Papers by Anna-Leena Toivanen
Moving Publicly, Writing Mobility: Public Transport in African Literatures. English Studies in Africa, Issue 2 Volume 67.Guest Editors: Anna-Leena Toivanen and Magdalena Pfalzgraf, 2024
Focusing on public transport in African literatures, this special issue not only wishes to draw a... more Focusing on public transport in African literatures, this special issue not only wishes to draw attention to the relevance of public transport as a literary theme in African literatures but also to strengthen the dialogue between mobilities research and African literary studies in order to develop mobility as a category of literary criticism
English Studies in Africa, 2024
The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature, 2024
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Texts Our Special Section for Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies seeks arti... more Texts Our Special Section for Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies seeks articles that are situated at the intersection of Black/ African/ Afrodiasporic aeromobilities and studies in literature and culture. Concentrating on "the study of various complex systems, assemblages and practices of mobility" (Sheller 2014, 45), mobilities research is often associated with the social sciences. Yet the field is also firmly rooted in the humanities (Aguiar et al. 2019, 4-5; Merriman and Pearce 2017, 493-494), and representations of mobilities are increasingly being studied in diverse cultural products. The "mobility humanities" pays attention to the meanings of mobility produced by humanistic production via representation, imagination, and speculation (Kim et al. 2019, 100). It recognizes cultural products as "vital constituents of the ways in which mobility […] is experienced as an embodied, subjective act that is informed by, and through, the cultural context in which it occurs" (Aguiar et al. 2019, 17).
The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature , 2024
Applying a mobility studies perspective, this chapter analyzes two Francophone Afrodiasporic hist... more Applying a mobility studies perspective, this chapter analyzes two Francophone Afrodiasporic historical novels by focusing on their portrayals of the mobilities of privileged historical Africans in and towards Europe and the coerced im/mobilities of the enslaved victims of the Middle Passage. With a reading that foregrounds representations of mobility practices in Wilfried N'Sondé's Un Océan, deux mers, trois continents and Emmanuel Dongala's La Sonate à Bridgetower (Sonata Mulattica), the chapter argues that the texts highlight the historical presence and mobilities of Africans in Europe and represent Europe as built on and haunted by (the legacy of) slavery. The relational approach to privileged and coerced mobilities not only underlines the “exceptionality” of historical Afroeuropean figures, but also draws attention to the fragility of this exceptionalism and the oscillating line between enslaved and free-moving historical Africans in Europe. N'Sondé's and Dongala's novels signal the importance of the memory of the Middle Passage and slavery to contemporary Europe by establishing parallels between historical and contemporary mobilities and by bringing the history of slavery to Europe in a way that resonates not only with the historical contexts in which the novels are set but also with today's Afro-Europe.
Avain - Kirjallisuudentutkimuksen aikakauslehti, 2024
Kotiinpaluu on ollut suosittu teema afrikkalaisessa ja Afrikan diasporien kirjallisuuksissa kautt... more Kotiinpaluu on ollut suosittu teema afrikkalaisessa ja Afrikan diasporien kirjallisuuksissa kautta aikain. Diasporiset kotiinpaluukertomukset kertovat historiallisten ja nykypäivän globaalien liikkuvuuksien tarinaa hieman eri näkökulmasta tuomalla lähtemisen sijaan keskiöön taakse jätetyn kotipaikan sekä siihen liittyvät henkilökohtaiset ja kulttuuriset muistot ja paluun usein synnyttämät identiteettidilemmat. Tämä artikkeli käsittelee ranskankielisen afrikkalaisen nykykirjallisuuden paluukertomuksia, joissa Afrikasta Eurooppaan lähteneet siirtolaiset palaavat takaisin kotimaihinsa erilaisten syiden motivoimina. Liikkuvuustutkimuksen näkökulmaa soveltava vertaileva analyysini keskittyy liikkuvuuden, ajan ja paikan yhteen kietoutuneisiin merkityksiin aineistossa, joka kattaa seuraavat fiktionaaliset sekä ei-fiktionaaliset teokset: Amadou Konén Les Coupeurs de têtes (1997), Nimrodin L’Or des rivières (2010) sekä Ken Bugulin Le Trio bleu (2022). Huomioni kiinnittyy erityisesti siihen, miten tekstien liikkuvuuskäytäntöjen ja kauttakulkupaikkojen kuvaukset tuottavat ajan ja paikan merkitysten ohella myös kotiinpalaajan hahmon.
Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism, 2024
This chapter discusses urban mobilities by analyzing the representation and formal functions of t... more This chapter discusses urban mobilities by analyzing the representation and formal functions of travel on public transport in two African literary texts, the short story "Niiwam" (1987), by the Senegalese author Ousmane Sembène, and the novel Without a Name (1994), by the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera. Both texts are centered on an image that combines public transportation with abjection and alienation: the protagonists travel in a bus while secretly carrying the corpse of their dead child. Sembène's protagonist, a poor peasant who has come to Dakar to take his sick son to hospital, travels by bus from the morgue to a cemetery to bury the child, who has died. In Vera's novel, the main character catches a bus from Harare back to her home village, which has been ravaged by the guerilla war, to
Mobility Humanities, 2023
As the (former) colonial centre and the mythical City of Light, Paris occupies a prominent positi... more As the (former) colonial centre and the mythical City of Light, Paris occupies a prominent position in the Francophone African literary imagination. While the alleged centrality of Paris has been challenged by critical readings of texts that provincialise, suburbanise, and move beyond the French national framework altogether, the present article focuses on the peripheralisation of Paris from the perspective of "mobile urban peripherality. " Adapting a mobility humanities perspective for use in a postcolonial literary analysis, the article concentrates on aeromobile portrayals of Paris as perceived by the figure of the newcomer-air traveller in a set of Francophone African literary texts dating from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The shift in viewing position enabled by the perspective of the newcomer in the context of aeromobility produces peripheralised representations of Paris, challenges romanticised ideas about the city, and underlines the role of mobility in making meaning out of urban spaces. My reading also extends aeromobility from its use in the air to the action on the ground. By focusing on African literary texts, the intention of the article is to contribute to enhancing dialogue between mobilities research and postcolonial literary studies.
Cultural Mobilities Between Africa and the Caribbean , 2021
While African and Afrodiasporic literatures are inspired and shaped by different forms of mobilit... more While African and Afrodiasporic literatures are inspired and shaped by different forms of mobility, literary portrayals of concrete mobility practicessuch as pedestrianism, motor/cycling, automobility, travel in public transports, maritime travel, aeromobility, and so on-have not received that much critical attention. 1 One reason for this could be that mobility is such an integral part of modern life that it easily goes unnoticed as a literary theme in the postcolonial literary scholarship. A more substantive reason for the lack of critical engagement with representations of concrete forms of mobility, however, is that in postcolonial studies, the term 'mobility' is often reductively used as a synonym for global migratory movements, or as an intangible metaphor for the displacement that informs the 'migrant condition' (Toivanen, 2019a, p. 60). The lack of critical interest in representations of concrete mobility practices that characterises postcolonial scholarship is somewhat surprising, because, at the same time, the field has paradigmatised the figure of the migrant, and because, in theory, migration does entail the notion of mobility, as Cetta Mainwaring and Noelle Bridgen (2016, p. 247; see also Schapendonk, 2012) highlight. While one can observe increasing use of the term 'mobility' in the field of postcolonial studies, this is certainly not a question of a paradigm shift. 'Mobility' in postcolonial studies is used as a substitute to such previously popular concepts as migration, displacement, diaspora, and exile. This change in terminology, then, is simply cosmetic: literary representations of concrete forms of human physical travel (e.g. automobility, aeromobility, pedestrianism, maritime travel, travel in public transport) 2 and the aesthetics of mobility that such representations produce remain the blind spot of postcolonial literary studies. In effect, as arts and humanities-oriented Mobility Studies scholars summarise it, postcolonial studies has been more interested in the "outcome of movement" than in movement itself (Aguiar, Mathieson & Pearce, 2019, p. 19). In order to move beyond the migration studies-oriented approach that has shaped postcolonial studies since its inception, and to promote a wider understanding of postcolonial mobilities that takes "the actual fact of movement seriously" (Cresswell, 2010, p. 18), I adopt a Mobility Studies
Transfers, 2022
Juillet au pays: Chroniques d'un retour à Madagascar ("July in the Country: Chronicles of a Retur... more Juillet au pays: Chroniques d'un retour à Madagascar ("July in the Country: Chronicles of a Return to Madagascar," 2007) narrates the "homecoming" of the diasporic author Michèle Rakotoson after several years of absence. Applying a literary mobility studies perspective and contributing to the dialogue between mobilities research and postcolonial literary studies, this article analyzes how Rakotoson's return travelogue constructs Madagascan landscapes through the interplay of mobility and memory. Th e article focuses on the text's representations of mobility practices and how diff erent means of transport aff ect the returnee's impressions of the "homely" landscapes and her own positioning with respect to them. While diff erent mobility practices and modes of transport and their intertwinement with personal/collective memories allow for diverse perspectives on the former home, the landscapes of return remain unruly: they are mobile not only because observed while in movement, but also because their present meanings escape from the returnee.
