Deadline for proposals/abstracts: November 8, 2024
Editors: Rebecca Fasselt and Joya Uraizee
African writers and filmmakers have responded to large-scale population upheavals in a
variety of ways, including mixing memoir and fantasy, fact and fiction, in order to give
voices to a diverse range of African migrants across race, class, gender, sexuality, age and the
spectrum between so-called voluntary and forced movements. As Grace Musila notes,
“Africans’ experiences of migrancy, primarily in Europe and the USA, have preoccupied a
significant number of writers for years now” (482; see also Steiner). Due to this increased
visibility of African narratives of (forced) migration, mobility and diaspora, especially in the
global North, critics have begun to speak of a “migration turn” in African literary and cultural
production over the past few decades (Iheka and Taylor). Jack Taylor, for example,
foregrounds the expansive historical, political and social coordinates of African migration
novels that “mobilize the migratory imagination to frame critiques of colonial and
postcolonial Africa” (5). He calls for a “theory on the move” (14) grounded in the diverse
migrant protagonists’ lived experiences. Other scholars have argued for a distinct body of
writing by authors of the “new African diaspora[s]” (Okpewho and Nzegwu; see also
Fongang; Ouma, Childhood; Sackeyfio; Toivanen; Uwakweh) – what Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
terms the “diasporas of structural adjustment” (55) – in contrast to the earlier “diaspora of
enslavement” (Mazrui 344-345). This new African diaspora, Joya Uraizee observes,
“includes many kinds of journeys, forced as well as voluntary, all of which build on the
foundations set by the trans-Atlantic slave trade” (46). Leaving behind a narrow “continental
concept of African literature,” Lokangaka Losambe and Tanure Ojaide read the “multiple
aesthetic sensibilities” and different articulations of “diasporic consciousness” across time
and space in the writings by post-1960s to 2020s “immigrant African authors” in the global
North (and, to a lesser extent, the global South), as a “major part of the distinct larger African
diasporic literary tradition” (5). Broadening the contours of global North-centered African
literary and cultural production, scholars have also turned to texts on intra-African migrations
and diasporas, “pluralizing the African diasporas and mapping their multiple identities and
identifications with [the signifier] Africa” (Zeleza 38; see Moudouma; Fasselt
“Decolonising”, “Appeals”; Adeoba; Fasselt and Ndlovu; Ouma, “Reading”). These recent
studies thus foreground the multiplicity and multidirectionality of African movements and, at
least in part, also cover precarious forms of African migrancy. They do so in ways that
question celebratory narratives of Afropolitan “global crossings”, which tend to silence
racialised Black African migrants “trapped in global coloniality of those crossings” (Gbogi
4).
This volume will focus on refugee narratives in contemporary African literature, film,
television, digital genres and a range of other popular cultural forms. Individual essays will
address African cultural engagements with, and reframings of, African refugeehood, a topic
on which there is a relative scarcity of sustained analyses. They will also challenge the
unbroken pervasiveness of the trope of “the helpless African refugee” in the Western
imagination. Despite the fact that the vast majority of African movements are not
immediately related to conflicts and war (Pasura and Makina 9), dominant global North
public discourse and media representations of Black African migrants continue to be couched
in a spectacular language of crisis. Binyavanga Wainana satirized such representations in his
“How to Write about Africa,” which featured “The Starving African, who wanders the
refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West”, who has “no past”
and only speaks about her “(unspeakable) suffering” (93). Such pathologizing accounts, as
Falola and Yacob-Haliso note, fail to locate “African refugee issues within exploitative
global, colonial, and neocolonial systems of power and knowledge production” (xxiv). These
dehistoricised media accounts, moreover, tend to elide the fact that the African continent
hosts more than a third of the world’s “forcibly displaced populations” (Ndegwa 184), often
in refugee camps rooted in colonial practices of encampment (Opi) established by the
UNHCR without much consideration of diverse local ways of “co-existence and acceptance”
(Pinduka 123) among “locals” and “refugees”.
