Shifting Contexts
Featured Refugees, Mini-migrations and the Centering of the Global South
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Crystal Payne
Using Caroline McKenzie’s 2020 novel One Year of Ugly, which attempts to depict the real issues Venezuelan immigrants face in Trinidad, this paper discusses the subversion of migration narratives to reflect movements within the global South, a shift from migration narratives which explore movements across vast distances toward the global North and centers Western metropoles as the only viable destinations. I examine how such a marked change is necessary for attempts to center the ‘peripheral’ cities of the global South. MacKenzie complicates such narratives in her willingness to position South-South migration as a modern foil to the aging ideology of South to North migration as the only worthwhile movement for literary exploration and civic investigation. Port-of-Spain, the capital city of Trinidad, and only seven and a half miles from the protagonist’s homeland of Venezuela, becomes a center in its own right, offering possibilities of a better life even as it creates core problems for McKenzie’s characters. Consequently, by abnegating the idea of the city to which migrants flee as wholly a city of hope, MacKenzie’s novel proves that these cities of perceived havens are spaces of duality (hope and horror; destination and danger; relative opulence and oppression) wherein the characters find themselves becoming simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible. This paper ultimately examines the implications of migration narratives where destinations for migration/asylum are a stone throw away from one’s home and questions the magnitude of positioning postcolonial cities of the global south as centers and valuable sites for migration.
Featured The Contribution of the Informal Sector in the Socioeconomic and Cultural Structure of Urban Households: An Empirical Investigation of Dakar Street Vendors View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fafa Sene, Houleymata Dite Dianga Ba Ndongo
In developed countries, policy makers consider informal activities as limited in scope and criminal in nature. Opposing this Western view, Keith Hart (1973) analyzes the informal sector in developing countries, as characterized by an easily-accessed self-employment, and a reliance on own resources in a family enterprise. In Senegal, street vendors contribute directly to the overall level of economic activity, and to the provision of goods and services. They are an integral part of the economy, and their elimination would reduce economic activities and increase poverty. However, there is no real enthusiasm from government authorities to handle the street business. The absence of a device capable of identifying all vendors is considered by authorities as loss earnings, because they wrongly believe vendors would manage to get away with tax. African societies need more of an anthropological approach in the way development patterns are adopted. In a conservative society like Senegal, it is the practices developed in households that shape politics and not the opposite. Therefore, the data collected in this study and within households, although not often considered in development programs, prove to be a solid hypothesis that could allow political authorities to respond, with clarity, to the demands of the populations. This study highlights the significant contribution of street vending in preserving cultural and societal values and in maintaining a substantive level of livelihood, as a social safety net, in urban households.
Playwriting, Performance, and Spectatorship Build Dialogue about Mental Health: A University in Egypt Works to Reduce the Stigma View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jillian Campana, Jonathan Harvey
Mental health issues are often stigmatized and open conversations about the topic in Egypt are few and far between. Having students write, perform and watch fictional accounts of mental health issues can help them to access and understand the subject and to develop healthy coping strategies for well-being. This paper examines a Theatre and Writing project at The American University in Cairo in which the community wrote, directed, and performed original plays about various mental health topics including grief, generalized depression and body image.
