Navigating Precarity: Emotions, Power, and Intersectional Perspectives on African Migrants in Guangzhou

While scholarship has increasingly recognised the role of emotion in migration, less attention has been paid to how emotions are reconfigured across intersecting boundaries in non-Western contexts. This study addresses this gap by examining the emotional experiences of African male migrants in Guangzhou, China, where migrants navigate everyday life within overlapping racial, cultural, and legal precarity. Using an intersectional lens, the study shows how emotions are shaped by and reacted to the interplay of race, gender, and class within broader structures of power. Drawing on 14 in-depth online interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and extended participant observation, this study develops the concept of emotional translation: the strategic process migrants do to reframe, reinterpret and repurpose their emotions in response to shifting hierarchies of power. Building on Hochschild’s emotional labour and affective economies, the concept highlights how emotions are not only managed or circulated but also actively transformed in meaning and function across racialised and cross-cultural boundaries. This article contributes to South–South migration and affective studies by showing how emotions serve as sites of both vulnerability and resistance, illuminating how migrants negotiate not only material constraints but also the affective landscapes of racialised belonging.