Studies in Travel Writing, 2022
This article discusses Bernard B. Dadié’s Un Nègre à Paris (1959; 1994) and Tété-Michel Kpomassie... more This article discusses Bernard B. Dadié’s Un Nègre à Paris (1959; 1994) and Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s L’Africain du Groenland ([1981] (2015); 2001) by focusing on their portrayals of transport and rhythms of mobility, and in so doing enhances the dialogue between travel writing studies and mobilities research. The texts’ representations of mobility practices and the rhythms thereof contribute to the production of the traveller figure (tourist; Arctic adventurer) and the destination (colonial metropolis; Arctic periphery). Dadié’s portrayals of transport produce a poetics of mobility that conveys a sense of speed and hurry but also of not being in the rhythm of the colonial metropolis, which eventually transforms into a critical attitude towards assimilationist impulses. Kpomassie’s travelogue captures the idea of an unreachable destination and the traveller’s struggle to pursue the journey despite obstacles, but also attests to the productive qualities of inertia as well as to the eurythmy of Arctic mobilities.
The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies, 2022
This chapter discusses the representation of West and Central African cities in francophone Afric... more This chapter discusses the representation of West and Central African cities in francophone African narratives of diasporic return. Using Camara Laye’s Dramouss (A Dream of Africa), Aïssatou Cissokho’s Dakar, la touriste autochtone (“Dakar, the Native Tourist”), and Daniel Biyaoula’s L’Impasse (“The Impasse”) as case studies, the chapter focuses on the texts’ portrayals of urban mobility practices and transport to explore the role of mobility in the construction of the postcolonial African city as experienced by the diasporic returnee, a typical displaced postcolonial mobile subject. In the novels discussed, various modes of mobility move the protagonists around in their former hometowns, permitting encounters with city dwellers and formerly familiar urban landscapes. The texts’ portrayals of the returnees’ urban mobilities highlight the tensions between memory and the present and underline the protagonists’ sense of unbelonging and disillusionment. By focusing on African cities from the perspective of urban mobilities, the chapter contributes to the ongoing postcolonialization of literary urban studies and enhances the field’s dialogue with mobilities research.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2021
The idea of unbalanced power relations between (post)colonial centres and peripheries lies at the... more The idea of unbalanced power relations between (post)colonial centres and peripheries lies at the heart of postcolonial studies. In this pattern, Europe, through colonial discourses, has constructed itself as the centre, whereas former colonized spaces – or what is nowadays frequently referred to as the Global South – are conceived as geographical, economic, and cultural peripheries. The centre/periphery binary, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (2007) put it in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, “has been one of the most contentious ideas” in the field (2007, 32). Not only does it attempt to define the pattern, but those asserting the independence of the periphery run the risk of perpetuating the binary and continue to subscribe to the very idea of the centre instead of destabilizing it. The centre/ periphery model has mostly been associated with world-systems analysis as theorized by scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s. This theory “locates ...
