so does the focus on issues of “habitus” (and social and cultural capital). Narrativity and storytelling appear both as method and theory (and in some instances as therapeutic practice), yet how—that is, the processes of discursive construction and formation—are left to the reader’s imagination.
What would have helped would have been a chapter on Bloemfontein itself and the relative weight of its population groups (ideally, over time) to get a sense of how central or marginal the presence of foreign nationals is, instead of leaving it there for a reader to work out. Also, there is a melding of the categories of “foreignness”—migrants, immigrants and people of temporary passage have significant and well-studied differences, such as differing associational clusters and forms of combination. Without a refinement in the analysis to take care of that, one could also include here a non-Sotho speaking worker from KwaZulu-Natal and the ex-owner of the most popular football club, Bloemfontein Celtic, who was of Greek descent. Both would be “South Africans,” and both would be in fluid negotiations over belonging in Bloemfontein.