Adventure Capital

"In a detailed reconceptualization of transport, Kleinman reveals Paris’s Gare du Nord as a place for social becoming, a station replete with transactions of all kinds, a critical machine for Africa making its imprint on a larger world of operations, and the contestations entailed in doing so."—AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield

"Disrupting dominant depictions of harried and desperate migrants currently flooding Europe from the South, this enthralling book tells a different story: that of West African adventurers who, for decades, have traveled to France to use its urban infrastructure in building durable futures—at once in the metropole, and back in the village. The result is a highly innovative study, both inspired and compelling."—Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Harvard University

"In refreshingly clear and concise language, Kleinman underscores the work of ethnography—to describe a place, the Gare du Nord; the history and social, political, and economic context of the place; and the people, West Africans adventurers from Mali and Senegal, who inhabit the place. As such, readers are transported into the Gare du Nord, where they meet and get to know the protagonists of a particularly gripping twenty-first-century narrative, replete with the complex and considerable whys and wherefores of West African immigration to France."––Paul Stoller, author of Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World