Blackness Out of Place and In Between in the Sahara

Abstract

This chapter revolves around an ethnographic moment in which the police interrogated two unauthorized Liberian migrants in Niger and uses this moment to highlight how unauthorized Black African migrants in Niger escape police and surveillance and humanitarian aid. The conditions of being an unauthorized migrant, along with this practice of escaping the police who seek to deport migrants and the nongovernmental organizations that want to repatriate migrants as a form of aid, collectively produce a geographic and embodied space of the in-between. The geographies of the in-between represent the complexities of Black geographies when articulated through Black African migration within West Africa.