Bordered lives and frontier futures: Reproducing “the minor” in contested times

Refugees in the present tense: The social reproduction of a bordering “major”

All the people whose experiences I recount in this article share a common experience: they had fled conflict in the DRC and had received refugee status from the UNHCR at some point following that. Refugee status is a category of international law used to recognize a person who is unable to return to their country of origin due to a “well-founded fear” of persecution (Office of the UNHCR, 2010); it codifies the legal liminality of people who are de-territorialized from their country of birth, but not yet accepted as long-term residents within a host nation of asylum. As such, the refugee label reveals the territorializing logics of a bordering “major,” since it functions to pathologize the detachment of a person from a “national order of things” (Malkki, 1995). Given that refugee status is a technical category of politico-legal externality, it should come as no surprise that each of the three “durable solutions” to protracted refugee displacement that are outlined by the UNHCR revolve around re-territorializing refugees into a status of national identification (UNHCR, 2022b). Repatriation involves a refugee returning to their country of origin; local integration involves a refugee being provided with residency status in a country of asylum; and resettlement involves providing refugees with permanent residency in a third country. While Deleuze and Guattari (1986) speak of “the major” as the dominance of specific languages, dialects, and grammars in producing literature, the bordering major that is revealed through these politico-legal systems is that which naturalizes the grammar of nations and borders, assuming that humans can be organized into national containers and pathologizing those whose link to the national order remains ambiguous.

It is not neutral, then, that the Congolese migrants I conducted research with continued to be referred to as “refugees” in the Australian public lexicon, even though that legal status had been effectively resolved upon resettlement. These migrants were former refugees, and while they were open about their histories of displacement, they no longer ascribed to the refugee label as a marker of personal identity (see also Kuwee Kumsa, 2006; Phillips, 2011). Nonetheless, throughout my research and professional work, I observed how they continued be referred to as refugees long after they arrived in Australia, usually within institutional contexts—social service organizations, schools, healthcare—and by members of the public who would casually assume that they were refugees, presumably because their Black skin and African heritage marked them as such against the predominantly White Australian population.

As an employee in an organization that provided settlement support to migrants, I witnessed how the “refugee” label was strategically employed by other workers within such settings as a form of social capital through which to attract attention and funding (see also Marlowe, 2010). For example, the organization I worked within included a program that supported migrant women to attain a professional catering certificate by operating a food stall at an open-air market. To organize the market, the employee who ran the program grouped the participants by national origin—conflating a territorialized identity with cultural homogeneity and social cohesion—and then promoted the market to the public as a “Refugee Market.” When I asked Rebecca, one of the women who, as part of this program, had been delegated to work in a stall that was advertised simplistically as the “Congolese Refugee Women,” how she felt about this label, she described feeling discomfited. I asked how she would have preferred to represent herself, and Rebecca told me that if she had been able to name her own enterprise, she would have called it, “Restaurant Amani,” a Swahili word meaning peace which did not reduce her to either her country of origin or her former refugee status, but instead represented her own melding of background and experiences. “Restaurant Amani,” even as an imagined alternative, echoed the potentiality of a minor: representing a unique way of acknowledging Rebecca’s de-territorialization (through using a Swahili word and the implied juxtaposition of peace against the conflicts she had fled) while re-forming that background in a new, unexpected way.

While the “Refugee Market” program at a surface level aimed to certify migrants with skills in commercial cooking, the program participants were simultaneously being trained as an entrepreneurial labor force capitalizing on public imaginaries of difference. The market emerged as a site of social reproduction in which the organization of labor reflected and revealed “a range of cultural forms and practices” (Katz, 2001: 711; 2004) through which major logics (in this case, of borders and bordering) were naturalized. Similarly to how Deleuze and Guattari (1986) recognize the fundamental inability of some migrants to be brought into the major, the migrants I worked with were, in public and institutional contexts, persistently framed as embodying inherent difference and unable to be fully incorporated into the Australian social order. And so, while representing a problem for their social inclusion, their backgrounds were nonetheless re-framed as valuable in terms of economic participation, enabling them to be incorporated into already-existing regimes of racial capitalism which hinge on “potentializing of all human species and planet for marketization” (Saldanha, 2020: 23) and reproducing raced stratifications of production and consumption. Their refugee background became a resource to be marketed to a public that anticipates and exoticizes such codifications of bordered difference.

