Asynchronous mobilities: hostility, hospitality, and possibilities of justice

Metrics of success, status, and justice are founded on subjective narratives of spatialized pasts and futures. This article considers three moralised space-times – chronotopes – and their relations to people’s mobility within and from sub-Saharan Africa. The first stems from European efforts to promote ‘development at home’ which places Africans on a separate temporal trajectory. By discursively positioning Africans outside global space and futures, Europe subsequently denies claims to European space or lives beyond African territory. Moreover, coding border crossing as deviant justifies an apparatus to return Africans to their space-time where they can achieve justice. The latter two chronotopes emerge dialogically among citizens and immigrants in South Africa’s ‘global city.’ Amidst Johannesburg’s polyrhythmicity, citizens position themselves in a chronotope of stalled transformation where justice comes by remedying deprivations inherited from an apartheid past. This rubs against international migrants operating in a mode of deferred distanciation: using the city to achieve rights and recognition in future elsewhere. These competing temporalities deny possibilities of a mutually shared definition of justice or spatial claim making. This article ultimately positions chronotopes as critical elements in migration infrastructures that shape movements, conditioning interactions, and foreclosing (or opening) possibilities for justice across or within space.