The ‘layered time’ of xenophobia and racial capitalism: comparing the everyday challenges and identities of African migrant women in Johannesburg and London

Abstract

The literatures on xenophobia and its violence in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Brexit UK, while each providing a deep and important contextual analysis, lacks a broader examination of the everyday manifestations of anti-foreigner discrimination for different groups. Particularly, they lack the perspectives of African migrant women. Using a relationally comparative approach, this interdisciplinary study examines both the conceptual and context-specific literature on xenophobia and its relationship to racism in South Africa and the UK, drawing on primary qualitative, ethnographic and creative fieldwork with Congolese and Zimbabwean women in Johannesburg and London using both an intersectional and temporal lens. Comparing contexts, concepts and lived experiences, this study embeds African migrant women’s experiences of discrimination over time within scholarship, policy and practice. Theoretically, it contributes towards an expanded conceptual understanding of xenophobia in three ways. Firstly, by examining its relationship to racism in wider literature and specifically within the Congolese and Zimbabwean migrant literatures in both contexts, arguing for it to be conceptually understood as embedded within racism and as a form of structural discrimination. It then goes onto argue for xenophobia and racism to be grounded within a global and contextually specific understanding of racial capitalism. Secondly, by applying a framework of ‘layered time’ to the lived experience of xenophobia, to reveal the longer-term psychological and ontological effects of this multi-faceted form of discrimination on women migrants’ livelihoods and wellbeing. Thirdly, by analysing barriers to access for African migrant women in everyday areas of education, work, healthcare and housing through an intersectional lens. This analysis reveals that to attempt an accurate portrayal of women’s lives and to inform legal and rights-based responses, intersectional research must include not only how lives and livelihoods are affected by their multiple overlapping categories of structural identity, but also by individual choice, background and social networks. Calling for a transnational, temporal and racially capitalist analysis of xenophobia, this study emphasises the importance of exploring the mundane ‘everyday’ as well as sporadic eruptions of violence. It warns against the tendency to homogenise the lived experiences of African migrant women, highlighting the need to recognise their human complexities