Migration stands out as one of the most important and most frequently depicted topics in contemporary African literature. Its relevance is increasing further. As I noted in my monographFootnote ¹ and in a recent publication co-authored with Anna-Leena Toivanen,Footnote ² the number of African literary texts, especially of novels, dealing with the experience of migration has grown since the year 2000; furthermore, these novels are often literary ‘blockbusters’ that are quickly translated into several languages and that attract the attention of an international readership, prize committees and scholars. It is hence no surprise that there exists a rich body of scholarship and vigorous research activity focused specifically on literary depictions of African migration. Lately, this subfield of literary studies has included a focus on mobility as a critical lens and narratological concept for the study of literatures of migration, a new conceptual direction spearheaded by the work of Toivanen, Carolin Gebauer, Michelle Stork and Nadia Butt.

It is certainly no easy task to find a niche and add a relevant contribution when it comes to a well-ploughed but also very lively and heterogeneous research field and body of primary texts. Jack Taylor addresses this openly when he asks: ‘[G]iven the vastness of the issues taken up in African migration literature: How does one approach this literature? What is its purpose?’ (p. 10). Taylor’s response is a literary–historical overview and an innovative conceptual frame that he sustains across an outline of the genre’s development and his discussions of ten primary texts. Pointing to Mongo Beti’s Mission Terminée (1957) as a foundational text of migration as well as to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Taylor takes readers on a journey from the ‘gradual turn toward migration in African literatures already present’ in novels from the mid-twentieth century to the emergence of a migration imaginary that foregrounded (cultural) alienation and disillusionment in the 1970s and 1980s to the veritable proliferation of migration novels in the present day. This is the first detailed enquiry into the topic’s literary history, which, moreover, cuts across languages and regions. Emphasizing a distant reading approach and a conceptual perspective that positions itself post-critique, Taylor introduces the intriguing argument that African literatures dealing with migration, although highly diverse in terms of content and language and often geographically and temporally distant from one another, share what he calls the ‘migratory imagination’, a mobile template on which recurring concerns, plot lines, themes and tropes accumulate across history. A second conceptual framework guiding his discussions is ‘theory on the move’, which Taylor develops through his engagement with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s take on world literature, in particular Ngũgĩ’s idea of ‘reading globalectically’,Footnote ³ and with an eye to Edward Said’s ‘Traveling theory reconsidered’.Footnote ⁴ (Mieke Bal’s idea of travelling concepts would have been a good addition to Taylor’s work on this concept, but this is a minor point of critique.) Anchored in a Felskian spirit of going beyond critique and the notion of ‘excavating’ literary texts’ underlying political affiliations, Taylor defines ‘theory on the move’ as ‘concerned with not reading theory into literature but with reading theory out of literature’, as ‘less committed to close reading and uncovering hidden truths buried within the text’ and more interested in ‘the historical, social, and political conditions that the texts themselves are responding to’ (p. 18). Taylor’s two main conceptual frameworks allow him to mobilize ‘the migratory imagination’ beyond individual novels as a phenomenon that develops across texts, time, languages and space. According to Taylor, the ‘migratory imagination’s promise’ is ‘the ever-expanding horizon of the thematic concerns being brought into the fold of African migration literary productions’ (p. 5). Migration ‘has moved to the foreground in African literature in addition to showing the expanding horizon of issues addressed therein’ (p. 5).

Taylor’s highly relevant choice of primary texts is commendable. He offers a fresh perspective by including depictions of migration that do not follow the more prominent US- or UK-centred trajectory. In particular, he sheds light on the much under-researched literary topic of intra-African, regional migration. The first analysis chapter discusses the experience of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street and Abani’s Becoming Abigail. The journeys depicted here are from Nigeria to Belgium and from Nigeria to Britain. The second chapter focuses on refugee experiences in novels by Mengestu (Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), USA). Chapter 3 introduces the idea of post-migration in texts set in the Parisian suburbs by Wilfried N’Sondé. Chapter 4 zooms in on questions of memory and the Rwandan genocide (Diop’s Murambi: the book of bones and Gatore’s The Past Ahead). Chapter 5 is devoted to regional, intra-African forms of migration: Bofane’s Congo Inc. depicts rural–urban migration in the DRC; Beah’s Radiance of Tomorrow depicts the forced displacement of villagers during the civil war in Sierra Leone.

Taylor provides a much-needed and welcome overview on the vast and multifaceted canon of African migration literature as well as an insightful overview of the topic’s development post-1950. With his elaboration on the ‘migratory imaginary’ and his notion of ‘theory on the move’, he presents a valuable conceptual approach that might even ‘migrate’ to further research contexts. This monograph will be of interest to literary scholars working on the theme of migration (in postcolonial studies, in the field of African literary studies, and beyond). It also contributes to the discussion of post-critique popularized by Rita FelskiFootnote ⁵ by showing how going beyond critique and resisting close reading can work in practice.