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This introductory chapter lays out the high stakes of rethinking immigration in our twenty-first century of migration crises, resurgent racist nationalisms, and the continued destabilization of countries in the Global South under globalization. It introduces a theory of conscription regarding immigration and historicizes the ways in which the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the United States, and other powers produced the migration that they attempt to police at their borders. Through global economic, political, and cultural processes from the era of high imperialism, decolonization, the cold war, to contemporary neoliberal globalization (neocolonialism), they have devastated nations in the Global South, creating instability and displacement. This chapter introduces migritude cultural production, often challenging these conscripting forces, and close reads Abu Bakr Khaal’s novella African Titanics.

This chapter introduces the concept of migritude and its literary genealogies that connect back to Négritude as a way to make the claim that this particular group of diasporic African authors not only gets to the heart of immigration but urge us to rethink immigration as we know it. It argues that early European management of movement was integral to the development of the nation-state, its imperial projects, and its processes of racialization in the nineteenth century and its afterlives in the twentieth and twenty-first. The chapter also introduces the importance of the phenomenological method regarding the study of migration—that it is always ontological as such—reading Shailja Patel’s 2010 Migritude as a radically feminist, anti-imperialist, and phenomenological treatise on migration connecting black and South Asian diasporas.

Through an analysis of Fatou Diome’s 2010 novel The Belly of the Atlantic, this chapter rethinks Jacques Chevrier’s definition of migritude, which he describes as a recent cohort of African writers in France who narrate existence between Africa and France and for whom immigration and exile are central themes. The chapter argues more narrowly that migritude writers disclose what Diome terms the “condition d’immigres”; that is, they image the conditions and structures of immigration as a national and international network of systems expropriating the means of movement from formerly colonized peoples and that these systems have a colonial past. In addition, it unpacks Diome’s conversations with the Négritude tradition, noting that, at the same time she borrows from her authors, she refashions aspects of Négritude in terms of migration. She reappropriates, for example, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s black humanism, and mobilizes it into her global twenty-first century as a migrant humanism challenging immigration under neoliberal globalization.

This chapter assesses the imperial origins of immigration. Chapter 6 studies Nadifa Mohamed’s 2010 novel Black Mamba Boy as a refashioning of Claude McKay’s novel Banjo. The chapter reads Mohamed’s novel as a migritude text and demonstrates the ways in which it reshapes Banjo’s migrant pan-Africanism into a narrative that negotiates colonial structures from the perspective of Somali migration. Jama’s diasporic nomadism, for example, circulates through, and is impinged upon by, both British and Italian colonial institutions and modes of managing movement. Furthermore, he is literally conscripted by the Italian army—a fate not uncommon for Somalis. Beyond the colonial setting of Black Mamba Boy, Mohamed, also speaks to our twenty-first century and the ways in which immigrants from the Global South are haunted, even conscripted, by colonial structures of immigration in the present.