Abstract
This book is about the city’s in-between spaces, exploring the nexus of gender, migration, and urbanization in the contemporary African context. It seeks to understand how women from the rest of the African continent experience migration to Johannesburg in postapartheid South Africa by interrogating their subjective interpretations of their lives, suspended between a past “back home” and a future elsewhere. These experiences are set against the background of changing sociopolitical and economic contexts in their own countries, South Africa’s democratization, and growing postapartheid nationalist discourses. By investigating the ways in which cross-border women negotiate, navigate, and shape the multiple sociocultural and economic spaces they encounter in Johannesburg, their lives expand our understanding of mobility and how it impacts the sociopolitical and spatial structures of the city. Women’s journeys to Johannesburg, notions of home and belonging, economic activities, self-representations, and everyday practices reconfigure urban space and, in doing so, transform our understanding of the nature of urban regulation, state power, and modes of belonging in the city. Through their lives in the margins, this book holds open the space in the city’s interstices long enough to understand the relationships that constitute it.
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Notes
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© 2013 Caroline Wanjiku Kihato
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Kihato, C.W. (2013). Conclusion: Ways of Seeing—Migrant Women in the Liminal City. In: Migrant Women of Johannesburg. Africa Connects. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299970_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299970_6
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