The Verbal Art of Mobility in West Africa

In recent years, youth migration across regional urban sites and national borders has radically reshaped West African societies and sparked a global debate on the legal and cultural processes of immigration. Along newly constructed international highways linking Senegal and Mali, young men and women travel between regional urban centers and their hometowns in the wake of a gold-mining boom that has brought new opportunities as well as risks.

Previous scholarship on migration has often emphasized the physical movement of bodies and things. Instead of using language only as a way to describe mobility, Nikolas Sweet positions language as the essential infrastructure through which individuals forge material connections and communication channels across space and borders, as well as distinctions between places. This reinterpretation of migration emphasizes that language is a form of social action in its own right-one that does not merely reflect experiences in the world but can bring things into being. Becoming a migrant in this setting not only reflects an individual's mobile history, but also depends upon that person's successful embodiment of the migrant role through everyday verbal performance.

Through ethnographic research on social interaction, verbal creativity, and mobility in southeastern Senegal, The Verbal Art of Mobility in West Africa reveals how migrants use language to build social networks and mitigate risk amid socioeconomic and environmental precarity.