In this volume, we adopt a critical refugee studies approach that “conceptualizes the ‘refugee’
as a critical idea but also as a social actor whose life, when traced, illuminates the
interconnection of [slavery,] colonization, war, and global social change” (Espiritu 11). We
build on critical refugee studies work in the Humanities which seeks to transcend insufficient
and limiting politico-legal definitions of political refuge by centring embodied experiences of
refugees in ways that “contribute to the shaping of alternative, resistant or emergent
conceptions of the refugee” (Cox et al. 8). We are also informed by Vinh Nguyen’s notions
of “refugeetude” and “lived refuge”, which reconfigure refuge with a focus on its “affective
experiences and social relations” as well as its “social ongoingness” to highlight how “refuge
is not a predetermined sociopolitical ‘good,’ but a continual process in which refugees
negotiate, revise, and recalibrate what it means to exist in, with, and under refuge” (3).
Following this turn to the material, affective, relational and temporal dimensions of being a
refugee, we seek to examine the ways in which these play out within the diverse historico-
political and geographical contexts of intra- and intercontinental African refugee narratives
across a range of cultural forms. We are interested in how African cultural forms go beyond
narrow legal understandings of “the refugee” as enshrined in the 1951 UN Convention on the
Status of Refugees (limited to Europeans only at the time), the 1967 Protocol, and the OAU’s
Refugee Convention of 1969. As such, we seek contributions that explore how contemporary
African cultural production, through its engagements with the lived experiences of forced
displacement, might bring to the fore alternative epistemologies about refugees. Our interest
in refugee narratives also takes the focus away from celebratory readings of the Afropolitan
globe-trotter in contemporary African diasporic literature. Instead, it positions histories of
slavery, colonialism, indentureship and their afterlives, visible across the globe, at the heart
of the study of African migration. Due to the ongoing dominance of Anglophone refugee
narratives, we particularly invite contributions on texts in Afrophone and other languages.
We invite essays that engage with aspects of African literary and cultural production and
refugeehood.
Topics might include but are not limited to the following:
• Forced displacements, refugeehood and the afterlife of slavery and colonialism
• Decolonial critiques of humanitarian paradigms in African cultural production about
refugees
• Genres of refugee writing, theatre, film, digital forms
• The aesthetics of refugee texts
• African refugee knowledges about refugeehood
• Afrophone and Europhone refugee texts outside the strictures of the nation-state and
juridical-political formulations of refuge
• Everyday lived experiences of refugees, reformulations of “refugeetude” in African
cultural production
• Affective dimensions of refugees’ lived experiences
• Kinetic aspects of refugee mobilities
• Refugee testimony and mediation
• Refugee narratives and queer intimacies
• African refugee childhoods
• Refugee ecologies, climate-induced refugeehood, refugeehood and the capitalocene
• Refugee texts and the “black aquatic” (Walcott)
• Refugee solidarities, ethics of care and pan-Africanism
• Critiques of normative formulations of refugeehood (refugee gratitude, assimilation,
neoliberal scripts of self-empowerment)
• Engagements with intra-African refugee movements
• Narratives of encampment within and outside the African continent
• Spatial and temporal dimensions of forced displacement and refuge
• Futurity of African refugee narratives
• Refugee narratives and memory work
• Refugee narratives and activism
• Audiences of refugee narratives and the question of extroverted African cultural
production
• The commodification of African refugee trauma in the global literary/cultural
marketplace
Essays should be 7,000 – 8,500 words, including references, and should follow the MLA
Handbook (9th edition) for in-text citations and works cited. If you are interested in
contributing a chapter to this volume, please submit a 500-word proposal/abstract by
November 8, 2024, to joya.uraizee@slu.edu and rebecca.fasselt@up.ac.za. Accepted
proposals will be considered for a panel at the African Literature Association Conference in
Nairobi in June 2025. Final chapters will be due by August 29, 2025. We intend to publish
the volume with Duke University Press or a comparable press.
Works cited:
Adeoba, ‘Gbenga. “Migration and Postmemorial Witnessing in Contemporary African
Poetry.” Literature, Critique, and Empire Today, 2024, 30333962241253086.
Cox, Emma et al. Refugee Imaginaries: Research across the Humanities. Edinburgh UP,
2019.
Espiritu, Yến Lê. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. U of California
P, 2014.
Falola, Toyin, and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso. African Refugees. Indiana UP, 2023.
Fasselt, Rebecca. “Decolonising the Afropolitan: Intra-African Migrations in post-2000
Literature.” Handbook of African Literature, edited by Moradewun Adejunmobi and
Carli Coetzee, Routledge 2019, pp. 75-91.
Fasselt, Rebecca, and Isaac Ndlovu. “Reimagining Anti-colonial Exile and Post-
independence Transnational Movements across Southern and East Africa in Intra-
African Migration Literatures.” The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature,
edited by Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt and Carly McLaughlin, Routledge, 2024, pp.
