Abstract:
Migration has never before occupied such a prominent place in African
cultural production as it does today. Yet, notwithstanding an increasing
focus on intra-African migration in the social sciences, literary migration
scholarship has largely focused on African migration to the West, as the
growing body of studies on outward-oriented Afropolitan migration novels
indicates. In this paper, I examine how the Afropolitan consciousness
that structures South-North migration novels is reframed in literature of
continental migration and mobility in post-Marikana South Africa. While
the themes of xenophobia and migration have emerged as central preoccupations
in South African literature from the early 2000s onward, there
has been a shift in literary production more recently with the publication
of a range of works by African diasporic writers in South Africa. Drawing
on Ekow Duker’s Yellowbone (2019), Rémy Ngamije’s The Eternal Audience of
One (2019), and Sue Nyathi’s The Gold Diggers (2018), I argue that these texts
interrogate South Africa’s complex relationship to “Africanness” and forge
new pathways for continental dialogue that allow us to resituate South
African-based writing within larger debates in contemporary African literary
studies. This category of intra-African diasporic fiction calls into question
simplifying binaries of outward, Western-oriented African writing and
locally produced popular, yet internationally disregarded, texts (Harris).
Rather, it scrutinizes the idea of “Africa” in global literary circuits from
the position of intra-African diasporic subjectivities. Drawing attention to
the long history of intra-African mobilities, the cross-continental thrust in
many of these works also productively speaks to recent scholarly efforts to
reframe migration studies in ways that insist on the de-exceptionalization
of migration and the breakdown of binary formulations of migrant and
non-migrant identities.
