Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T06:16:22.421Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Agency of Somali Migrant Women in Nairobi and Johannesburg: Negotiating Religious and Cultural Identifications in Diasporic Spaces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2020

Nereida Ripero-Muñiz Open the ORCID record for Nereida Ripero-Muñiz [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

An ethnographic analysis of two interconnected cities for the Somali diaspora—Nairobi and Johannesburg—helps to uncover alternative narratives about the lives of Somali women and the ways they renegotiate their cultural and religious identities in diasporic contexts, moving beyond the widespread representation of Somali women in the global imagination as helpless victims. Using the domains of marriage and female circumcision, Ripero-Muñiz analyzes how these women exercise their agency while at the same time negotiating the cultural and religious practices of their community. By focusing on the ways in which Somali women re-negotiate their identities, this article helps to locate the agency of women in refugee and migrant communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Résumé:

une analyse ethnographique de deux villes interconnectées pour la diaspora malienne, Nairobi et Johannesburg, permet de découvrir d’autres récits sur la vie des femmes maliennes et la façon dont elles renégocient leurs identités culturelles et religieuses dans des contextes diasporiques allant au-delà de la représentation répandue dans l’imagination mondiale des femmes maliennes en tant que victimes impuissantes. En utilisant les domaines du mariage et de la circoncision féminine, Ripero-Muñiz analyse comment ces femmes font usage de leur libre arbitre tout en négociant les pratiques culturelles et religieuses de leur communauté. En mettant l’accent sur les façons dont les femmes maliennes renégocient leur identité, cet article aide à localiser l’agence des femmes dans les communautés de réfugiés et de migrants en Afrique subsaharienne.

Resumo:

Através de uma análise etnográfica de Nairobi e Joanesburgo – duas cidades interligadas da diáspora somaliana – é possível encontrar outras narrativas acerca da vida das mulheres somalis e do modo como elas renegoceiam as suas identidades culturais e religiosas nos contextos da diáspora, superando os limites, muito presentes na imaginação internacional, da representação das mulheres somalis enquanto vítimas indefesas. Perscrutando os domínios do casamento e da circuncisão feminina, Ripero-Muñiz analisa o modo como estas mulheres exercem a sua agencialidade, ao mesmo tempo que negoceiam as práticas culturais e religiosas da sua comunidade. Ao focar os mecanismos segundo os quais as mulheres somalis renegoceiam as suas identidades, o presente artigo ajuda a compreender a agencialidade das mulheres entre as comunidades de refugiados e de migrantes na África subsaariana.

