Engaging the Diaspora: Migration and African Families ed. by Pauline Ada Uwakweh, Jerono P. Rotich, and Comfort O. Okpala (review)

The south-north migration of continental Africans around the world marks one of the most dramatic demographic shifts of the twenty-first century. Engaging the Diaspora: Migration and African Familes is, thus, a timely and highly relevant volume. Consisting of ten chapters compiled and produced by first-generation African immigrant scholars, this book offers a unique view of immigrants’ challenges inflected by moving personal insights from its authors. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book brings together sociological, political, economic, psychological, and literary analyses of immigrant experiences, emphasizing the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, social class, and gender in the process. Although the authors’ methodologies are diverse, they share an optimism about the resiliency of immigrants’ survival strategies bolstered by case studies of the subjects’ lives.

Following Pauline Ada Uwakweh’s introduction on migration policies and processes, Part I of the volume focuses on various aspects of African family dynamics altered by the migration process. Part II examines employment, education, and religion as routes to social adaptation. Each chapter is replete with pertinent facts about problems surmounted during immigration based on ethnographic observations, interviews, and literary examples. Immigrants’ diasporic experiences are characterized by alienation, isolation, longing, gender and parental role reversals, and new economic, ethnic, and community formations involved in acculturation and assimilation. Ruptures in these adjustment processes may be psychologically and socially devastating to new immigrants and their communities, causing the cumulative risks of adaptation to outweigh some of the benefits of change.

With respect to research in African literatures, an interesting organizational “remix” might be proposed to interrogate the volume’s themes. Pauline Ada Uwakweh’s compelling opening chapter on negotiating marriage and motherhood using literary examples from the works of award-winning Nigerian women writers Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Adichie—both of whom deal with the constraints of patriarchy and the loneliness of exile—could be followed immediately by Joya Uraizee’s brilliant chapter three on the traumas emerging in civil war memoirs reconstructed from the accounts of Sierra Leonean teenage soldier Ishmael Beah and Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army acolyte Grace Akalma. These literary analyses lift the veil of normalcy of cultural adaptation to reveal the double consciousness of suffering souls. Using these two chapters as paradigmatic renditions of some of the most horrific challenges of immigration, Ifeyinwa Mbakogu’s investigation of immigrant African parenting practices in Canada, Khadidja Arfi’s sociolinguistic study of Algerian code switching, and Jerono Rotich’s analysis of physical fitness among refugee African youth suggest beacons of hope in the immigrants’ quest for social integration, as recent immigrants mutably balance customary practices with the norms of their host countries.

A new road map for navigating the volume would also enhance the value of the consecutive case studies in Part II by Comfort Okpala and Amon Okpala on African professionals in historically black universities and Shirley Mthethwa-Sommers on African academics in predominantly white US universities. Although they describe the successful outcomes of professional survival strategies, both of these chapters conclude on a somber note concerning the marginalization of African intellectuals in US institutions of higher learning and the obstacles to their advancement.

The final three chapters of the book deal with institutional, economic, and organizational adaptations to change through the Diversity Visa Lottery, skillfully analyzed by Michael Kremer; African rotatory credit unions in the US, astutely examined by Iheanyi Osondu; and an African Pentecostal church in south London, insightfully studied by Amy Duffuor. In each case, African communal efforts save the day by providing innovative survival strategies for improving immigrants’ lifestyles. Duffuor, however, points out some of the ironies underlying success when she quotes an interviewee describing the Pentecostal church’s “Prayer Warrior” outreach strategies as the casting out of “demons” followed by “career development counseling” (169). This syncretic admixture of nonaligned strategies alludes to a fundamental discontent with modernist pathways to assimilation and a latent anxiety about what...