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Moving beyond the narrative of crisis/disaster dominating discussions of African migration to Europe, this chapter argues for the importance of attending to intimate relations and processes of regeneration in African migration. When European migration regimes rely on marriage or family reunification as a way to grant entry and citizenship, intimate relations have become extraordinarily important: They often provide not only a motivation for migrating abroad but also a means to do so. In turn, migrants often engage in complex exchanges with their kin back home as they seek to make, rework and break intimate relationships with kin, lovers and friends. We conceptualize these exchanges as affective circuits in order to capture their material and affective dimensions, as well as their social dynamics. The chapter makes three arguments regarding affective circuits in African migration 1) Africans quest for valued forms of personhood and the desire to reposition themselves in exchange networks often prompts migrants’ efforts to build and maintain these circuits 2) notions of marriage and family, both those embodied in European state policies and the practices migrants bring along, shape how these circuits unfold 3) and that these circuits are gendered, with different participatory opportunities for men and women.

This chapter introduces core concepts, methods, and themes regarding mobility, belonging, and motherhood. Reproductive insecurity is both a motivation for and a result of migration. Mothers manage this insecurity by forging and maintaining affective circuits of exchange among overlapping social networks. Kin back home, migrant associations, as well as enforcers of German laws and bureaucratic procedures expose Cameroonian migrant mothers to new expectations about belonging-through children. Mothers balance these expectations by sharing and weighing advice through personal stories. They develop a migrant legal consciousness by circulating narratives of encounters with the law along the same affective circuits that anchor their belonging. Belonging—a complex mix of recognition by, and attachment to, a particular place or group—is constituted by social and emotional connections (citizenship, ethnicity, family) that can be felt, performed, or imposed. This chapter imagines the social networks that create belonging for migrant mothers through the metaphor of electrical circuitry; mothers switch connections on and off to control the information, goods, money, and emotions flow between them and social outlets located both nationally and transnationally. Mothers capitalize on the attention their children elicit from various actors, enabling them to navigate the many challenges of belonging in the diaspora.

This chapter examines how transnational social reproduction occurs in bi-national marriages between white French men and Malagasy women who over have sought to marry Frenchmen and migrate to France. The chapter argues that women’s ability to generate these life-sustaining affective circuits depends in part on their ability to maintain their relationships with white French husbands who have different ideas about being a wife, mother, sister or daughter. Consequently, these women must negotiate between two competing visions of who they are and how to behave. By analyzing how women manage their social relations with their French husbands and Malagasy kin while they are in France and then what happens when a woman and her husband return to Madagascar, the chapter shows how these women seek to manage social space and status so as to ensure the proper movement of both emotions and various material and symbolic resources through these circuits. While most studies draw attention to the role of migrant women’s reproductive labor and remittances in sustaining kin across national divides, we suggest that it is equally important to consider how different cultural conceptions of kinship and family, and women’s efforts to manage their networks, shape how transnational social regeneration unfolds.

This chapter explores how therapy management groups--that is groups of kin, friends and local practitioners-- in the Senegal River Valley region come together to provide patient care transnationally. In the context of transnational migration to Europe, focusing on how health advice and resources circulate between immigrants and their kin and social networks in their societies of origin. Ethnographic research on immigrants from the Senegal River Valley region living in France indicates that illness continues to mobilize therapy management groups transnationally by allocating material resources, and facilitate knowledge-sharing about sickness etiology and treatment, care-giving, and the interpretation of misfortune. Transnational therapy management networks reinforce affective circuits between migrants, kin, and friends and the viability of both biomedicine and ritual and herbal specialists, even if biomedical and Senegalese spiritual approaches occasionally contradict each other and create tensions. The chapter suggests that the management of illness sustains the transnational reproduction of kinship ties, continuously spurring material, spiritual, and affective connections.