Performance raises fundamental issues about bodily praxis, human agency, temporality, and discursive knowledge and calls into question conventional understandings of tradition, repetition, mechanical reproduction, and ontological definitions of social order and reality. Across academic disciplines and across modes of production, however, performance is a contested concept, “meaning that its very existence is bound up in disagreement about what it is, and that disagreement over its essence is itself part of that essence” (Strine, Long, and HopKins, 1989: 183). In other words, performance has no precisely agreed upon definition. Rather it varies in scope and import from one academic discipline to another and from one practitioner, or human agent, to another.

In the emerging field of performance studies, performance is open-ended, but it privileges process, the temporally or processually constructed nature of human realities, and the agency of knowledgeable performers who have embodied particular techniques and styles to accomplish it (M. Drewal, 1989b; Conquergood, 1989). In the broadest sense, performance is the praxis of everyday social life; indeed, it is the practical application of embodied skill and knowledge to the task of taking action. Performance is thus a fundamental dimension of culture as well as the production of knowledge about culture. It might include anything from individual agents' negotiations of everyday life, to the stories people tell each other, popular entertainments, political oratory, guerrilla warfare, to bounded events such as theater, ritual, festivals, parades, and more.

There is strong evidence that labor is highly mobile in many developing countries, especially in Africa. The history of the African continent is rich in accounts of various forms of movement across and within national boundaries—promoted by trade, warfare, pastoralism, slaving, natural disasters, and evangelization. Evidence, of fact and in myth and legend, indicates the occurrence of large-scale migrations in the past. The dispersion of Fulani-speaking peoples throughout the northern parts of West Africa is well documented. In addition to such movements, there are the age-old seasonal wanderings of herders seeking water and pasture for livestock. During the present century, the migration of labor to centers of mineral, oil, and industrial production has become one of the most important demographic features of West Africa and the continent as a whole (Adepoju, 1977, 1978; Zachariah and Conde, 1981; Addo, 1974; Little, 1974; Mabogunje, 1972, 1980). The migratory movement of population in Africa is very dynamic and complex; its general features are not well understood, and hence are rarely studied.

This paper is an attempt to understand the economic and sociocultural factors that have influenced the character of the international migratory flow of labor in West Africa. The hub of the investigation is to provide an understanding of the patterns of labor migration in West Africa and evaluate the models utilized in the explanation of international migratory trends in the region.

Mozambique is a country that lends itself to metaphor—of high ideals, of challenge to the world system, and of unfulfilled aspirations. There, questions that elsewhere are raised in academic forums are articulated as matters of public policy: searching questions about the structures that perpetuate international inequality, the ability of a mass movement to erode the basis of worldwide domination, and aspirations for democracy amid pervasive poverty. In an extreme form, to be sure, Mozambique has gone the way of the continent—from lofty expectations to an increasingly marginal position in the international division of labor. This article is an attempt to discern the dynamics of marginalization in the world system. Informed by theoretical debates over the emerging international division of labor, this is an effort to rethink, and draw lessons from, one concrete historical experience: the global constraints and opportunities facing Mozambique.

Stated briefly, the core argument is that the concept of the international division of labor must be stretched to account fully for the regionalization of problems and solutions. While internationalization entails increasing integration into expanding financial markets and penetration by transnational corporations, Africa has not kept pace with the global manufacturing system and the related upsurge of export activities. Although industrialization is not a magic remedy for the problems of underdevelopment, upgrading the role of manufacturing is a key component of productive economic growth. However, efforts to promote manufacturing are constrained by market-based reforms insofar as they are anti-egalitarian and erode the basis of democracy at the very time when forces at home and abroad are pushing for democratization.