Urban Studies, 2021
Literary texts convey the complexities of the urban experience in a tangible way. While there is ... more Literary texts convey the complexities of the urban experience in a tangible way. While there is a wide body of work on literary representations of Paris, the role of public transport as part of the (postcolonial) urban experience has not received much attention. This article sets out to analyse the meanings of the mobile public space comprising the Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the mid-20th century to the 2010s. The reading demonstrates how the texts represent the public space of the Metro as a symbol of modernity, a space of disappointment and alienation, an embodiment of social inequalities and as a site of convivial encounters and claims of agency. Through this analysis, the article highlights the role of literature in elucidating the intertwinement of mobility, public space and postcolonial urbanity.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2021
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2021
Paris is the axiomatic centre of francophone African literary
representations of Europe. Focusin... more Paris is the axiomatic centre of francophone African literary
representations of Europe. Focusing on narratives that revise Pariscenteredness,
this article explores francophone African representations
of European peripheries from the perspective of Afroeuropean
(im)mobilities. The article shows how, in novels by Michèle Rakotoson,
Kidi Bebey, Simon Njami, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, three specific
Afroeuropean mobile subjectivities, namely the newcomer, the
holidaymaker, and the clandestine migrant, produce very different
meanings of European peripheries. While the meanings of peripheral
spaces in the novels vary and, thus, attest to the complexity of the
concept of the periphery and point to a shift from a national framework
towards a continental one, the texts simultaneously articulate
the perpetual pull of traditional centres.
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is freely available in The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 18 May 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2021.1921960
Transfers
In the field of postcolonial literary studies, representations of concrete forms of mobility have... more In the field of postcolonial literary studies, representations of concrete forms of mobility have not received the critical attention they deserve. This is partly due to the field’s reductive understanding of “mobility” as a synonym for migration. In order to enhance dialogue between postcolonial literary studies and mobilities research, this article focuses on representations of aeromobility in the context of Afroeuropean student mobilities in a set of Francophone African novels from the 1980s to the 2010s. My reading of scenes of aeromobility in the text corpus draws attention to the anxious aspects of the air travel of unaccustomed travelers and African newcomers traveling to the former colonial center, and explores the formal functions of representations of aeromobility in terms of narrative structures and tropes.
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies
Literary representations of postcolonial subjects’ concrete mobility practices beyond migrancy ha... more Literary representations of postcolonial subjects’ concrete mobility practices beyond migrancy have not received much critical attention. To fill this void, this article analyses the representations and poetics of urban everyday mobilities in two francophone African diasporic novels, Michèle Rakotoson’s Elle, au printemps (1996) and Alain Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs (2012), through a mobility studies perspective. I focus on the protagonists’ use of urban mobility systems and the narratives’ ways of producing urban cartographies as means for inscribing the newly arrived irregular African migrants in the metropolis, and argue that the texts give articulation to a practical cosmopolitanism. The texts’ poetics of mobility – manifest in their uncanny and thrilleresque qualities – and the protagonists’ journeys to peripheral dead-ends convey the anxious aspects of their attempts to claim Paris as their city through mobility.
AVAIN - Kirjallisuudentutkimuksen aikakauslehti
Kuten Frank Schulze-Engler (2013, 670) on todennut, Eurooppa on jälkikoloniaalin tutkimuksen soke... more Kuten Frank Schulze-Engler (2013, 670) on todennut, Eurooppa on jälkikoloniaalin tutkimuksen sokea piste. Eurooppaa ei ymmärretä ”jälkikoloniaalisena” mantereena, joten se rajautuu kyseisen paradigman ulkopuolelle. Schulze-Engler peräänkuuluttaa Euroopan sisällyttämistä jälkikoloniaalisen tutkimuksen kartalle, minne se siirtomaamenneisyyden määrittämän nykyhetkensä puolesta perustellusti kuuluu. Euroopan ”jälkikolonialisointi” oli yksi keskeinen motiivi toukokuussa 2018 Liègen yliopistossa Belgiassa järjestämälleni symposiumille “European Peripheries in Postcolonial Literatures”. Tapahtuma liittyi kaksivuotiseen, Euroopan komission rahoittamaan Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship -tutkimusprojektiini.