Consequently, it is bordering that I identify here as the major, rather than just “the border,” because even when the geopolitical problem of being external to the “national order” (Malkki, 1995) is resolved, the experience of bordering persists. Border-ing exists as a process which is socially produced and subjectively embodied (Anzaldúa, 1987), manifesting well beyond the physical sites of borders between nations. Bordering is most effective as a form of terror imposed on those marked as others due to racialized, classed, sexual, and gendered differences in everyday life, meaning that those so marked carry the border with them; but it is also effective as a more mundane yet persistent codification of difference, as the example of the “Refugee Market” reveals. As Shahram Khosravi (2011), a self-named “illegal traveler” who crossed multiple nations to be eventually accepted as a refugee in Sweden, the border is felt most acutely not at sites of crossing but in the lived experience of existing as a raced migrant within the global North. “I am the border,” Khosravi (2011: 99) contends. If the major is understood as a “constant and homogenous system,” that is, the ideal or standard which is “secured not in being the most numerous, but in being the unmarked” (Katz, 1996: 493), then we see the major at work through these bordering systems that persistently reduce migrants to racialized figures who embody seemingly inherent incompatibility with the dominant social order.

No longer technically refugees, the “refugee” label nonetheless continues to structure the lives of people resettled in Australia, reflecting the persistent dehumanization of imposed labels Hannah Arendt describes (1994 [1943]) in the essay “We Refugees.” There is a temporal disjuncture between how the Australian public codes migrants from Africa, as refugees in the present tense (see also Colic-Peisker, 2009; Phillips, 2011), compared to how these migrants would ideally identify themselves, as people whose refugee status is in the past. This disjuncture of tense reveals an important aspect of bordering as it is socially produced. Namely, that bordering is a process which not only works to imagine people within geographic containers, but which also maps assumptions of temporal asynchronicity onto those distinctions. According to Mary Pat Brady (2000), part of the nationalist fantasy of domination that is played out through bordering is that which separates people representing Otherness into different socio-temporal scales. Brady (2000: 178) describes how, “National borders utilize the fantasy that on one side of the border a nation exists in one phase of temporal development while the nation on the other side functions in a different stage of temporality.” In the case of people from the DRC resettled in Australia, being continually referred to as a refugee in the present tense reveals a temporal basis of bordering, which works not only to socio-spatially re-territorialize migrants but moreover to re-temporalize them.

Importantly, temporal bordering not only operates metaphorically and discursively but, as Brady (2000) emphasizes, is also realized tangibly, in practice. It is crucial to analyze not simply what borders mean, but what they do: that is, how borders—and, more specifically border-ing—is experienced and lived in everyday terms; that is, within the material sites and processes of social reproduction. Above, the “Refugee Market” example provides insight into one such site of social reproduction through which the bordering major is reproduced, naturalized, and imposed on Congolese migrants. But that example also hints at a temporal disjuncture, whereby the accelerated pace of entrepreneurial time is juxtaposed against a commodified sense of difference that is rendered, temporally, as a permanent state of refugee status. It is this temporal incommensurability, and its codification within and through processes of social reproduction, that I elaborate below.

Colonial racisms and temporal bordering

The story above was recounted to me by Caroline after we had gone grocery shopping together in a suburban mall. A seemingly mundane activity, I had nonetheless noticed many other people in the grocery store giving us—me, a White woman sharing a grocery cart with Caroline, a Black woman—curious glances. On our way back to Caroline’s house she explained that this kind of attention was normal for her when she went out in public. On other occasions she had experienced people literally peering into her grocery cart to see what food she had placed in it, or heard derisive comments directed towards her. But her expression sobered when she recounted the story above to me; the experience of everyday racism that had been most shocking for her.

Before that incident, Caroline had never been referred to as a monkey: a literal animal. Her sense that she was being seen as “some kind of ancestor, walking the earth, not on the same level,” suggests that there was a temporal aspect of the insult, in which she, as a Black African person, was being relegated to a different time: specifically, a primeval time of ancestors rather than modern human beings. Caroline recognized that, by virtue of her racialization, her life was being seen as temporally incompatible with the presumed modernity of the Australian social order. In his discussion of African stereotypes in On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe (2001: 1) makes a similar reflection, describing how, “It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished.” Black African people, according to Mbembe (2001), have come to represent a primitive timelessness that is fundamentally at odds with the presumed modernity of Western states, meaning that the African subject (or continent) could never be integrated into the same contemporary. This logic is recognized by Caroline, who is appalled by it.

