Adventures in Infrastructure: Making an A frican Hub in P aris

Abstract

Abstract Based on ethnographic research at one of the largest transit hubs in the world—Paris'sGare duNord railway station—this article examines how the practices of WestAfrican migrants transform theFrench urban environment. I argue that migrants create social ties outside of kin and village networks by rerouting and combining the channels of two types of infrastructures:French transportation systems andWestAfrican systems of exchange and obligation. While this infrastructural practice relies on a shared cultural repertoire, it also helps create new channels that circumvent the pathways for social becoming prescribed by either theFrench state or their home communities. TheGare duNord as a social environment shapes these practices but is also reshaped by them, a process I illuminate by examining how the station becomes anAfrican hub: not an enclave of “LittleAfrica” but rather a node of communication and exchange. This process sheds light on how strategies for creating relations across difference and through infrastructure form transnational communities in urban spaces. [WestAfrica,Paris, migration, railway, transnationalism]

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