Preliminary Programme

The migration of workers to post-war Europe has been divided into several distinct temporal phases. Beginning with intra-European migration and colonial labour migration in the immediate post-war period, the current situation is now characterised by European Union governments’ attempts to restrict the ‘acceleration’ of migration in a global era. Labour migration into Italy began in the late 1960s but it was only in the mid 1980s that immigration came to prominence as a political and social issue, as numbers began to rise. Many new chains of migration have been initiated from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, contributing to extensive diversity within Italy in terms of ethnic groups, regional settlement and racialised and gendered employment opportunities. At the institutional level, therea re formal routes of entry into Italy for migrant workers. However, the undocumented sphere and the informal economy are also buoyant and together may constitute a growing feature of contemporary migrations to Europe.

This paper will focus on the migration of Ghanaian workers to Italy. It will be argued that Ghanaian migrants in Italy are emblematic of the new type of migration currently taking place in Europe. Ghanaians have in fact been identified as one of the important new diasporas of the late 20th /early 21st century with diasporic communities present in North America, Canada and a wide range of European countries. This paper will focus on their presence in the Veneto, in the North-East of Italy. The Veneto is characterisesd by the presenece of small and medium size enterprises and its ‘industrial districts’ are internationally competititve in terms of product quality and innovation. Within Italy, the largest community of Ghanaians reside in the Veneto region, representing the sixth largest ethic minority group in the area. Moreover, unlike many other migrant groups in Italy, male and female migrants are almost equally represented amongst Ghanaians, allowing the significance of gender to be analyzed in relation to this group. The paper will be based on primary qualitative research conducted with Ghanaians. It will focus on the migratory trajectories of Ghanaian migrant workers to and within Italy and it will also discuss the nature of their employment in the ‘industrialised countryside’ of Italy. (Show less)

Out migration has been a feature of life in the post colonial Caribbean since the end of slavery. Most commonly this was temporary. Many young people would expect to spend a period of time, typically five years, working abroad. This was viewed as a positive life experience enhancing status and economic resources. However post second world war, alongside this pattern, people began to move to the United States and Canada as well as the United Kingdom on a longer term basis. Intentions were not always clear, but for many people the move proved to be permanent. With the ending of the post war economic boom, during the 1990s, there has been some evidence of a new pattern of return migration. This paper will examine the nature and extent of this movement. Questions will be raised about the causes and significance of this 'return migration'. (Show less)

Today about 35000 immigrants from the West African country of Mali live in France. Together with their French-born children, the Malian origin population in the Hexagon probably numbered over 75,000 in 2000.

This paper opens with an overview of the migration of Malians from their homes in the West African Sahel to France. Beginning with the earliest migrants in the nineteenth century, this network was an outgrowth of French colonialism in West Africa. Moreover, crucial changes in the network are associated with crucial changes in French colonial history in West and North Africa: the expansion of French shipping and trading in West Africa in the high tide of colonialism between the two World Wars; the deployment of labor from the colonies in France immediately after World War II; and the search for workers during “les trente glorieuses,” the three decades of high levels of economic growth in France from the late 1940s to the oil crisis of the 1970s.

However, immigration from Mali was not just a product of the colonial history of the métropole. Events in the colonies (and later, the independent countries that replaced them, also influenced the evolution of Malian immigration: the Algerian revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the Sahelian droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, the socialist regime that governed Mali in the 1960s, the military dictatorship that ruled through the early 1990s, and the last decade of democratic government. In recent years, the rise of a transnational, globalized culture has also stimulated a re-imagination of village and national space among migrants and non-migrants alike, leading to a postcolonial and postmodern new “African world” whose boundaries are not land frontiers, but are defined by broader patterns of communication, travel, and culture. Today Malian migration to France is truly postcolonial. (Show less)

The recruitment of nurses abroad led in 2001 to a parliamentary debate in the Netherlands. The Dutch minister of Health stated that recruitment ought to take place in the Netherlands first, in the countries within the European Union second and only in the last resort in countries outside the EU. Recruitment abroad also should be restricted to countries with a plentiful supply. Therefore recruitment in South Africa and Surinam was halted. The debate on recruiting nurses from Surinam is not new. In the 1940s and 1950s the Dutch health care was also confronted with huge personnel shortages. One of the solutions to resolve the problems was the recruitment of (student) nurses abroad. Like other European countries the Netherlands for example attracted East European women from the Displaced Persons Camps and women from Italy and Spain. The main obstacle in working with foreign health workers was – and still is - the Dutch language. That problem could be solved by attracting nurses from Dutch speaking countries, like Surinam. The Dutch government however did not want to participate in this recruitment, because they did not want to “entice” Surinamese women from their native country, where they were needed in their “own” hospitals. The same argument as in 2001.
There came no official recruitment program, but Surinamese women (who were until 1975 Dutch citizens) came on their own initiative, for they had read about the shortages in the Dutch women’s magazines that were also read in Surinam. Because of the good experiences with these women some hospitals started their own recruitment campaigns. By an estimation in 1958 there were about 250 Surinamese women working in the Dutch hospitals. They all came to do their education in the Netherlands, and they all wanted to go back after their training period. But, as can be expected, many of them stayed. I traced a substantial part of this group and will show in my paper which effect their migration to the Netherlands had on them and on the country they left behind. Therefore I interviewed Surinamese women in the Netherlands as well in Surinam. (Show less)

This paper examines the lived experiences of African musicians who have emigrated to Paris since 1981, at a time of initially expanding opportunities for Sub-Saharan immigrants followed by successive stages of greater restrictions on immigration, much of it directed against such communities as the Malians who have figured prominently in movements that have demanded “regularization” and expanded definitions of French citizenship. As typically well-educated, often upwardly mobile immigrants, the musicians who have put Paris on the map as the capital of “World Music” have operated at the intersections of volatile national debates over race, culture, and ethnicity as they interrogate cherished notions of French national identity.

The author has spent eight years visiting Paris and both examining archival sources and conducting extensive interviews with more than seventy persons involved as musicians, producers, engineers, or journalists in the well-established Paris African music scene. The proposed paper will draw upon the research to be presented in the forthcoming book _Paris_africain_: Rhythms of the African Diaspora (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). (Show less)