Dwelling discreetly: Undocumented migrants in Cape Town
Document Type
Article
Source of Publication
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Publication Date
12-1-2017
Abstract
© 2017 Duke University Press. This article explores how undocumented African immigrants negotiate challenges of housing and house-holding in urban South Africa. It chronicles an itinerant household of young male migrants in Cape Town over a five-year period, tracking the household’s movements and sojourns across the city through different buildings and residences. The ethnography examines the migrants’ distinct approach toward householding: a mode of dwelling marked by strategies of concealment and separateness and by deliberately staying unsettled. Disciplined and artful, the migrants craft an exhausting, but surprisingly effective style of tenanting and domesticity. This household’s capability at finding and funding places to live in Cape Town demonstrates that there is success in invisibility and precarity. Examining a fluid urban context in which growing anti-immigrant prejudice renders many neighborhoods inhospitable spaces for African outsiders, this ethnography complicates dominant descriptions of African migrants and refugees in contemporary South Africa as impoverished, wholly destitute victims.
DOI Link
ISSN
Publisher
Duke University Press
Volume
37
Issue
3
First Page
420
Last Page
426
Disciplines
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Keywords
Cape town, Households, Housing, Migrants, South africa, Urban violence
Scopus ID
Recommended Citation
Williams, James, "Dwelling discreetly: Undocumented migrants in Cape Town" (2017). All Works. 1341.
https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae/works/1341
Indexed in Scopus
yes
Open Access
no