The Conolese Diaspora in Brussels and Hybrid Identity Formation: Multi-Scalar Identity and Cosmopolitan citizenship

In most of the literature on transnational communities and urban identity formation, emphasis is placed on two main processes of immigration that have shaped transnational presence. On the one hand, considerable attention has been paid to the emergence of large communities of migrating people who were positively attracted, if not encouraged to move, to fuel local labor markets (as in the case of guest workers in North-Western Europe). On the other hand, research has focused on mass migration movements through colonial and post-colonial networks (as in the case of, for example, Asian and West Indian immigration into the UK) or the legacies of the slave trade (Koser 2003). Urban transnational communities are customarily analysed from either or both of these vantage points. The Congolese diaspora in Belgium, however, does not correspond easily to these two typical cases. This atypical character (but one that will become more prevalent in a neoliberal and post-national world), however, has important consequences and permits us to think through the formation of transnational identity stripped from the singular dominance of the search for work and income on the one hand or symbolically overcoded by a distinct post-colonial sensitivity on the other.