AVAIN - Kirjallisuudentutkimuksen aikakauslehti
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Papers by Anna-Leena Toivanen
representations of Europe. Focusing on narratives that revise Pariscenteredness,
this article explores francophone African representations
of European peripheries from the perspective of Afroeuropean
(im)mobilities. The article shows how, in novels by Michèle Rakotoson,
Kidi Bebey, Simon Njami, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, three specific
Afroeuropean mobile subjectivities, namely the newcomer, the
holidaymaker, and the clandestine migrant, produce very different
meanings of European peripheries. While the meanings of peripheral
spaces in the novels vary and, thus, attest to the complexity of the
concept of the periphery and point to a shift from a national framework
towards a continental one, the texts simultaneously articulate
the perpetual pull of traditional centres.
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is freely available in The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 18 May 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2021.1921960
representations of Europe. Focusing on narratives that revise Pariscenteredness,
this article explores francophone African representations
of European peripheries from the perspective of Afroeuropean
(im)mobilities. The article shows how, in novels by Michèle Rakotoson,
Kidi Bebey, Simon Njami, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, three specific
Afroeuropean mobile subjectivities, namely the newcomer, the
holidaymaker, and the clandestine migrant, produce very different
meanings of European peripheries. While the meanings of peripheral
spaces in the novels vary and, thus, attest to the complexity of the
concept of the periphery and point to a shift from a national framework
towards a continental one, the texts simultaneously articulate
the perpetual pull of traditional centres.
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is freely available in The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 18 May 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2021.1921960
In the present paper, the focus is on the ways in which contemporary African women writers address the theme of communication technologies in their work. Besides featuring in the texts thematically, modern communication technologies such as the email and telecommunication applications also often have aesthetic functions that structure the narrative form. By employing the trope of technical devices in their content and by using them as an inspiration for the form, these texts generate a specific aesthetics of globalization that embodies the notion of translocality as the intertwinement of the local and the global. While the local presence of distant elsewheres is articulated through the trope of communication technologies, it is, nevertheless, noteworthy that often the narratives also convey the idea of an epistemic and emotional distance that cannot be overcome and which, eventually, creates a gap of misunderstanding between the interlocutors and e-mail correspondents living respectively on the African continent and in diaspora. In this paper, I look into three recent novels, namely Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père (2013), Liss Kihindou’s Chêne de bambou (2013), and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) in order to analyze their ways of representing technological devices not only as advanced means of communication that may be inspirational to the literary form, but also as vehicles for betraying the fact that globalization is not merely about the world getting smaller, but about worlds getting farther apart.
This paper looks into the ways in which Véronique Tadjo’s novel Loin de mon père (2010) rewrites the diasporic romance of return from a gendered viewpoint, exposing the inhospitable nature of the postcolonial African nation-state towards the female revenant. The novel’s protagonist Nina, a cosmopolitan daughter of an Ivorian father and a French mother, returns momentarily from her Parisian life to the war ridden Ivory Coast in order to organize her father’s funeral. Unlike more traditional narratives of return, the novel rejects the idea of homecoming romance from the very outset by conceiving the return in tragic terms, with several obstacles on its way. Loin de mon père gives expression to daughterly disillusionment in the face of the glaring failures of the postcolonial nation-state to produce viable prospects of living for its citizens. Ironically, however, it is in its outright pessimism and its acknowledgement of the complexity of the situation that the novel eventually gives the return a second thought.
Considering the case of the Zimbabwean writer, Yvonne Vera (1964-2005), this paper argues that culture has pretty much “to do with it”. Through her works, Vera has been bearing witness to the aching spots of the Zimbabwean nation, especially from women’s point of view. Vera’s work draws from the painful, silenced issues that cast their long shadows over Zimbabwe’s past and present.
