4 - Interstitial Lives and Interconnected Places: Towards a New Theory of Afro-Asian Circulation

The term "migration," as understood in academic and policy frameworks of the Global North, does not easily translate into the languages of the migrant communities they seek to regulate. This linguistic and conceptual dissonance suggests deeper issues with the statist biases and methodological nationalism that dominate migration studies. In this paper, I propose that studying circulatory and mobile lives from the Global South offers an alternative lens, challenging rigid categorizations of "home" and "abroad." Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic research with South Asian (Bangladeshi) and East African (Kenyan) migrants in Qatar, I explore the interstitial, lived realities of Gulf migrants who navigate disparate spaces, linking them in ways that at times recall old connections and generating altogether novel ties at others. Spaces become places in this manner, acquiring new layers of meaning that remain woefully understudied by migration studies. Using sending households, not urban destinations, as my principal units of analysis, I show via two case studies how stretched kinship relations across national borders shape and are shaped by the affective economies that sustain mobility today. I argue that patterns of voluntary circulation, revived after the colonial interlude defined by forced mobility and sedentarization campaigns, yield a new understanding of postcolonial personhood as well as the graded sovereignties that govern multiple forms of mobility (physical, socio-economic, etc) across the Indian Ocean in this century. My focus is thus bottom-up, that is, on the mutual imbrications of interconnected places traversed by mobile persons and informed by stretched kinship ties.