Between Displacement and Imagination
Exile and Identity in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure and Abdourahman Waberi’s In the United States of Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12797/RM.02.2025.18.01Keywords:
Exile, Francophone African literature, Identity and belonging, Postcolonial subjectivity, Afropessimism and AfrofuturismAbstract
From the mid-twentieth century, the independence of African states and the mobility of young intellectuals to Europe made migration a central site for negotiating identity and belonging. This article examines exile as a structural condition in two Francophone African novels: Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1961/1972) and Abdourahman Waberi’s In the United States of Africa (2006/2009). In Kane, exile is framed as spiritual and intellectual displacement within colonial modernity; in Waberi, it is reworked through a satirical reversal in which Africa becomes a destination for European refugees. Engaging work on postcolonial subjectivity (Achille Mbembe), Afrotopian imagination (Felwine Sarr), transnationalism (Dominic Thomas), and recent studies on liminality and identity (Okechukwu Ugwuezumba, Nkiru Onyemachi, Joanna Suffern), the article argues that Kane and Waberi write from divergent positions (Afropessimism and Afrofuturism) yet address the same concern: how identity is reconfigured when social and cultural worlds are divided. The comparison shows exile as a continuing framework for understanding both decolonization and contemporary forms of global belonging.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The Origins Of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books, Inc.
Bayart, J. F. (1993). The State In Africa: The Politics Of The Belly. London–New York: Longman.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location Of Culture. London–New York: Routledge.
Bowling, R. L., & Combs, L. D. (2023). Liminality as a Third Wave Conceptual Framework. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 60(4), 537–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/19496591.2022.2150974 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/19496591.2022.2150974
Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1952).
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation (B. Wing, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1990). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10257
Gordon, D. F., & Wolpe, H. (1998). The Other Africa: An End to Afro-Pessimism. World Policy Journal, 15(1), 49–59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40209569
Hall, S. (1990). Cultural Identity And Diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (pp. 222–237). London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Hall, S. (1996). Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’? In S. Hall & P. du Gay (Eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity (pp. 1–17). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221907.n1
Kane, C. H. (1972). Ambiguous Adventure (K. Woods, Trans.). London: Walker and Company. (Original work published 1961).
Mabona, M. (1964). La spiritualité africaine. Présence Africaine, 52(4), 157–161. https://doi.org/10.3917/presa.052.0157 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/presa.052.0157
Mbembe, A. (2001). On The Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising The Mind: The Politics Of Language In African Literature. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Ogunsuyi, A. (2023). Africa’s Year of Independence. EBSCO Research Starter. Retrieved from https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/africas-year-independence
Rankin, S. K. (2016). The Influence of Exile. Maryland Law Review, 76(1), 4–54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2754254
Roniger, L., & Feldmann, A. E. (2023). Forced Migration and Exile: Analytical and Historical Perspectives. In A. E. Feldmann, X. Bada, J. Durand, S. Schütze Eds), The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration (pp. 172–185). New York: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003118923-16
Said, E. W. (2000). Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sarr, F. (2019). Afrotopia (D. Burk & S. Jones-Boardman, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv105bb1g
Schwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. New York: Guilford Press.
Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/dio.201.0127
Suffern, J. L. (2024, August 19). Fiction Educated, Civilized, and Utterly Lost. The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved from https://brooklynrail.org/2012/06/books/educated-civilized-and-utterlylost/
Thomas, D. R. D. (2007). Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2979/4515.0
Ugwuezumba, O., & Onyemachi, N. D. (2024). Postcolonial Identity and Liminality in Isidore Diala’s The Lure of Ash. Journal of African Interdisciplinary Studies, 8(12), 82–94.
Vurm, P. (2024). Chapter 10 Sub-Saharan African literature in French from the 1980s to the Present: The Symbolic Year 1980 as an Aesthetic and Thematic Turn. In P. Kyloušek (Ed.), Centers and Peripheries in Romance Language Literatures in the Americas and Africa (pp. 272–291). Leiden: Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004691131_012
Waberi, A. A. (2009). In the United States of Africa (D. & N. Ball, Trans.). Nebraska: The Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. (Original work published 2006).
Whitley, L. (2023). Images of Mediterranean Crossing. Social Text, 41(4), 61–82. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10910014 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10910014
Zeleza, P. T. (2002). Contemporary African Migrations in a Global Context. African Issues, 30(1), 9–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/1167083 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/1167083
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