396-409.
Fongang, Delphine. The Postcolonial Subject in Transit: Migration, Borders, and
Subjectivity in Contemporary African Diaspora Literature. Lexington Books, 2019.
Gbogi, Tosin. “Against Afropolitanism: Race and the Black Migrant Body in Contemporary
African Poetry.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2022,
00219894221113767.
Iheka, Cajetan, and Jack Taylor. African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space.
Rochester UP, 2018.
Losambe, Lokangaka, and Tanure Ojaide. The Routledge Handbook of the New African
Diasporic Literature. Routledge, 2024.
Mazrui, Ali A. “Islam and the Black Diaspora: The Impact of Islamigration.” The African
Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, edited by Isidore Okpewho,
Carole Boyce Davies, Ali A. Mazrui, Indiana UP, 1999, pp. 344-349.
Moudouma, Sydoine Moudouma. Intra- and Inter-continental Migrations and Diaspora in
Contemporary African Fiction. PhD Thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2013.
Musila, Grace A. “East and Central Africa.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.
50 no. 4, 2015, pp. 481-492.
Ndegwa, David Gakere. “Forced Migration in Africa.” Routledge Handbook of African
Migration, edited by Daniel Makina and Dominic Pasura, Routledge, 2023, pp. 182-
196.
Nguyen, Vinh. Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. U of California P, 2023.
Okpewho, Isidore and Nkiru Nzegwu. The New African Diaspora. Indiana UP, 2009.
Opi, Bosco. Refugee Coloniality: An Afrocentric Analysis of Prolonged Encampment in
Kenya. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
Ouma, Christopher. “Reading the New Diaspora in Yewande Omotoso’s Fiction.” The
Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature, edited by Lokangaka
Losambe and Tanure Ojaide, Routledge, 2024, pp. 555-567.
Ouma, Christopher EW, Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature:
Memories and Futures Past. Pan Macmillan, 2020.
Pasura, Dominic and Daniel Makina. “Contemporary African Migration: An Introduction.”
Routledge Handbook of African Migration, edited by Daniel Makina and Dominic
Pasura, Routledge, 2023, pp. 1-20.
Pinduka, Norman. “Refugeehood in Crisis and the Quest for a Decolonial Turn in Africa.”
Pan-African Conversations, vol. 1, no. 2, 2023, pp. 112-130.
Sackeyfio, Rose A. West African Women in the Diaspora: Narratives of Other Spaces, Other
Selves. Routledge, 2021.
Steiner, Tina. Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in
Contemporary African Literature. Routledge, 2009.
Taylor, Jack. African Migration and the Novel: Exploring Race, Civil War, and
Environmental Destruction. Rochester UP, 2024.
Toivanen, Anna-Leena. Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic
Literatures. Brill, 2021.
Uraizee, Joya. “Paradise Destroyed: Exile and Diaspora in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise
and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names.” The Routledge Handbook of the
New African Diasporic Literature, edited by Lokangaka Losambe and Tanure
Ojaide, Routledge, 2024, pp. 46-56.
Uwakweh, Pauline Ada. Women Writers of the New African Diaspora: Transnational
Negotiations and Female Agency. Routledge, 2022.
Wainana, Binyavanga. “How to Write about Africa.” Granta 92, 2005, pp. 91–95.
Walcott, Rinaldo. “The Black Aquatic.” liquid blackness, vol. 5, no. 1, 2021, pp. 63-73.
Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. “Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic.” African
Affairs, vol. 104, no. 414, 2005, pp. 35-68.
Editors
Joya Uraizee is Professor of English at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, where
she teaches postcolonial literature and film. She is the author of This is No Place for a
Woman: Nadine Gordimer, Nayantara Sahgal, Buchi Emecheta and the Politics of Gender
(2000), In the Jaws of the Leviathan: Genocide Fiction and Film (2010), and Writing That
Breaks Stones: African Child Soldier Narratives (2020). She is working on a monograph
analyzing African child refugee narratives. She has published articles on same sex desire in
east African cinema, migrant African children, and religious fanaticism in Bollywood
movies, among others.
Rebecca Fasselt is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria.
Her research examines literatures of intra-African migration and diaspora. She is co-editor of
The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature (2024) and The Short Story in South
Africa: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives (2022).