Fareda Banda, professor of law at SOAS University of London, has provided an immense service to students and teachers of the law and experience of migration, linking the literature of migration out of Africa to human rights law and cases. The book provides a wealth of resources to supplement legal and scholarly commentary, with insights from novels, memoirs, poems and even photography. Framed by her own experiences, the book explores the boundaries of the study of law, with in-depth reflections on the impacts of race, gender, class, religion and ethnicity on the interpretation and consequences of the law as it is written. She considers not only the “hostile environment” policies of Britain and other wealthy countries, but also the limits of human rights, “comparing and contrasting the rhetorical claims about the inherent value in each human being and the need to offer protection and succour to those in need, with the realities”.Footnote ¹

Faced with such a broad subject area, Banda wrestles in the introduction with the framing of her project: “[i]s it law and literature, or law as literature, or even law in literature?”.Footnote ² The book contains elements of all three, while focusing on the first and third of this triad. She acknowledges the pioneers in this field, including James Boyd White, Richard Posner, Ian Ward, Robin West and, in Africa especially, Ambreena Manji. The mobilization of literature, broadly defined, allows for alternate voices to be heard and alternate views of law to be explored. She quotes Kenji Yoshino: “law wields a brutal coercion literature cannot approximate. Yet literature has a power to get inside us, to transform our hearts and minds, in a way that law cannot”.Footnote ³

The internal chapters of the book explore: “artivism” and the role of literature in challenging human rights violations; the long history of African migration, dating back to Roman times; the content of immigration law and policy as seen through fictional accounts; and a particular focus on women, sexual and gender minorities, and children. The final chapter offers two visions of the future, both in works titled The Wall: John Lanchester's dystopian view of an island state, guarded to keep the “others” out;Footnote ⁴ and Meron Hadero's more optimistic auto-fictional story considering the friendship between an older German professor, who had fled divided Berlin for the United States, and a family newly arrived from Ethiopia, also via Berlin.Footnote ⁵

Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book consider the use of story-telling to advance justice, and the importance of story-telling in the presentation of claims for asylum. The sources go far beyond the well-known (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith and Kiran Desai, not to mention Shakespeare) to many that are less celebrated. The three volume collection Refugee Tales,Footnote ⁶ for example, provides real-life accounts by asylum seekers in the UK, based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,Footnote ⁷ with stories from the migrant, the interpreter, the barrister, the detainee and the lorry driver.Footnote ⁸ They show how language itself becomes the border, in which the wrong way of telling a story (irrespective of its truth) can lock a person out of the asylum process, or into immigration detention.

The view of “law” the book employs goes beyond state immigration law and international human rights norms to consider the legal pluralism of the real world and parallel systems of “smugglers’ law”. From Shahram Khosravi's “auto-ethnography” Illegal Traveller Footnote ⁹ she quotes the case of Amir, a smuggler who produced a 48-page guide to the asylum process. Amir's view is that: “in fact, I do not smuggle people. I take them to the border where they can seek asylum. When they have sought asylum a refugee lawyer takes care of their cases. Why is my job a crime but not the lawyer's? We both have the same goal.”Footnote ¹⁰

Later sections of the book provide vignettes of the “fictional strategies for gaining entry”, including not only smuggling, but also courier services and marriage visas;Footnote ¹¹ as well as the legal ways of buying your way in through “investments” in a country.Footnote ¹²

Banda explores the depiction in literature of ideas of belonging, hierarchies and notions of citizenship, and the ways in which these conflict with the rigidities of law and the limits of the recognition of human rights. Inevitably, many of her references highlight the racism encoded in apparently neutral language of bureaucracy, as well as in the responses of “host” societies.

Yet the book does not shy away from the complexities and moral ambiguities of migration: the role of the family as a persecuting agent; the exploitation of the undocumented by other migrants; the appropriate response of the asylum system in western states to female genital mutilation or persecution on the basis of sexual orientation; and balancing white saviourism with the real need for protection. There are glimpses too of empathy from the side of immigration control. Samson Kambalu's autobiographyFootnote ¹³ describes the real story of his interaction with the British High Commission in Malawi: “‘Are you marrying Susan to get a British passport?’ My reply to that was deliberate. ‘Not really’, I said. The consul regarded me for a moment and filled in ‘No’. ‘The answer is NO, OK? The answer is NO,’ he said.”Footnote ¹⁴

Professor Banda also takes the time to note the positive efforts to overcome the frontiers of the law and of the mind. Indeed, a large part of the book's purpose is to highlight the literature that has this aim, including literature written by and for children, taking the educational ambition beyond the university and into the school classroom.

The book highlights the fundamental contradiction between human rights “for all” and the entitlements that depend on arbitrary allocations of citizenship. Most painfully of all, the chapter on childrenFootnote ¹⁵ shows how this arbitrariness can split families, based on birth dates (before or after a change of rules, before or after the migrant journey of the mother) or the different status of parent and child. Banda mentions the case of the East African Asians denied entry to Britain in 1968.Footnote ¹⁶ However, she does not generally highlight statelessness (the reviewer's own areas of expertise) as an additional vulnerability in migration, nor the particular alienation caused by the knowledge that exile is permanent because the imagined “home” does not consider one ever to have belonged. It is the final insult of asylum procedures when refugee status is refused, but there is no country that will grant the right to return, requiring a whole new procedure to prove the negative of statelessness, and then only if the person is “lucky” enough to be in a country that provides a legal route to protection for stateless persons. It is with statelessness that references to Kafka become most compelling: a hovering presence over immigration enforcement, although not included here.

I read this book over the same period that I was also participating in series of webinars run by the British Institute on International and Comparative Law on teaching international law.Footnote ¹⁷ It makes a fine companion resource, challenging us to teach law differently, to re-examine the notion of “core” and “non-core” aspects of legal education, to take on board the perspectives of the periphery as much as the centre, or to reconceptualize where the periphery and centre may in fact be.

This book is a reference work rather than a sustained argument, and at times it is too much of an accumulation of analysis and extracts of different texts (legal and literary) without an obvious integration of the two. For reading in its own right, it would be most suitable for students at masters’ level or above, but the book also suggests texts that will illustrate and provoke discussion in any context of the multifaceted issues framed by the law and policy of migration. I imagine every reader of the book will find pointers to new resources. I look forward to working through the personal reading list that I have compiled in writing this review.