Significantly, her experience also reflects the bordering experiences of another central figure in critical Black theory, Frantz Fanon, whose famous “Look, A Negro” passage in the book Black Skin, White Masks (1968: 112) recounts a similar incident of being heckled and slurred by a child:

‘Look, a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but the laughter became impossible … I existed triply: I occupied space … I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships … 

Caring for children was another site of social reproduction through which this temporal incommensurability was enacted. While conducting fieldwork I occasionally accompanied migrants I worked with to appointments with (predominantly White) social workers who were supposed to provide parenting and family support. During one such appointment, a social worker who was watching a Congolese mother put lotion on her children’s ashy skin leaned toward me and said, “It’s interesting, you know, I would not have thought she would be so concerned about the children’s skin. I figured that, in Africa, they probably didn’t have soap.” I must have reacted with a somewhat confused expression, because the social worker quickly clarified, “You know, because they were so poor in the camps and everything. I just wouldn’t have expected them to have soap or anything there.” On another occasion, a social worker who was doing a home visit with a family expressed disgust at witnessing children eating while sitting on the ground and using their hands. “They are eating like animals,” I was told.

“At its most basic, [social reproduction] hinges on both the biological reproduction of the labor force (both generationally and on a daily basis through clothing, sanitation, and health care) and the physical conditions of that make ongoing production possible,” Cindi Katz (2004: x) writes. What we see in the encounters described above are activities of social reproduction through which codifications of racialized inferiority are being applied to migrants, even at these most basic scales of biological reproduction: eating and sanitation habits. The social workers are reproducing a bordering major as naturally prevailing by reading these activities as inherently deficient, revolting even. In both examples, I witnessed racist sentiments that are deeply embedded in colonial assumptions of African subjects as being inherently dirty, savage, and in need of domestication (Elias, 1978). They are being temporally bordered as seemingly “primitive” in comparison to the majority Australian public.

Alongside the socio-spatial forms of bordering that work to exclude racialized migrants from full belonging within the Australia social order are these parallel forms of temporal bordering: that is, segregations of people on the basis of presumably incommensurable temporal positions, in which one group is assumed to embody progressive modernity, and the other is coded as regressive. This conceptualization of temporal bordering builds on the Johannes Fabian’s (2014 [1983]) foundational critique of the ways that ethnographic research often reinforces notions of allochronic time, whereby he suggested that anthropologists represent the people they work with as inhabitants of different, often “primitive,” time. I want to broaden out this critique to consider that such assumptions of allochronic time are also embedded in more pervasive systems of bordering—majors—in which racialized assumptions of otherness are grounded in notions of differential time (Khosravi, 2019; Ramsay, 2017, 2020). Continually racializing Congolese migrants in ways that emphasize their assumed lack of modernity assumes and imposes a temporal between African migrants and the White Australian majority. As a consequence, they are also excluded from hegemonic future imaginaries, as I describe below.

Bordered futurity and the speculative state

Why are arenas of social reproduction—and specifically those related to caregiving and children—such fertile grounds for intervention into the lives of migrants, from those whose interests reproduce and align with major systems of knowledge? The answer to this question lies in the temporal stakes of social reproduction, and specifically that these processes are the gradual sites of futurity in the making. This is particularly the case in regard to biological reproduction, in that children literally embody future potential, reflecting a way of conceptualizing reproduction that Rebecca Sheldon (2016) describes as “reproductive futurism.” The Australian state—along with many nations—invokes pro-natalism in order to justify policies that perpetuate and serve dominant interests, such as heteronormativity, gender conformity, neoliberal productivity, and racial borders. Reproductive futurism persists as a central organizing factor of state policy because it remains an important source of neoliberal speculation. Future generations are not just understood in terms of the potential for infinite growth (which underscored the reproductive futurism promoted by governments in the twentieth century), but as the basis of future organization of societal resources that are increasingly imagined through a lens of scarcity (Sheldon, 2016). Hence, controlling and orchestrating reproduction in the present, including along racial lines, is a way for the speculative state to attempt to maintain existing power hierarchies into an uneasy future.

