Black Mobility, Documented

Against the backdrop of salt mining in Niger and at the meeting point between French colonialism and contemporary policies around 'managed migration,' this paper is interested in the work that documentation performs in perpetuating racial logics around right and proper movement. Building on recent work on early non-fiction film I read the work of poet and filmmaker Ladan Osman, whose travelogue Alien Citizen Field Notes and poetry collection Exiles of Eden both recover the history of anthropological depictions of nomadic communities and link that history to the contemporary policing of movement during the so-called ‘migrant crisis.’ The paper concludes on a reading of a scene in Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s documentary Arlit, deuxième Paris (2005), where the Nigerien town that was once the centre of the French uranium boom has been transformed into a last stop for persons who have been intercepted on their way to Europe. 

Christine Okoth is Lecturer in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic in the Department of English. Her work is primarily concerned with questions of environment and race in contemporary Black literature and visual art. She's currently writing a book entitled Race and the Raw Material and her work has been published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, and Textual Practice. 

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