Knut Graw is lecturer at the University of Leuven and associated researcher at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. His current research focuses on ritual praxis and migration in Senegal, Gambia, and Spain. Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. His research focuses on morality, religiosity, and aspiration in Egypt.

• Introduction: Reflections on migratory expectations in Africa and beyondKnut Graw and Samuli SchielkeWhy migrate?On the cause of migration:Being and nothingness in the African-European border zoneKnut GrawBushfalling: The making of migratory expectations in Anglophone CameroonMaybritt Jill AlpesDepartures and non-departuresCity on the move: How urban dwellers in Central Africa manage the siren's call of migrationFilip De BoeckSpaces in movement: Town-village interconnections in West Africa Denise Dias BarrosMigration, identity and immobility in a Malian Soninke village Gunvor Jonsson"God's time is the best": Religious imagination and the wait for emigration in The GambiaPaolo GaibazziHorizons in the makingThe Eiffel Tower and the eye: Actualizing modernity between Paris and GhanaAnn CassimanLiteracy, locality, and mobility: Writing practices and 'cultural extraversion' in rural MaliAissatou Mbodj-PouyeEngaging the world on the Alexandria waterfrontSamuli SchielkeAfterwordMichael JacksonContributors

The focus here is on the deep existential dilemmas of migration; how young people at great peril to their lives set out to take part in a globalized world that reaches them only in the form of 'absence' or as Knut Graw argues, as a 'non-arrival of change' (p. 33). [...] At the heart of many African migration journeys, even the high-risk forms that we see today in the Mediterranean and in the Sahara Desert, lies a continues struggle for a life worth living that is in a constant flux between local and global, between tradition and modernity, between what one has been given and what one must achieve in order to make the world one's own. In this excellent book, the dilemmas are given ethnographic context and challenge what we know about African migration.Hans Lucht, Ethnos, 2015 (pp. 1-;2), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1069366