Consequently, we see on the one hand that the Australian state has historically (and contemporaneously) sought to control and restrict the reproductive decisions of people from non-White backgrounds (see also Ramsay, 2016), while simultaneously encouraging natalism for those deemed worthy: to use the words of former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, to encourage “women of caliber” in particular to have children (Farr, 2013). Just as the movement of some migrants across borders is encouraged while others’ is restricted, so too do we see the logics of bordering determining which kind of people are encouraged to procreate the future generations of Australia. And, just as borders imposed on the movements of migrants can be mapped onto lines of racial segregation, so too does the differential encouragement of natalism by the Australian state reflect racial borders. It is implicitly understood that “women of caliber” does not include women of color.

My analysis of the Australian state’s implicit exclusion of Brown and Black people from the hegemonic horizons of reproductive futurism stems from a long history of the Australian government intervening into the social and biological reproduction of communities of color, specifically those of Aboriginal people in Australia. Historically, the Australian government sought to remove the children of Aboriginal parents and place them into the care of the state or of White foster families—a policy now referred to as the “Stolen Generations” and one which was formally in place in various forms from the early twentieth century until the 1970s. But even recently, the Australian government has developed less explicit ways to slowly repress and annihilate the future potentiality embodied by Aboriginal people. As Elizabeth Povinelli (2011: 28) writes, specifically in reference to Aboriginal people in Australia, “The futures of some, or the hopes that they have for their future, can never be a future. They can only drag others into the past” (Povinelli, 2011: 28). Povinelli is referring in this statement to “economies of abandonment,” describing how the Australian state frames the circular dreaming temporalities embodied by Aboriginal Australians as incompatible with the neoliberal futures of linear progress that are aspired to by the state. This incommensurability is realized empirically, specifically in terms of deteriorated housing conditions and structural “abandonment.” Again, we see that is through sites of social reproduction, like the home, that the work of temporal bordering is enacted in the situation described by Povinelli (2011). Observing the temporal incommensurability that is already attached to Black African migrants as I have recounted above, it is clear that they similarly represent a threat to collective futures that are imagined through the Australian state. For them, too, it has been through activities of everyday life that temporal bordering is enacted, since it is within such spaces of social reproduction that the futurity of families, and by extension collective populations, is being gradually reproduced over time.

If bordering is a process of playing out nationalist anxieties and establishing a hegemonic national identity, as Mary Pat Brady (2000) suggests, then bordering also functions temporally as a way to mediate anxieties over the future of a nation. Fears of cultural “decline” or “White replacement” through migration, which were once more fringe or at least less openly espoused, are now invoked as part of mainstream political discussion in predominantly White nations (Abascal, 2020), problematizing the inclusion of Black African migrants within nationalist frames of projected futures. Such anxieties have been expressed at the highest levels of political representation in Australia. In 2018, the then-Home Affairs minister, Peter Dutton, suggested that a recent increase of crime could be linked to what he described as “African street gangs,” stating that politicians “need to call it for what it is—of course it’s African gang violence,” followed by the assertion that some groups of migrants “are not prepared to integrate” and therefore “don’t belong in Australian society” (Karp, 2018). Prior to this, in 2007, the perceived integration “problems” of South Sudanese refugees in Australia was used to justify a reduction in the number of refugees accepted for resettlement to Australia from the African continent: a move which not only ideologically framed African people as “problematic” subjects, but which also had the empirical effect of preventing many would-be migrants from being able to migrate to Australia, and enter into the Australian national project (Hanson-Easey and Augoustinos, 2010). Essentially, they were bordered externally before they could be bordered within.

Clearly, bordering processes in Australia do not only reflect nationalist anxieties in the present. These are processes through which some groups of people, in this case racialized “African refugees,” are also temporally partitioned: that is, excluded from imaginaries of the future. More broadly, I would suggest, following Besteman’s (2019) analysis of “militarized global apartheid” as a form of North-South partitioning, that the futures of African subjects more globally are being increasingly excluded from Northern imaginaries of future prosperity. Whether through temporal bordering or having their identities flattened out into essentialized tropes of the “African refugee,” women I conducted fieldwork with were being routinely exposed to the grinding force of the major, acting to continuously border them from the lifeworlds of the majority White Australian population and reify their assumed incommensurablity. As I discuss below, however, these processes were not all encompassing. Minors—specifically minor futures—are eked out even within such contexts of domination.

