Paper short abstract:

This paper explores abjection through an ethnographic lens focused on the post-conflict existence of former migrants returned to urban Burkina Faso from Côte d’Ivoire in response to the 2002 Ivoirian civil war.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores abjection through an ethnographic lens focused on the post-conflict existence of former migrants returned to Burkina Faso from Côte d'Ivoire in response to the 2002 Ivoirian civil war. Abjection is present in multiple forms in the contemporary lived experiences of this population. For instance, repatriates resist categorization and are outside an existing symbolic order in which the "returned migrant" is a nationally known figure, while the "refugee" is an internationally recognized one. The categories—"returned migrant" and "refugee"—from which repatriates are excluded speak to continuities between the colonial and post-colonial and especially when considering the Ivoirian civil war. Its eruption 42 years after independence, the Ivoirian civil war has been considered a latent manifestation of a post-colonial quest for national identity in which the post-colonial is not so much a chronological marker, rather it is ideologically invoked and therefore central to this national project. Although their historic investment in Côte d'Ivoire is significant, Burkinabé migrants are not just excluded from this Ivoirian enterprise, but vital to its realization through their literal and figurative excision. Many in retrospect view the promise migration to Côte d'Ivoire once offered them as illusory (i.e., never existing) or representative of a bygone era in which the present is characterized by a definitive "global disconnect." Return prompted the creation of new subjectivities that despite their deployment to secure material resources remain marginal and illegible, while identification with the repatriate label ten years on speaks to an uncanny "nostalgia for the future."