Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on the recent phenomenon of African migration to Poland. Particularly it will focus on the city of Lublin, a peripheric city at the Polish Eastern border. The paper will examine the notion of Afropolitianism at the intersections of migration, religion, Polishness and periphery.

Paper long abstract:

While Afropolitanism is a well-established term and serves as a useful descriptive and analytical tool, in Europe it is also heavily linked with diasporic communities in central node cities of the Global North. Most of them are linked with Africa through the colonial past and global economic and cultural networks of global cities. In this paper I would like to challenge the category of Afropolitan by reflecting on it from the angle of Lublin, a periphery, that is hardly defined as the Global North or the Global East. I will analyze the multiple intersections the term Afropolitan implies while contextualized in Poland, such as local responses, new local social and religious formations and the notions of transition, rooting and escape.

Lublin is a peripheric city in Poland near the Ukrainian border that experienced a massive rise of young African migrants, mostly students, in the last few years. Historically the city of Lublin might be characterized by its culture and economic link to the nowadays Ukrainian territory, with no links with Africa. During the WWII the Jewish part of the city was demolished by the Nazis and most of Jews were murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. The burden of history, the geopolitical location of this city, and particular formations of Whiteness and Polishness in the region are particular contexts for the sudden appearance of young Africans, coming mostly from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

The paper will be based on the data collected in the ongoing research project PentACTors.