Intra-African Migration and Diasporic Literatures

Abstract Transnational intra-African migration and intracontinental diasporas have increasingly become the focus of social science scholars who have attempted to shift attention away from the hegemonic Global North–centered study of migration toward the complexities and multiplicities of previously marginalized transnational movements within the African continent. This body of research has consistently rejected sensationalizing false claims of an “African exodus” to Europe and North America by highlighting that transnational migration within Africa is at least on par with migration away from the continent, while migration between different states in sub-Saharan Africa outweighs extracontinental migration. Studies on African migrations and diasporic narratives largely remain tethered to prevailing South-North frameworks that continue to structure literary migration studies globally. Existing work on transnational intracontinental migration and diasporic literatures mainly examines contemporary writing, which risks framing intracontinental movements as solely a present-day phenomenon. These studies often continue to rely on conventional teleological templates that closely link African literatures to narratives of the nation, moving from anticolonial resistance, cultural nationalism, and postcolonial disillusionment to experiences of migration and diaspora following the ruinous structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 1980s. Rereading texts of the epic tradition, narratives of enslavement, literatures of the Mfecane, colonial labor migrations, anticolonial exile, and postindependence disillusionment for traces of intracontinental migratory lives places African migration and diasporic literatures onto a broader geographical and temporal canvas. It demonstrates that intra-African cross-border movements have been integral to African literary forms from the very beginning. The growing body of contemporary literary and cultural texts engaging with intracontinental migrations and other forms of mobilities and diasporic formations demonstrates how present-day neoliberal border regimes on the continent, born of the violence of colonial border impositions, elicit a wide range of cultural responses that demand a longer historical perspective. While these texts situate migratory movements within ongoing legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism, they also bring into view the deeply varied local political, economic, and social realities of intracontinental migratory and diasporic lives across time and different regions that bypass the Global North as a migratory center. Grounded in a pluriversal approach to migration literatures, the reading of intracontinental migration and diasporic works also calls for a broader generic canvas, incorporating oral literatures, newsprint literature, and various popular forms, which are often erased by the dominance of the novel in contemporary African literary migration and diasporic studies. A re-examination of African literary histories through the lens of intracontinental migrations and diaspora allows for the tracing of continuities and discontinuities between different generations of African writers rather than examining migration through the lens of recency.