Reproducing minor futures

The major does not wholly determine the lives of those within it, even as it acts as a structuring force. Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 19) describe how the major encompasses those whose taking up of this dominant grammar is incomplete and inauthentic, which in their analysis includes not only migrants but also the children of migrants, who collectively come to embody “the problem of minorities, the problem of minor literature.” But this “problem” of incompletely taking up the major is also a source of collective possibility: it is a means of evading normative codifications—which Deleuze and Guattari (1986) interestingly refer to as “territorializations”—and creating new forms of language—or, more broadly, “grammars”—that can never be fully interpreted from within or incorporated into the major. In this way, minors resemble a kind of “sideways” means of “moving across and beyond easy categorization”—not so much directly opposing forms of societal organization, but rather, as Andrucki et al. (2017) write, “queering” these through lateral, sideways modes of living.

The “minor,” therefore, is not a direct challenge to the “major” but a mode of being that rubs against it, creating friction simply by not reproducing the same hegemonic logics and binaries ( Katz, 1996, 2017). The example used by Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 19) to demonstrate the power of the minor is the work of Franz Kafka who, while writing in German, does so with the unique grammar of Czech Jewishness, and in doing so creates new—specifically “minor”—ways of reading and thinking, even within what they refer to as the “paper language” of German. For the migrants I worked with, however, it is not through language that the major of bordering is deterritorialized but through the gradual re-working the terms of their social reproduction: that is, through acts that subtly yet progressively decompose these everyday conditions of inscribed difference. Just as processes of social reproduction can work to encode difference and reinforcing the hegemonic logics of the bordering major, as I have described above, it is also within these sites of social reproduction that migrants gradually re-appropriate the terms of their codification, and establish vectors of new, indeterminate, futurity in which their value—and that of their children—is not reduced to incommensurable difference.

In a political context in which anxieties over the future racial makeup of a nation’s population have moved into mainstream politics (Abascal, 2020), having and raising Brown and Black children within those spaces can be understood as subtly revolutionary act; even as a minor, in which those who are marked as Other are creating means through which to be included within those futures. It is a way of establishing the temporal coevalness that they are, in so many other ways, denied. Almost every woman I worked with during the period of my research had given birth to a child within the first two years of their arrival in Australia. It became such an expectation attached to Congolese migrant women that some of the people I worked with in the migrant settlement support organizations referred to these children as “arrival babies.” This was a somewhat disparaging label, meant to emphasize the comparatively high number of children in Congolese families compared to White Australians. But what did these children mean to the mothers giving birth to them?

I was uniquely positioned to explore this question during my research, since several women gave birth to children over the course of my fieldwork. Like the decision to have a child in any situation, the reasonings and meanings behind the birth of a child following settlement in Australia were complex and deeply personal, unable in many ways to be generalized. What was important is that these were not “anchor” babies, in the sense that the women I worked with were already permanent residents and did not need a child to reinforce the legality of their migrant status. Instead, many of the women I spoke with described having a child after resettling in Australia as a kind of symbolic act marking the potentiality of their “new life” in Australia, following years—for some decades—of temporal stasis in a refugee camp. The new born child was a source of optimism, marking forward momentum. Literally and figuratively, the child represented “a new life,” which was how many women characterized these Australian births.

Part of the joy of having a child after migrating to Australia was, for many women I conducted fieldwork with, tied not only to this new-found sense of potentiality in Australia; it also emphasized the emergence of a reworked “African” future within the migration context. For them, bearing and raising “African-Australian” children—the terminology that most women I worked with used to describe children raised in Australia by African parents—represented new, collective, potentiality. In the frame set out by Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 19), these children embody “the problem of minorities” but also the power of possibility: the power to “challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path.” The “African-Australian” is a new identity, as yet undetermined; representing a way to potentially decompose and rearrange the bordering binary of “African”/“Australian.”

