‘They did not allow me to enter the place I was heading to’: being ‘stuck-in-place’ and transit emplacement in Nigerian migrations to China

Abstract

How do African migrants become stuck-in-place and experience stuckedness in China? This article interrogates the concepts of stuckedness and social navigation to examine what it means to be ‘stuck-in-place’ using the stories of four Nigerians—a woman and three men—in Guangzhou City. Two modes of stuckedness were observed: ‘truncational stuckedness’ and ‘identity stuckedness’. While the former resulted from being spatially stuck in Guangzhou on their way to South Korea and Hong Kong, the latter was a product of identity appropriation, where a migrant uses the passport of another country. Despite the constraint of stuckedness and the precarity that those without valid immigration papers faced, migrants managed to reinterpret their situations and stayed put while being opened to emplacement in Guangzhou—albeit a transitory kind. In calibrating their practice of ‘moving on’ in Guangzhou, however, economic integration, the local and transnational networks of migrants, hope, prolonging one’s stay and management of micro-mobilities of the everyday were deployed singly or in combination with one another. The article advances debates in China-African relations and Afro-mobilities in East Asia while also contributing to discourses on migrant trajectories, stuckedness, and mobilities studies.