Christopher Ian Foster
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496824219
- eISBN:
- 9781496824264
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496824219.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