The label of “African-Australian” is not universally accepted by people with African heritage in Australia. For some, being hyphenated as “African-Australian” in popular media is experienced as just another way to homogenize the rich diversity of people, languages spoken, and histories from the African continent (Phillips, 2011) and reduce them as a group to dominant and deeply harmful stereotypes of deficiency (Mbembe, 2001). Even amongst Congolese people I worked with, some voiced frustration at being glossed into a homogenous African identity, although often their frustration was not at being labelled specifically as “African” but was in reference to being mistakenly identified as a person from South Sudan, with South Sudanese migrants being an especially vilified group of resettled refugees, associated (unfairly) with criminal activity (Windle, 2008). I once witnessed someone lean out of a window in a passing car to scream at a Congolese woman I was walking with, “Go back to Sudan!” I had been enraged by the explicit racism in the harassment; she had been infuriated by being misrecognized as Sudanese, but assured me that the racism was something that she was “used to.” Indeed, it was because of such experiences of being explicitly racialized as not belonging in Australia—and the implicit Whiteness associated with the Australian identity (Hage, 1998, 2016 )—that led Congolese people I worked with to associate themselves and their children with a broadly “African” identity. They could not escape their racialization, and so sought to use their visible difference to nuance what it means to be Australian by creating a simultaneously Black African and Australian mode of being (Kudzai, 2009).

Solange was one of the women who had a child during my field research, her first born in Australia. I visited her in the hospital the day after she gave birth. “This is my Australian baby,” she told me, “ …  my African-Australian baby.” Smiling down at the child in her arms, Solange told me that this baby, and the other babies born from former African refugees in Australia, were a new generation of children who would embody the “strength” of their African heritage and the opportunities of their Australian birthplace. Pushing her to elaborate, I asked, “But aren’t they Australian if they are born here? Surely their family background doesn’t mean they have to consider themselves African if they don’t want to.” In the immediate hours after giving birth, this was probably a difficult conversation to broach, but Solange was open to my questions. It seemed she had reflected on these ideas substantially well before I probed her.

“Look at her skin,” Solange said, and gently rubbed her child’s chubby forearm with two fingers. “She is black,” Solange told me. “She is African. That does not go away just because of where a person is born. She will always be African,” then, releasing her child’s arm, she said, “She will always be strong. She is Australian and African.” The same skin color that evokes the major of racialized bordering in Australia was being re-imagined in this moment by Solange as a source of strength, not in resistance to the racism that structures daily life in Australia but rather as a connection to a longer heritage of African potential. I came to see from this and other interactions throughout my fieldwork that, through reproduction, women like Solange were articulating a way of existing as an “African-Australian” that laterally departs from the hierarchical binary of Australian/African.

Intentionally bringing “African-Australian” children into the world is a way to re-work the major logics of bordering which would see these two subject positions as separate. Through this arena of social reproduction, Congolese women like Solange are creating a minor future in which it is possible to embody Africanness and Australianness at the same time, in a new and indeterminate mode of being. They are embodying a new temporal frontier: a minor future. But it is important to note that the minor futures that are being created against these major bordering processes nonetheless continue to draw on the grammar of nations and borders (“Australian” and “African”) even while these grammars are being re-made. Thinking about these children as “African-Australian” does not explicitly resist the major logics of bordering; it is a way to re-assemble these borders towards new “frontier futures.”

Frontier futures: Re-creating the conditions of social reproduction

The creation of minors/the minor for people I did fieldwork with was not only a means to re-imagine the borders that structure their everyday lives. It was also a way to think inter-generationally about the future. The minor—the “African-Australian” child—took on a temporal significance, emphasizing futurity in a context in which they, as Africa people in Australia, were denied contemporaneity and relegated to a seemingly primitive past. I consider that this minor, produced through a collective attention to inter-generationality and raising “African-Australian” children, can be thought of in terms of what I would theorize as “frontier futures.” I use the term “frontier” here with care, knowing that it has historically not only signaled the border between territories but specifically the violent contestations that have taken place over those. I recognize the ways that this minor re-appropriates the logics of borders but ultimately does not transcend these bordering logics: hence, the minor represents a kind of “frontier” rather than a trajectory of explicit resistance. I am drawing, here, on the work of Rasmussen and Lund (2018: 389), who argue that the “frontier” is not a specific place or time, rather, that frontiers take place and continue to do so in the contemporary period. Moreover, those trying to reckon with the frontier and their place across it are not only the most powerful actors who are able to establish zones of friction (Tsing, 2011), but also those who find themselves subjects of those bordering processes. In the ambivalent landscapes of bordered lives, people can work with and across the frictions to create new modes of self-understanding (Anzaldúa, 1987); and “minor” tempos that work across the “major” logics of bordering to push into new and indeterminate “frontiers” of futurity.

