Abstract
Abstract Liberia is a state built on a history of migration. From the transatlantic slave trade to its contemporary generation of transnational citizens, images of elsewhere have always informed this West African country’s local and national discussions of integration and exclusion. This paper shows how historical imaginations and representations of ‘here’ and ‘there’, of ‘suffering’ and ‘escape’, inform contemporary discourses of belonging in Liberia. I argue that the imagination of civilisation – kwii – and distinction plays an important role in the ways distance and mobility are perceived and articulated, both from a physical point of view and a moral-social point of view, at transnational and local levels. Rather than being merely tied to a national elite, the imagination of mobility is, I demonstrate, linked to an ethos of suffering articulated at all levels of society, informed by the experience of structural violence and crises over time.
Highlights
Le Liberia est un État dont l’histoire repose sur la migration
3.2 (Im)mobility During Moments of Crisis Having addressed the link between structural violence and the desire for distinction by considering the longue durée in both the transnational and local imagination,mobility has a generational component, not in the least for young people who were mobilised into the Liberian civil war (1989–2003)
I have used an indepth ethnographic approach to deconstruct the regimes of mobility that are, in today’s Liberia, being reproduced on the basis of a history of migration, and on the politics of betterment and advancement
Summary
Le Liberia est un État dont l’histoire repose sur la migration. De la traite transatlantique des esclaves à la génération actuelle constituée de citoyens transnationaux, des images de l’ailleurs ont toujours nourri, dans ce pays de l’Afrique de l’ ouest, les débats locaux et nationaux au sujet de l’intégration et de l’exclusion. I detail how this ethos of suffering informs contemporary subjectivity through (a) historical experiences of state formation in Liberia, including the role of the transatlantic slave trade and early colonisation, (b) practices and meaning of mobility in the fields of education, labour, trade, or localised areas like ‘town’ and ‘bush’, (c) and intersectional status categories recognised in Liberia, such as the distinction between kwii and country.
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