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Don’t Call Me a Foreigner: Place Making in Khartoum and Juba between 2006–2018

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/diaspora.22.1.2022.11.15

1911-1568

Ulrike Schultz,

Migration and Labor Dynamics

This article is based on long-term research with South Sudanese who lived in Khartoum before the secession of South Sudan from Sudan and who moved to Juba between 2006 and 2013. Taking the case of South Sudanese belonging to the Bari, an ethnic group originally from the area around Juba, I argue that politics of return forces people to identify with specific forms of belonging and relate this belonging to specific places. Furthermore, people have to make sense out of places, which are perceived as their homes by others, but in many cases are hostile and strange for them. Conversely, they claim to rightfully belong to places, which are, in fact, constructed as the place of others. My argument is based on the dialectical relationship between two dimensions of place: place as a site of identification and as a place which Appadurai (1995) calls a location, where people have experiences and create social relations ( Schultz 2012 ). By using the concept of translocality, I want to stress the importance of context ( Anthias 2012 ). In their attempts to sustain their livelihoods, South Sudanese not only have to make sense out of new places, but also have to maintain relationships to places they have lived before. Taking the case of two women and their families moving from one place (Khartoum) to another (Juba) and vice versa, I argue that people not only try to maintain locality but also to counteract the politics of belonging by creating new ways of identification which I will call the politics of belonging from below.