Jack Taylor’s African Migration and the Novel is a theoretically charged and historically informed investigation of twenty-first century African migration literature. For Taylor, migration literature extends beyond the language and imagery writers employ to depict narratives of movement. Taylor grounds his analysis in what he describes as the “migratory imagination” (4, and throughout), the capacity of migration narratives to expand and deepen a reader’s awareness of history, culture, and society. He thus understands African migration narratives as capacious, and one contribution of his work is its suggestion that close readings of African migration novels, together with careful consideration of context, can nurture empathy, empowerment, and critical reader insights.

In each of the five chapters that follow his wide-ranging introduction, Taylor analyzes African migration novels to investigate the main themes outlined in the book’s subtitle: race, civil war, and environmental destruction. In Chapter One, Taylor analyzes Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street, and Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail to examine the long histories of forced migration, sex trafficking, and slavery. Drawing on the work of Chielozona Eze, Taylor reads these works through the history of slave narratives—thus linking contemporary coerced migration to the history of Atlantic slavery, writing that “Unigwe and Abani dramatize the firm link between slavery and human trafficking to spark moral outrage in the reader” (55). This affective response is central to Taylor’s understanding of migration literature, and it is at the heart of his examination, in Chapter Two, of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, and How to Read the Air, by Dinaw Mengestu. Taylor especially emphasizes in his reading of Mengestu, the sense of loss and the emotional attachment to home (nostalgic and hoped-for) that the two novels elicit. In his third chapter, Taylor takes up Wilfried N’Sondé’s The Heart of the Leopard Children and The Silence of the Spirits, both published in translation as part of the exemplary Global African Voices series of Indiana University Press. He finds in N’Sondé’s work an expression of postcolonial critique coupled with an aspirational sense of hospitality and love.

The affective responses that Taylor is concerned with are influenced by common narrative tropes regarding African migration. Many contemporary stories of African migration emphasize movement of people from Africa to Europe. The reality, though, is that most African migrants move within Africa. Depictions of migration that suggest local and regional conflicts generate global African migrant crises are thus inversions of the larger migratory landscape, in which global forces catalyze local and regional movement. African Migration and the Novel, in its first three chapters, centers stories of migration from Africa to Europe or North America. Taylor thoughtfully places these narratives in historical and cultural context, and demonstrates how the novels serve as important critiques of the very global forces that push people to leave their homes. Nevertheless, his analysis of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi: The Book of Bones, and Gilbert Gatore’s The Past Ahead in Chapter Four is a welcome break and one that could have come earlier in the book. And yet, an anecdote that Taylor recounts in the chapter perhaps reveals why he chose to lead his investigation with stories framed in the Africa-to-Europe migration trope. Taylor writes about a time he taught Diop’s book to university students who claimed that they had “never heard” of the Rwandan genocide (127). Taylor employs the story in part to advance his argument that fiction has the capacity to elicit interest and engagement with complex histories and that through the migratory imagination “the past becomes perceptible” (136). The story also suggests that readers of African migration literature may often approach the genre with inverted understandings of what African migration is, or has been. In this way, the structure of the book thus perhaps is meant to engage readers where they are, through a critical evaluation of stories that simultaneously rely on, and push against, conventional migration expressions.

If Taylor’s migratory imagination expands our understanding of the experiences articulated in the novels under investigation, it also extends, and blurs, the concept of migration itself. Indeed, Taylor sees the concept of migration unmoored from movement across space in Ishmael Beah’s Radiance of Tomorrow. His analysis of Beah comes in Chapter Five, alongside a reading of In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo INC (also part of the Global African Voices series). Within his analysis is an important—and to my reading underdeveloped—consideration of how remaining in a transformed homeland may be a sort of migration itself. Building on Rob Nixon’s concept of “displacement without moving,” Taylor offers a glimpse of the great potential of the migratory imagination that he has developed over the course of the book (159).

In his coda, Taylor asks “Where does the study of African migration literature go from here?” (187). He outlines several promising areas of investigation, and I look forward to reading Taylor’s continued research. What is clear from the five chapters that precede the coda, however, is that what constitutes migration literature—indeed, what constitutes migration—remains a contested and important subject of analysis and inquiry. African Migration and the Novel is a nuanced and theoretically sophisticated intervention into this scholarship on migration literature and narratives of movement.