Performing return: victims, criminals or heroes? Senegalese male returnees engaging with the stigma of deportation

In Senegal, migration can both be a stigma and a privilege; it can increase social standing but also lead to stigmatization and suffering following aborted migration projects. This article uses performativity as an analytical lens to explore how Senegalese male migrants narrate and perform their return to Senegal in reaction to diverse social expectations. It focuses on men who were deported from Europe or who lived there under threat of deportation before returning voluntarily. Despite appeals by migration scholars to go beyond a limited discourse of victimhood, few studies explore returnees’ agency and even fewer the agency of deportees. Based on almost a year of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Senegal, we examine multiple simultaneous performances and narrations by returnee men. Despite the numerous difficulties they experience, returnees narrate success post-return by engaging with hegemonic masculine discourses of being a provider, protector and devout Muslim. But ambiguity about return is common, including silencing of suffering in public and private spaces. Performing return as an agentic act, regardless of the duration of return or whether it was voluntary, can enable returnees to conceive of belonging to Senegalese society. By recognizing returnees’ agentic performativity, this article moves beyond common categorizations of deportees as victims or criminals.