8 - Reading Space, Subjectivity, and Form in the Twenty-First-Century Narrative of Return

Summary

It has become commonplace in scholarship to place the experience of migration at the center of contemporary African literature, viewing the thematic content of the former as integral to the expressive aesthetics of the latter. Ranging from the claim that “African writers have become part of the worldwide phenomena of migration and globalization with the attendant physical, sociocultural, psychic, and other forms of dislocation, which permeate their individual writings,” to the observation that approximately “half of all the writers hailing from African countries are said to have lived abroad,” to the focus on “mobility [as] a key component” of this body of work, critical accounts of contemporary African writing place transnational fluidity at the heart of its epistemic foundations. While one might argue that an overdetermining emphasis on concepts such as migration and diaspora has hampered how contemporary criticism has engaged with literary production from and around the African continent, it is equally the case that a growing body of critical writing has emerged that registers how contemporary writing from Africa and its diasporas complicates teleological visions of migration in ways that far surpass the straightforward binaries of “here and there, homeland and hostland and indigenousness and foreignness on which it is assumed to be predicated.”

Along with a shift in emphasis from the former imperial center of the United Kingdom to the current symbolic center of the United States, contemporary Anglophone migration narratives reflect, too, an asymmetric, cyclical dynamism that both mimics long-running patterns of circular migration within territories and disallows any reading of migration as a simple, teleological, or Manichean movement from periphery to center. Maintaining epistemological, ontological, and material ties across multiple locations spanning continental “home” (or “homes”) and Euro-American “destination,” the polydirectional movements of contemporary migration that emerge in African literature defy any singular category or conscription. Instead, they foreground a “decentered and dynamic idea of Africa” in which the continent is “conceived as a site of passage and reproduced through circulation and mixing.” This is a literary aesthetic that registers the complexity of the agonistic and ongoing process of self-fashioning, set against the complex material circuits of a vision of diaspora that is multiaxial and multiple in its purview.