Abstract
This book presents a broad and multifaceted image of African migration and more significantly showcases the intricacy of race relations in post-colonial societies and humanized imagery of migrants. It also promotes examinations of the work of scholars like Marzek Allouache, Leila Aboulela, Noo Saro-Wiwa, Chimamanda Adichie and Teju Cole, who are yet to receive considerable scholarly attention.
The book is divided into 15 chapters and four sections. Section one, ‘African Migration on the Screen: Films of Migration’, analyses filmic representations of migration to highlight the diversity and multiplicity of migration routes. This section’s value is in the attention to how these more predictable narratives, ranging from tragic Mediterranean crossings to ‘fortunate’ visa lottery winners, share a collective critique of how the West imagines and responds to African migrants inadequately and contradictorily.
Section two, ‘Forgotten Diasporas: Lusophone and Indian Diasporas’, provides a refreshing break from standard migratory flows by paying attention to what we call ‘forgotten diasporas’, which often neglected in the study of African literature and culture. Though, this part of the book, in my opinion is a bit contradictory. The title immediately suggests a greater focus on Lusophone and Indian migration flows, enveloping spaces that usually be given less international scholarly consideration. However, only Niyi Afolabi’s chapter actually highlights the geographical space delimited in this section of the book, discussing the work of José Eduardo Agualusa, Mia Couto and Germano Almeida. The other two chapters also primarily focus on South Africa, the United States and Peru, and not on Lusophone or Indian diasporas.
Section three, ‘Migration Against the Grain: Narratives of Return’, examines an underappreciated and under-analysed migratory pattern: the return. The chapters in this section focus primarily on contemporary African novels dealing with African protagonists who return to their native lands. This section theorizes the narrative that though return migration has long been analysed in the social sciences, the affective dimension of such mobility within literature remains an understudied phenomenon. The scholars in this section broaden the earlier scholars’ work by considering return migration as a forgotten diaspora in and of itself. Madhu Krishnan illustrates this in the book by analysing two Nigerian texts, Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012) and Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc. (2014). Krishnan demonstrates how return migration complicates binary understandings of belonging for the returnee visiting the homeland. In this collection of essays, Toni Pressley-Sanon extends further the analysis of Saro-Wiwa’s travel memoir to mull over the returnee’s struggle to recover connections and relationships within a homeland, knowing the developments that both time and geographical distance have brought. Shankar, however, prioritizes the characters of July within July’s People (1981) and Abdu of the Pickup (2001) to exhibit how migrancy becomes an inevitable condition for impoverished characters. Such individuals ironically find their movements constrained under the passbooks of the apartheid regime and the visa requirements of nation-states.
Section four, ‘Migration and Difference: Indigeneity, Race, Religion, and Poetry at the Margins’ draws attention to the function of memory, globalization, neoliberal politics and violence in contemporary African narratives to understand the politics of migration and belonging. The section also demonstrates the importance of indigeneity and religion concerning migration politics and as essential markers of subjectivity.
In my view, one of the most significant contributions that this book makes is to bring necessary attention to under-acknowledged, underappreciated and omitted experiences and narratives. This collection of essays convolutes the familiar account of migration in terms of geographical location, perception and form, as it accurately develops more completely and more humanely the prejudice of those born in African post-colonies who attempt to leave the place.
This book also seems to be a response to our changing political and social climate. The migration crisis has left no part of the world untouched as people escape Africa and the Middle East in search of better opportunities in Europe and America. Migrants from Latin America also implore the United States’ border with Mexico, begging to be let in or finding ways to enter illegally. As migration increases, the intensity of the politics of migration increases as well. As is well known, anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise as right-wing, anti-immigrant movements make waves throughout Europe and the United States. In this way, the collection itself is birthed out of the increasing political tensions surrounding the politics of migration. This heightened socio-political attention to migration is also responsible for the proliferation of African narratives on the subject.
This book also imbues upon less studied and marginalized diasporas on the continent, including the Indian and Lusophone diasporas though not much. Unlike much scholarship on migration in African cultural studies, which tends to focus more on a genre (literature), a region, or a selected language, this collection of essays emphasizes Africa’s geographical and linguistic diversity as well as an array of texts encompassing various genres.
This book covers a range of materials and tried to cover many routes or migratory paths. Rather than going to the traditional path of presenting migration as one street out of Africa and into the cosmopolitan West, this book has tied several issues under the one theme of migration like the creation of the black diaspora, shaping black subjectivity, and contemporary African migration narratives in particular.