After a brief presentation about my current HERA grant on migrant night-scapes (not too much to say yet, since the project is in its initial stages), I will focus on a current book project (Lies That Take Place) related to my work with West African and Haitian migrants in São Paulo, Brazil.

In the talk I will make a brief argument for why fiction is a necessary complementary genre to conventional ethnography and policy analysis in the current discussion of migration. I will then read a piece of ethnographic fiction entitled “How High to Pour the Tea.” It tells a tale of immigrant documentation in contemporary Brazil. Ada and Moussa are the main protagonists, along with the humming machines inside Ada’s apartment located in Brás, a post-industrial neighborhood close to the center of the city. The story pivots between dramatic action in Ada’s apartment and the narrator’s reflections while he endures dental surgery in another part of the city.

“How High to Pour the Tea” is part of an ongoing dialogue between cultural anthropology and literature. The story demonstrates certain techniques of Afro-futurism and speculative fiction, represented by authors such as Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin, to discuss the complicated nature of immigrant documentation and its inherent gender and race politics. In addition, the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis has also significantly influenced the text.