Maya Angela Smith has written an important and innovative book that addresses, through the prism of language and discourse, contemporary questions of migration and race among the Senegalese diaspora in three world cities. Moving between Paris, Rome, and New York, Smith conducted eighty extensive interviews with Senegalese migrants and members of the diaspora whose voices, abundantly represented in both their multilingual original and English translation in the text, provide an intimate account of how they view themselves as cosmopolitan and multilingual world travellers and of the challenges they face as racialized subjects in the global north. Both language and race, particularly blackness, are central themes in these narratives, and the two are linked in different and complex ways according to the colonial histories and racial ideologies of each context, which are often at odds with national discourses of assimilation and integration.

Smith's interviewees have impressive linguistic repertoires, something commented on for Senegalese more generally by both the author and an Italian immigration lawyer who claims that they ‘learn[ed] the Italian language better than almost any other group’ (103). Yet language is often the site of discrimination and even of humiliation. Lucie, a French schoolteacher of Senegalese descent, recounts in a chapter entitled ‘Speaking while Black’ how hurt and angry she felt during a conference with a student's mother when she made a speech error that the mother then used to undermine her legitimacy as a teacher and deny her ownership of the French language. ‘This is what it means to be black in France’, she tells a sympathetic colleague who witnessed the exchange (69–70). While Senegalese in New York in some ways have an easier time assimilating in the city's Little Senegal neighborhood, Mariama feels that she is judged negatively by members of that community for not being able to speak good Wolof — a linguistic marker of Senegalese identity even for speakers of other Senegalese languages (58). The complexity of her quest for belonging emerges later in the book when, teased by African American classmates for being African, she temporarily experiments with adopting a Puerto Rican identity, even going so far as to eat pork dishes which, as a Muslim, she recounts ‘I really wasn't supposed to eat’ (89–90).

Each of Smith's interviewees has a complex and unique story to tell, all of which are well worth reading, but those who were born in Senegal all grapple with the loss of a social identity based largely on ethnicity and nationality in a new and predominantly white space where they are seen primarily through the prism of race. For those who live in Paris and Rome, many of their accounts of racially motivated indignities center around the use of the word for black (noir, nero) deployed as an insult by white French and Italians, while the English word, backed by its African American cachet, is considered a neutral and even positive term. ‘En Afrique . . . on ne parle pas de, euh, blacks’ [In Africa … one doesn't talk about, uhh, blacks], says Professore (a nickname), as he declines to talk about race in Italy, implying that Smith, as an African American — an identity that she signals throughout the book — must already know something about it (80). Commenting on the topic of race within the French context, Ajuma says, ‘They [the French] say ‘Ah, you are the only black’. She explains that they can't use the word noir, because it is taboo (81).

The fourth and final chapter of Senegal Abroad moves the arguments in a different direction by focusing on the link between multilingualism and mobility to develop a concept of Senegalese cosmopolitanism ‘unbounded by geographic borders or linguistic boundaries’ (159). Here we meet interlocutors who capitalize on their multilingualism to advance their careers and those who use language creatively to try on different identities. In a Senegalese restaurant in Rome, Idi entertains his friends by announcing in Italian, ‘I don't like the Senegalese and therefore I've become Italian now. Understood?’ As the banter continues, one of Idi's friends says in Wolof, ‘Give him some water so he can drink it in Italian’ (147). Encounters such as this one reveal that mastery of multiple languages, in addition to being useful, is also a source of enjoyment and camaraderie.

In her epilogue, Smith reflects on the life histories of her Senegalese interlocutors and the multiple ways in which they experience their mobility, their relationship to Senegal, and their struggle for inclusion. She makes the case for including migrants’ voices and perspectives more generally in academic and policy research, a task that she claims is all the more important in the current global political climate where migration plays a polarizing role. ‘[I]n many ways’, she writes, ‘the world is a much different place’ from when she began her interviews a decade ago.