Keywords

Somali womenagencyidentitiesNairobiJohannesburgSomalinessIslam
Type
Forum: Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Somali Refugee and Migrant Experience
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 65 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2020 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abdi, Cawo M. 2015. Elusive Jannah. The Somali Diaspora and the Borderless Muslim Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Amy. 1999. The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Al-Sharmani, Mulki. 2010. “Transnational Family Networks in the Somali Diaspora in Egypt: Women’s Roles and Differentiated Experiences.” Gender, Place & Culture 17 (4): 499–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 1995. “The Production of Locality.” In Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, edited by Fardon, Richard, 204–55. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Archer, Margaret. 2003. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asad, Talal. 2009. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Qui Parle 17 (2): 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Brady, Catheleen. M., and Files, Julia A.. 2007. “Female genital mutilation: cultural awareness and clinical considerations.” Journal of Midwifery Women’s Health 52 (2): 158–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bryden, Matt, and Steiner, Martina. 1998. Somalia between Peace and War: Somali Women on the Eve of the 21st century. Nairobi: UNIFEM.Google Scholar
Boyd, Monica, and Grieco, Elizabeth. 2003. “Women and Migration: Incorporating Gender into International Migration Theory.” www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/displaycfm?id=106.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2010. “Performative Agency.” Journal of Cultural Economy. 3 (2): 147–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Campbell, Elisabeth H. 2006. “Urban Refugees in Nairobi: Problems of Protection, Mechanisms of Survival, and Possibilities for Integration.” Journal of Refugee Studies 19 (3): 396–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carrier, Neil. 2016. Little Mogadishu: Eastleigh, Nairobi’s Global Somali Hub . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Curran, Sara R., and Saguy, Abigail C.. 2001. “Migration and Cultural Change: A Role for Gender and Social Networks.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 2 (3): 54–77.Google Scholar
Elmi, Afyare A. 2010. Understanding the Somalia Conflagration: Identity, Political Islam and Peacebuilding. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Mische, Ann. 1998. “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103 (4) 962–1023.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farah, Nuruddin. 2000. Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora. London: Cassell.Google Scholar
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardner, Judith, and El Bushra, Judy, eds. 2004. Somalia – the Untold Story: The War through the Eyes of Somali Women. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greiner, Clemens, and Sakdapolrak, Patrick. 2013. “Translocality: Concepts, Applications and Emerging Research Perspectives.” Geography Compass 7 (5): 373–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 1992. “The Question of Cultural identity.” In Stuart, Hall, David, Held and Tony, McGrew, eds. Modernity and its Futures: Understanding Modern Societies, Book IV, 273–326. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Who Needs Identity?” In Stuart, Hall and Paul, du Gay, eds. Questions of Cultural Identity, 1–18. London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 2008. “Cosmopolitanism Globalization and Diaspora: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Pnina Werbner, March 2006.” In Werbner, Pnina, ed. Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Hassim, Shireen, Kupe, Tawana, and Worby, Eric, eds. 2008. Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hersi, Ali. 1977. The Arab Factor in Somali History: The Origins and Developments of the Arab Enterprise and Cultural Influences in the Somali Peninsula. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Gail. 2010. “A Changing Sense of Somaliness: Somali Women in London and Toronto.” Gender, Place & Culture 17 (4): 519–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jinnah, Zaheera. 2010. “Making Home in a Hostile Land: Understanding Somali Identity, Integration, Livelihood and Risks in Johannesburg.” Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 1 (1): 91–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langellier, Kristin M. 2010. “Performing Somali Identity in the Diaspora.” Cultural Studies 24 (1): 66–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leming, Laura M. 2007. “Sociological Explorations: What is Religious Agency?” The Sociological Quarterly 48 (1): 73–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lochery, Emma. 2012. “Rendering difference visible: the Kenyan state and its Somali citizens.” African Affairs 111 (445): 615–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mack, Phyllis. 2003. “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism.” Signs 29 (1): 149–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacIntyre, Alasdair.1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Masquelier, Adeline. 2009. Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra T. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30: 61–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murunga, Godwin R. 2009. “Refugees at Home? Coping with Somalia Conflict in Nairobi, Kenya.” In African Studies in Geography from Below, edited by Arrous, Michael B. and Ki-Zerbo, Lazare, 198–232. Dakar: CORDESIA.Google Scholar
Palmary, Ingrid, Burman, Erica, Chantler, Khatidja, and Kiguwa, Peace, eds. 2010. Gender and Migration: Feminist Intervention. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Pessar, Patricia R., and Mahler, Sarah J.. 2003. “Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender in.” International Migration Review 37 (3): 812–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Philips, Anne. 2007. Multiculturalism without culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Portes, Alejandro. 1997. Globalization from Below: The Rise of Transnational Communities. Oxford: University of Oxford Transnational Communities Programme.Google Scholar
Ripero-Muñiz, Nereida, ed. 2017. Metropolitan Nomads: A Journey through Jo’burg’s Little Mogadishu. MoVE: Johannesburg. https://issuu.com/move.methods.visual.explore/docs/mn_publication_-_ebook_-_10_octoberGoogle Scholar
Ripero-Muñiz, Nereida. 2019. “The Port and the Island: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Identity Constructions among Somali Women in Nairobi and Johannesburg”. In Mobile Urbanity. Somali presence in Urban East Africa, edited by Neil, Carrier and Tabea, Scharrer. 58–75. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Rostami-Povey, Elaheh. 2007. “Gender, agency and identity, the case of Afghan women in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran” The Journal of Development Studies 43 (2): 294–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sadouni, Samadia. 2009. “‘God Is Not Unemployed’: Journeys of Somali Refugees in Johannesburg.” African Studies 68 (2): 235–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steinberg, Jonny. 2014. A Man of Good Hope. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.Google Scholar
Tiilikainen, Marja. 2007. “Continuity and Change: Somali Women and Everyday Islam in the Diaspora.” In From Mogadishu to Dixon: The Somali Diaspora in a Global Context, edited by Abdi, Kusow and Bjor, Stephanie R., 207–33. Trenton, New Jersey: Red Sea Press.Google Scholar
United Nations. 2017. Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2017 Revision. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (United Nations database, POP/DB/MIG/Stock/Rev.2017).Google Scholar
UNHCR. 2018. “UNHCR Population Statistics Database: Mid-Year Trends 2018.” popstats.unhcr.org. http://popstats.unhcr.org.Google Scholar
Vertovec, Steven. 2001. “Transnationalism and Identity.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27 (4): 573–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ware, Rudolph T. III. 2014.The Walking Quran. Islamic Education, Embodied knowledge and History in West Africa. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Weitzberg, Keren. 2017. We Have No Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicament of Belonging in Kenya. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Whitaker, Beth Elise. 2020. “Refugees, Foreign Nationals, and Wageni: Comparing African Responses to Somali Migration.” African Studies Review 63 (1): 18–42.Google Scholar
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2014. “Religion and Gender in Contemporary Political projects of Belonging.” In Region, Gender, and the Public Sphere, edited by Nuamh, Reilly and Stacey, Scriver, 31–44. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar