Decolonising the Afropolitan

Toward postmigrant realities in Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home

“…For this article, the notion of postmigration as a conceptual tool is not about alternative modes of migration, which are emphasized by Rebecca Fasselt (2019: 76) in her chapter on narratives of intra-African migration, but instead it offers novel ways of seeing migration as an inherent component of society. The focus has shifted from the actual movement from one place to another to what comes beyond.…”

“…Previous studies on this body of work have included investigations of identity and otherness, transnational connections, and cosmopolitan aspirations. Despite this abundance of perspectives on the literature, there have also been urgent calls for new ways of theorizing migration (Fasselt, 2019;Kraler, 2011;Edmunds, 2006). Postmigration is just such an intervention, a concept that aims to go beyond previous meanings of migrant and migration, to critique instances of othering and the gap between the margins and the majority society (Römhild, 2017), and to focus explicitly on trajectories relating to the future.…”

“…Many of these writers, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Taiye Selasi, Brian Chikwava, Chika Unigwe and NoViolet Bulawayo, have been extensively studied from perspectives of cosmopolitanism and Afropolitanism (Toivanen, 2018;Phiri, 2017;Knudsen and Rahbek, 2017), identity and alterity (Berning, 2015;Okolocha, 2016;De Mul, 2014), and dislocation and exploitation (Moji, 2014;Cobo-Piñero, 2018;Ligaga, 2019). However, despite this abundance of perspectives on writers and their works which are often labelled migrant, there have also been urgent calls for new ways of theorizing migration (Fasselt, 2019;Kraler, 2011;Edmunds, 2006). This suggests that the present moment requires novel perspectives on migration that go beyond earlier discussions of diaspora, transnationalism, and questions of belonging.…”