Performing conviviality in diverse and precarious urban spaces: everyday experiences of Nigerian migrant entrepreneurs in Downtown, Harare

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article explores how the notions of place, belonging, home and identities are relationally constructed through convivial encounters in diverse and precarious spaces. Drawing on “convivial” ethnographic study among Nigerian migrant entrepreneurs in Downtown, Harare, the article shows that while anti-immigrant rhetoric and nationalistic attitudes characterize migrants’ quotidian lives, both migrants and Zimbabwean nationals often accommodate these tensions, and identify mutual commonalities based on relational ontologies of “togetherness”. Thus, convivial encounters act to reposition Downtown from being an exclusionary space to a more accommodating space where difference is routine, and regularly, often amicably negotiated in prosaic social interactions. By exploring these dynamics, the article has contributed to scholarship on urban research that develops concepts such as “light-touch relations”, “niceness” or “kindness”, to articulate how diversity and exclusion can be breached. The article also challenges the Eurocentric bias that has dominated debates on conviviality from its inception.