Inter-generational relatedness and the potentiality that was seen as embodied through “African-Australian” children was clearly a means through which Congolese people that I worked with—whether they were biological parents themselves or were simply part of the collective network of social reproduction within which these children were raised—sought to subtly shift their collective conditions of everyday life and the kinds of futures these imply. The daily indignities of being defined by Otherness and assumptions of temporal incommensurability were less abrasive when Congolese people I worked with were able to identify themselves and encounter the world as members of social network invested in raising a new generation of Africans in Australia—“African-Australians.” I most often witnessed these kinds of sentiments at community events. There, Congolese people would speak, both formally and informally, about the “strength” they were building as a collective in this new generation of young people. But to create the material conditions of social reproduction necessary to raise these children required organizing familial networks in particular ways, beyond just occasional community events. Families worked together to develop care strategies whereby one family would look after children on some days so that members of another family could work, and vice versa. One family with the largest vehicle took responsibility for driving children to and from school. Food was cooked and shared amongst families, not simply within them. Inter-generationality became a collective project. These practices of care and nurturance represent processes of social reproduction through which minor futures are being nurtured.

A central aspect of the minor, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1986), is that its creation inherently engages a collective politics, even if that is not explicitly expressed. Simply existing in a way that rubs against the major is a political act. That is why, even when talking here about individuals—specific children and parents—this emergent generation of “African-Australian” children represent more than just the establishment of intergenerational reproduction for particular families. Centering everyday life around conditions of social reproduction that nurture the development of an explicitly “African-Australian” generation expresses a collective potentiality: a minor future in which people with African heritage are centered and included.

Nonetheless, at first glance this specific kind of minor, which is established explicitly in terms of biological reproduction as much as processes of social reproduction more broadly, appears to reflect another kind of hegemonic logic: a sense of reproductive futurism and compulsory heteronormativity. While these regimes of normativity are not wholly encompassing—Lee Edelman (2004) has shown how queer refusal works to challenge these—it would be over-simplifying to presume that Congolese people I worked with, in centering children in their immediate sites of social reproduction, are driven by the same logics and agendas of reproductive futurism that dominate Eurocentric contexts. For example, any reading of heteronormativity within continental African contexts needs to be understood as a product of colonial interventions and missionary logics, which encourage compulsory heterosexuality through Western frames of marriage as an investment in the reproduction of African bodies for extractive and exploitative purposes (Epprecht, 2008; Msibi, 2011): another means through which African people have been oppressed through reproductive futurism. Therefore, it is important not to reduce African kinship relations to Eurocentric understandings of gender and sexuality. Parenthood, for example, continues to be understood in many contexts as a standalone social role rather than one conflated with heteronormative partnership (Amadiume, 1987; Epprecht, 2008; Oyèwùmí, 2000). Understanding social reproduction here (as elsewhere) requires thinking beyond heteronormative binaries. As Heidi Nast (2017) suggests, “queering” kinship in this way challenges us to see reproduction and caregiving—biologically or otherwise—in terms of being “called to life,” rather than being reduced to oppressive frames of reproducing heteronormativity.

Additionally, if reproductive futurism functions to normalize some ways of living while identifying others—and the futures they imply—as threats to normativity that must be obstructed from realization (Edelman, 2004), then we can read the reproduction of Black African children as a source of tension within that normative frame. For centuries, racial capitalism has commodified the children of Black women across the globe, either as economic potential or as economic burdens (Hartman, 2016; Nast, 2017). Black women’s reproduction has been, and continues to be, heavily controlled and critiqued (Roberts, 1999). Those outside the dominant racial frame of Whiteness are already marked as Other, meaning their children are not necessarily included in the children who are imagined as “the future” within settler-colonial contexts. Consequently, by having children on their own terms, Congolese parents are embodying a minor that rubs against the dominant forms of reproduction control that they have been subjected to over centuries, particularly the colonial-era interventions that aimed specifically at reducing their fertility (Hunt, 2017).

