Given the overwhelming prevalence of migration narratives in African literary and cultural production since the turn of the century, it is almost difficult (if not outright impossible) for a book to “say something new” about migration. It is this difficult task that Iheka and Taylor’s African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space not only takes up, but also performs very successfully. This book offers fresh and crucial insights into the migration story of Africa and Africans by weaving together historiography, political economics, global geopolitics, culture, literature, and film, all tied neatly together—rather unexpectedly, but very importantly—around the rubric of ethics. The ethical impulse that animates this project is as clearly articulated as it is palpable throughout the entire book. As the editors note in their introduction, “The world faces not a crisis in immigration, but a crisis in our capacity to offer hospitality, to welcome those in need. . . . This collection, in part, is an effort to nudge humanity toward justice—to encourage the reader to welcome in advance the ones who have yet to come” (14).

African Migration Narratives carves a niche for itself within the vast ocean of scholarly meditations about the migration question on a number of fronts. It is a compendium that self-reflects about the needs for its interventions and at the same time shrewdly articulates, in clear terms, those points of intervention.

To begin with, all the chapters of the book—even though dwelling on disparate textual genres, time periods, and theoretical methodologies—approach the (hi)story of migration in contemporary global imagination from a deconstructive standpoint. Too often have migration discourses been parochially limited to the movement of bodies across intracontinental and intercontinental spaces. African Migration Narratives effectively decenters the body as a focal migratory agent and emphasizes the point that migration actually entails the transactionary movements of labor, capital, cultures, and other immaterial aspects of human existence. One chapter, in fact, explores the migration of the text—unpacking how the machinery of international publishing impacts upon how literary texts are produced and circulated. The perceptive implication of this is that the book beams the light on how the global north has been a beneficiary of African migration, whereas the conventional discourse has always cast the West as a refuge to which Africans flee in search of better lives. Hence, in reversing the popular rhetoric (of the unidirectional migratory flow of the parasitic global south), this book draws attention to the hypocritical dynamic in which “migrants are depicted as liabilities more often than fellow citizens of the world, and they are rarely depicted as potential new laborers, taxpayers, or innovators in the global North” (39).

Another intervention that African Migration Narratives offers is its engagement with the intersections of migration and trauma. In its nuanced treatment of trauma, the book underscores the idea that migration is not just personal, but also political. This truism, which is apparently often lost on many people who think about the experiences of refugees and immigrants, helps Iheka and Taylor’s project to navigate the delicately thin lines between the intimate and the public, the personal and the political. Hence, the book helps us to appreciate how personal trauma resulting from migration can be extrapolated to the national traumas of many postcolonial African nation-states or, in fact, the continental trauma of the African state.

African Migration Narratives comprises 15 chapters divided into four parts that are thusly named: Part One: “African Migration on the Screen: Films of Migration”; Part Two: “Forgotten Diasporas: Lusophone and Indian Diasporas”; Part Three: “Migration Against the Grain: Narratives of Return”; and Part Four: “Migration and Difference: Indigeneity, Race, Religion, and Poetry at the Margins.” All these parts (and their constituting chapters) work together coherently to, as the editors point out, “braid together different language groups and geographical regions by being attentive to Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone areas” as well as to “encapsulate a range of media—novels, memoirs, film, and other forms of visual cultural productions.”

In all, African Migration Narratives is an extremely important addition to our contemporary contemplations of migration in Africa and around the world. The book’s huge focus on historical materialism and the intricate workings of global geopolitics, without doubt, helps the African reader to begin to see where “the rain began to beat us,” as Achebe would say.