The first of its kind, this special focus section examines a relatively understudied concept and brings together new literary works and scholarship across continents and languages. Contemporary authors and activists like Fatou Diome, Shailja Patel, Abdourahman Waberi, and Igiaba Scego contribute to a new literary, cultural, and political genre called migritude. Migritude initially indicated a group of younger African authors in Paris but has since expanded to include Europe beyond France, such as Britain and Italy, as well as South Asian and Caribbean diasporas. This body of work reveals intersections between complex histories of colonialism, immigration, globalization, and racism against migrants and highlights differences in region, class, gender, and sexuality that constrain the movement of many people. In an era characterized by openly belligerent nationalism and anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, this special focus section aims to unpack migritude cultural production in an international context to study and combat these violent trends.
French literary theorist Jacques Chevrier argues that immigration is at the heart of contemporary African literature. He calls this new corpus of African literature migritude. Migritude literature provides both a new and sophisticated way of understanding immigration in the era of global capitalism and a critical engagement with it; it lends new perspective to the study of African literature itself by bringing to the fore conditions of diaspora, movement, and migration. Further, these younger authors are often in conversation with earlier generations of the black radical tradition. Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed, for example, not only cites Claude McKay's 1929 Banjo in her acknowledgements but strategically weaves the wandering Banjo and his black orchestra into her own twenty-first century migritude novel. In this article I analyze the relationship between McKay's "story without a plot" 1 as a (proto)migritude narrative embodying a pan-African politics of movement and Nadifa Mohamed's 2010 novel Black Mamba Boy as a representative migritude narrative and critique."Their faces were passports inscribed with the stamps of many places but in their countenances was something ancient, the variety of those who went wandering and peopled the earth" 2 -Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy "[Africa] was always a continent on the move." 3 -Achille Mbembe, "Africa and the Future: An Interview with Achille Mbembe.
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