This article explores the social lives of West African street vendors in New York City through the eyes of one such trader, Issifi Mayaki, an African immigrant from Niger who sold cloth and other items in Harlem and other areas of the city during the 1990s. The article describes how Issifi made his way in America and probes how he has drawn on native cultural and social resources to secure a niche in New York City. Issifi's financial and marketing strategies and his response to consumer demands, state regulation and local politics are also analyzed. From this description and analysis it is clear that people like Issifi inhabit complex, hybrid and fluid social worlds. How can social scientists capture this contemporary complexity? This article proposes that social scientists can, indeed, capture `on the ground' complexity by linking narrative, ethnographic description and social theory.
Amin, Samir
(ed.) (1971) Modern Migrations in West Africa. London: Oxford University Press.
2.
Basch, Linda
, Nina Glick-Schiller and Cristina Szanton-Blank (1994) Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects and the Deterritorialized Nation-State. New York: Gordon and Breach.
3.
Bohannon, Paul
(ed.) (1962) Markets in Africa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
4.
Bourgois, Philip
(1995) In Search of Respect. New York: Cambridge University Press.
5.
Burawoy, Michael
, Joseph A. Blum, Sheba George, Zsuzsa Gille, Teresa Gowan, Lynne Haney, Maren Klawiter, Steven H. Lopez, Sean O. Riain and Millie Thayer (2000) Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
6.
Callaghy, Thomas
and John Ravenhill (eds) (1993) Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline. New York: Columbia University Press.
7.
Castells, Manuel
and Alejandro Portes (1989) `World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the Informal Economy', in A. Portes, M. Castells and L.A. Benton (eds) The Informal Economy, pp. 11-37. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
8.
Clark, Gracia
(1994) Onions Are my Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
9.
Coombe, Rosemary J.
and Paul Stoller (1994) `X Marks the Spot: The Ambiguities of African Trading in the Commerce of the Black Public Sphere', Public Culture15: 249-275.
10.
Desjarlais, Robert
(1997) Shelter Blues. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
11.
Duneier, Mitchell
(1999) Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
12.
Ellison, Ralph
(1995) The Invisible Man. New York: Random House.
13.
Foner, Nancy
(1995) `General Editor's Introduction', in S. Mahler (ed.) Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conflict. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
14.
Foner, Nancy
(2000) From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
15.
Foner, Nancy
(ed.) (2001) New Immigrants to New York (2nd edn). New York: Columbia University Press.
16.
Gregoire, Emmanuel
(1992) Alhazai of Maradi: Traditional Hausa Merchants in a Changing Sahelian City. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner.
17.
Gregory, Steven
(1998) Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
18.
Gugler, Josef
and William Flanagan (1978) Urbanization and Social Change in West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harvey, David
(1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. London: Basil Blackwell.
21.
Lewis, I.M.
(ed.) (1980) Islam in Tropical Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
22.
MacGaffey, Janet
and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga (2000) Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
23.
Mahler, Sarah
(1995) American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
24.
Mollenkopf, John
and Manual Castells (eds) (1991) Dual City: Restructuring New York. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
25.
Nossiter, Adam
(1995) `A Shabby Welcome Mat', The New York Times, 11February, pp. 21, 23.
26.
Ong, Aihwa
(1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
27.
Painter, Thomas
(1988) `From Warriors to Migrants: Critical Perspectives on Early Migrations among the Zarma of Niger', Africa58(1): 87-100.
28.
Portes, Alejandro
(1999) `The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field', Ethnic and Racial Studies22(2): 217-237.
29.
Portes, Alejandro
, Manuel Castels and Lauren Benton (eds) (1989) The Informal Economy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
30.
Rouch, Jean
(1956) `Migrations au Ghana', Journal de la Société des Africanistes26(1-2): 33-196.
31.
Sanjek, Roger
(1998) The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
32.
Sassen, Saskia
(1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
33.
Sassen, Saskia
(1994) Cities in a World Economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge/Sage Press.
34.
Steiner, Christopher
(1993) African Art in Transit. London: Cambridge University Press.
35.
Stoller, Paul
(1992) The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
36.
Stoller, Paul
(1996) `Spaces, Places and Fields: The Politics of West African Trading in New York City', American Anthropologist96(4): 776-789.
37.
Stoller, Paul
(2002) Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
38.
Taylor, Lucien
, Ilisa Barbash and Christopher Steiner (1992) In and Out of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Media Extension.
39.
Waldinger, Roger David
(1996) Still the Promised City: African Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
