TY - JOUR

T1 - Mobile Misfortune

AU - Vigh, Henrik Erdman

PY - 2015/6/11

Y1 - 2015/6/11

N2 - This article examines how the emergent cocaine trade in Bissau, the capital of the west African country of Guinea-Bissau, has become entangled with and trickled into the life worlds, hopes and fears of the city’s many impoverished young men. The article is divided into two parts. While the first part looks at the predicament of youth and the hope of migration in Bissau, the second illuminates the anguish of deportation and the despair of being forcefully ‘displaced back home.’ Following in the footsteps of the young men that seek to navigate the cocaine trade, in order to obtain better lives for themselves and their families, it shows how involvement in the cocaine trade is both a curse and a catalyst. Though trading the drug may facilitate migration and mobility, generating social being and worth in the process, it is an activity that is haunted by the threat of deportation and the termination of the mobility it enables. This article, thus, looks at the motives and manners in which young men in Bissau become caught up in transnational flows of cocaine. It shows how motion is emotively anchored and affectively bound: tied to and directed toward a feeling of worth and realisation of being, and how migration from the global South often has negative potentiality as an end-point via the ascription of illegality and condition of deportability that shade it.

AB - This article examines how the emergent cocaine trade in Bissau, the capital of the west African country of Guinea-Bissau, has become entangled with and trickled into the life worlds, hopes and fears of the city’s many impoverished young men. The article is divided into two parts. While the first part looks at the predicament of youth and the hope of migration in Bissau, the second illuminates the anguish of deportation and the despair of being forcefully ‘displaced back home.’ Following in the footsteps of the young men that seek to navigate the cocaine trade, in order to obtain better lives for themselves and their families, it shows how involvement in the cocaine trade is both a curse and a catalyst. Though trading the drug may facilitate migration and mobility, generating social being and worth in the process, it is an activity that is haunted by the threat of deportation and the termination of the mobility it enables. This article, thus, looks at the motives and manners in which young men in Bissau become caught up in transnational flows of cocaine. It shows how motion is emotively anchored and affectively bound: tied to and directed toward a feeling of worth and realisation of being, and how migration from the global South often has negative potentiality as an end-point via the ascription of illegality and condition of deportability that shade it.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - Migration

KW - cocaine

KW - transnational crime

U2 - 10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1572233

DO - 10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1572233

M3 - Journal article

VL - 7

SP - 233

EP - 253

JO - Culture Unbound

JF - Culture Unbound

SN - 2000-1525

IS - 2

ER -