African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space [Paperback]

This essay collection examines the representations of migration in African literature, film, and other visual media. Inspired by the proliferation of texts focused on this theme and the ongoing migration crises, essays in the volume probe the ways in which African cultural productions shape and are shaped by the migration debates, the contributions these productions make to an understanding of globalization, and the stylistic features of the works. The texts analyzed here include important recent writings and films that have yet to receive considerable scholarly attention, by artists such as Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, Leila Aboulela, Noo Saro-Wiwa, and Marzek Allouache.

Current scholarship on migration largely focuses on the journey from Third World spaces to the First World, thereby radically limiting our understanding of migratory flows. This project works against this lopsided analysis of migration and considers narratives of return as central to migratory flows. The book also invests in underanalyzed and underrepresented diasporas on the continent including the Lusophone and Indian diasporas. Unlike much scholarship on migration in African cultural studies, which tends to focus primarily on a genre (literature), a region, or a specific language, the current book emphasizes Africa's geographical and linguistic diversity by being attentive to Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone areas, as well as an array of texts encompassing various genres.

CAJETAN IHEKA is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama. JACK TAYLOR is Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

"Cajetan Iheka and Jack Taylor's edited collection is a refreshing addition to the scholarship on African migration. Not only does it privilege and represent the dynamics of African migration across different countries in Africa, through its representation of migration from different cultural productions, it emphasizes that to adequately understand an issue that has seemingly defined a people, all systems and genres of cultural production and means of self-representation should be assessed."

AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY ()

"Iheka and Taylor's volume presents a broad and complex picture of African migration and, more importantly, promotes examinations of work that showcases the complexity of race relations in post-colonial societies and humanized images of migrants."

JOURNAL OF REFUGEE STUDIES ()

"It is a point that aptly summarizes the diversity of insightful and rich scholarship on display within African Migration Narratives, a work whose contribution to the fields of African studies, migration studies, and literary studies is invaluable in a time when, in the words of the collection's editors Iheka and Taylor, 'the world faces not a crisis in immigration, but a crisis in our capacity to offer hospitality."

AFRICA IS A COUNTRY ()