E-motions: A History of Unrecorded Female Rural Displacements in Post-Slavery Africa

Abstract This special issue introduces the concept of e-motions in (post-)slavery Africa to analyse movement or motion that is not so much driven by labour and economic survival but rather by relational/emotional (dis-)connection. We introduce the term e-motions to qualify the gendered mobilities mainly of subaltern girls and women who have been voluntarily or forcedly moving in the past and present to establish and consolidate emotional ties. These ties exist in intimate spheres that are profoundly entangled in histories of slavery and asymmetrical dependencies. In this special issue, we use the concept of e-motions to flesh out the link between small-scale and rural (im-)mobilities executed by subaltern women and girls, who are expected to fulfil important ritualised roles in various emotional stages of life through pathic labour and care work. While not denying we are living in a world with exponential digitisation, mobilities and extreme forms of exclusion, we wish to historicise less spectacular but acute, highly impactful and often implicitly violent e-motions that mostly women at the lowest echelons of their societies faced and continue to face in a male-dominated world.