This paper discusses how the role of a writer in a crisis society is constructed in Vera’s case. By bringing out the silenced memories, Vera adopts the position of a witness and a healer. Nations are always partly based on oblivion: certain memories are erased for the sake of the hegemonic unity. In this process, the voices of subaltern female subjects are often marginalized and neglected.
Vera’s works suggest that forgetting some less heroic moments of the national history does not form a healthy basis for the community. What is more, the violent stories of women – albeit unpleasant scars on the nation’s texture – should be considered a firm part of the narrative of the nation. Remembering is necessary, even though it might hurt; otherwise the intentionally forgotten memories keep haunting the community like an unprocessed trauma. In her role of a witness and a healer, Yvonne Vera indicates the direction towards a collective memory with fewer skeletons in the cupboard.
Vera’s focus, however, is on the marginalized experiences of the subaltern female subjects, whose bodies represent symbolic sites of struggle in the hegemonic, masculine nationalism. Women’s bodies represent the mistreated Mother Earth who has been raped by the colonialists and who is in need of her sons’ protection. The effects of this “symbolic” struggle on the women’s material bodies are, however, not only purely symbolic: besides the domination of their physical space, the women are subjected to cruel physical violence under the form of rape and murder. What is more, in order to fight the meanings that the hegemonic nationalist discourse attaches to their reproductive bodies, the women themselves commit acts of violence against their own bodies and their born and unborn children.
This paper studies the different meanings the female body is subjected to by the hegemonic nationalist discourse in Vera’s works. It also discusses the desperate ways to which Vera’s female protagonists resort in order to reject the seizure of their bodies into the realm of the hegemonic nationalism. It seems that this is a struggle that the women can not win: they always end up physically hurt and mentally traumatized. They are victims even when challenging and negotiating the meanings of their bodies which, despite all their efforts, they are unable to repossess.
My paper looks into the cultic discourses surrounding the renowned Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera. During his lifetime, especially because of the context of Zimbabwean nation-building, Marechera was considered an enemy of the newborn postcolony. The writer himself argued that he had been silenced and marginalized in his home country. It can be claimed that the writer’s death at 35 years of age made people “realize their loss”, and afterwards Marechera has been elevated to the status of a cult icon. In this paper, I will focus on the discourses of loss and regret that occur quite frequently in different scientific and non-scientific texts dealing with the heritage of Marechera. The motifs of guilt and compensation seem to be central for many of these texts, in which Marechera is seen as a seer and prophet whose genius was not really understood and appreciated during his own time, and now that it is, it is already too late. The adoption of a critical stance towards nationalism and the post-colonial rule constitutes one of the leading ideas of this phenomenon.
Postcolonial literary discussions have been fascinated with the notion of dislocation from a (specific) migrant perspective. While, theoretically, the notion of dislocation can be empowering, its complex material realities challenge any simplistic celebration.
This paper analyses the themes of dislocation and movement in two Zimbabwean novels, Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name (1994) and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009). Vera’s novel takes place in the settings of the Zimbabwean anti-colonial freedom struggle, its viewpoint being that of the gendered subaltern. The novel’s protagonist is in a perpetual state of movement which is motivated by an imperative to escape a traumatic memory. The protagonist’s condition of dislocation is marked by her failure to establish belonging on her own terms, outside the logic of nationalist discourses.
Chikwava’s novel addresses the theme from a different angle, namely that of illegal immigration. The novel’s protagonist, a Mugabe supporter and a former youth militia member, travels destitute to London in order to earn money to get him out of trouble back home. Here, too, the motive behind dislocation is violence, echoing the crisis in the geopolitical space of the postcolony. Transnational movement in this context is a condition of disenfranchisement without potential for upward mobility in the new location. The fact that the narrative viewpoint is that of a perpetrator complicates the setting even further.
The novels under scrutiny tell as much about the movement as about the space from which one is dislocated: the national informs the protagonists’ displaced conditions in somewhat uneasy ways. The texts raise questions of who ― and where ― is the displaced subject and what are the reasons that motivate the movement.
Readership: Scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and African literary studies and academics interested in the interdisciplinary dialogue between mobilities research and the humanities.
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