While childlessness has been described as a basis of social invisibility in some African contexts (Boerma and Mgalla, 1999; Kimani and Olenja, 2001; Upton, 2001), throughout my fieldwork I observed that nurturing a new generation did not exclude those who, by choice or biology, did not give birth to their own children. During my fieldwork I got to know three women who were childless involuntarily. These women were crucial caregivers for the children of immediate family members, and their community at large. Indeed, within the community I worked with, caregiving was communally oriented, and maternity was not reducible to biology (see also Nast, 2017). In social situations, many people—including myself—would find themselves with a baby strapped to their back and providing care for infants and young children. Women would collectively gather in kitchens during visits or events, where all of us would work together to prepare food for the children who were invariably close-by. These mundane moments of social reproduction reflected a broad commitment to collectively nurture children in a context where, historically, children had been fragile, and easily destroyed by regimes of colonial violence, poverty, and the ravages of war and conflict. For Congolese people, broadly, there was and continues to be a commitment to “wealth in people” (Guyer, 1995), embodied by the collective as much as biological parents. While in the account above social workers described children eating out of a communal dish as “eating like animals,” Congolese people saw those kinds of practices as collective nourishment of a new generation. Such nourishment builds towards an indeterminate, but inherently relational, minor future, which departs from the dominant regimes of bordering that have, historically and contemporaneously, centered on control and critique of Black reproduction and parenting.

The minor being that is being produced by Congolese people through the inter-generational potential of their children is one that re-appropriates the terms of inclusion and belonging within the major logics of bordering, in some ways reproducing these and in other ways re-imagining what borders mean in terms of localized identity, reproductive futurism, and social reproduction. In this way, the creation of the minor here reflects a “frontier” future in that it emerges from within the territorial logics of borders and bordering, yet embodies the potential to push and re-imagine how these are enacted and understood in the future. The minor is not a call to revolution here; rather it is, as Deleuze and Guattari (1986) recognized, a means of creating “revolutionary conditions”—what I would term “frontiers”—of future possibility. Specifically, in this context, within everyday sites of social reproduction.

Conclusion

It is not just Congolese people who have been resettled as refugees in Australia who are creating frontier futures. Across the globe, people are attempting to transgress the North–South partitioning that has structured global relations over the past centuries (Besteman, 2019; Vigh, 2010). I saw such logics of “frontier” futures elsewhere in my fieldwork, in which people I worked with would take up the logics of bordering in new ways to include themselves in futures of prosperity that they associated with life in the global North. They sought to push themselves into new frontiers of engagement with and hopefully across borders, embodying the potential to re-make these in the process.

During a period in which estimates about the number of displaced people across the globe have reached an unprecedented high, turning critical attention to the consequences of displacement is an important task, in both empirical and theoretical terms. Displacement is not an intrinsically negative experience. As Deleuze and Guattari (1986) point out, it is through discontinuity and displacement that the very possibility of “minor” forms of experience come about, as alternates to otherwise hegemonic orders. For the Congolese migrants I conducted fieldwork with, the contingency embodied through reproduction is the central means through which frontier futures are oriented, yet their experiences reflect the processes through which migrants at much broader scales forge frontiers through the teleology of their lives, particularly by undertaking uncertain migration passages.

To better understand how and why migrants are seeking out these frontiers of futurity, bringing attention to the interaction between displacement and temporality is crucial (Ramsay, 2020), especially if we are to move beyond catastrophizing and sensationalism (Cabot, 2019). Rather, if we consider, as Deleuze and Guattari (1986) suggest, that is through displacement that alternate—that is “minor”—experiences are forged, then we can begin to understand contemporary migration situations as sites of possibility, in which frontier futures are—or could be—mobilized at both personal and societal scales. In doing so, we can understand with more nuance that how displacement can come to decompose the racist colonial partitions that continue to border lives into the present, not as a direct “threat” to those geographic borders, but as the augury of new futures of possibility: frontier futures that are still in a state of invention.