At a historical moment when nationalist parties are gaining ground internationally and racist discourses have become commonplace, Senegal Abroad offers a glimpse into the ways African migrants navigate racism and belonging in three host societies. It compares Senegalese emigrants’ experiences of blackness and diasporic identity in Paris, Rome and New York through the innovative lens of language. Smith, a sociolinguist, calls into question portrayals of African migration that reduce Africans abroad to economic immigrants, ‘forced to move because of economic necessity’, using detailed analysis of multilingualism among Senegalese abroad to highlight, instead, the ways that ‘Senegalese view themselves as cosmopolitan world travelers’ (162).
In four chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, Smith demonstrates how identity – both national and racial – is in constant flux, shifting in dialectic relationship with language practices. Through examination of codeswitching and attitudes towards language among Senegalese emigrants, Smith traces the ways that individuals draw upon diverse linguistic resources in unfolding conversation, playfully navigating the symbolic meanings associated with various ways of speaking. She argues that mobility and multilingualism are fundamental to what she calls ‘Global Senegality’, a diasporic identity founded on the Senegalese notion of teranga (hospitality), which she analyses relative to migrants’ efforts to linguistically accommodate their interlocutors.
Drawing together three sites with vastly different histories of migration, race relations and political economic links to Senegal, Smith demonstrates that while Senegalese migrants’ specific struggles with racism vary from one location to another, widespread discrimination against blacks in Europe and the USA led her interviewees to perceive themselves (and her) as sharing a common experience of blackness. Her comparative approach draws attention to the ways that national immigration policies and relations between migrants’ home and host countries shape their experiences of belonging and exclusion. She depicts a sense of betrayal among Senegalese in Paris, who, despite their French fluency (and often citizenship), felt they were treated as foreigners. In Rome, migrants described Italian as having little international value and insisted that their stay in Italy was temporary. And Senegalese in New York found there were multiple ways of speaking English, which mediated their acceptance in, or distance from, African American communities.
Although Smith frames her exploration of the pleasure Senegalese associate with multilingualism as going beyond questions of political economy, her observations also reveal language practices to be fundamentally political and economic. Language skills provide economic opportunities, while the jobs available and prejudice migrants encounter shape their attitudes towards language and engagement in the host culture. In demonstrating how migrants negotiate macro-level power relations in their everyday language choices, Smith adds a comparative case study to important scholarship in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics examining processes of racialisation through language.
The book's multi-sited approach provides an important intervention in migration studies, encouraging us to look beyond home and host countries to consider how (aspiring) migrants understand various trajectories in relation to a wide range of possible destinations and potential means of getting abroad. The downside of this comparative approach is that juxtaposing three sites leaves little space to elaborate on the specificities of each national context. The introduction offers a brief history of each country's approach to race and migration, but tells us little about how this translates into concrete trajectories, structuring the opportunities for jobs, formal education, visas, or paths to citizenship available to migrants, and how these might, in turn, shape language practices.
Smith's writing style lends itself to use in the classroom. All transcribed passages appear first in their original language(s), then in English, providing abundant data for students to examine. She describes her research process with particular transparency – inviting the reader to the cafés where she first met interviewees or describing the awkwardness of being underdressed at a Senegalese social gathering – which can give students a tangible sense of what ethnographic research consists of and how to use it to inform linguistic analysis.
