Life's Good Ailleurs: The Labor of Hope Among Sudanese Refugees in Paris

Abstract

In the middle of 2016, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced that her city “will not stand by and do nothing while the Mediterranean becomes a graveyard.” By the year’s end, the city opened France’s first-ever “centre de premier accueil” (CPA), or Initial Welcome Center, in its 18th arrondissement with hopes of better accommodating and organizing the influx of refugees. However, the CPA quickly became congested; an informal camp of unaccommodated refugees spilled out onto its surrounding streets, much to the despair of the French state and the fatigued refugees. Based on ethnographic research in these streets conducted in August 2017, this thesis examines how street-bound Sudanese refugees hoped and pursued the next day, despite their protracted displacement and the “social technologies” employed by the French state to control the refugees’ senses of space-time, such as uncertain queues and a proliferation of fences. I specifically track how materials—objects as mundane as cups, fences, crowd control barricades, and scraps of paper—became stages for human exchange (with one another and with humanitarian workers and institutions) and mutual, cooperative survival. While unable to resist or radically alter the EU border regime, the refugees were able to carve out alternative understandings of space-time that allowed them to remain steady within their circumstances. Ultimately, this thesis hopes to provide a more nuanced understanding of this particular population of refugees, in order to encourage a more critical humanitarianism.