Transit Lit

Explores new forms of cosmopolitan identity constructed in contemporary diasporic fictions



The expanding number of migrants to the United States from continental Africa since the 1960s has led to a flourishing twenty-first-century literary corpus by immigrants and the children of immigrants. Transit Lit: Fictions of Migration in Twenty-First-Century African Immigrant Literature analyzes key works by African immigrant authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, and Yaa Gyasi to argue that such texts reveal the tensions between the authors' own cosmopolitan ideals and a necessary critique of how such ideals become co-opted and commodified within contemporary geopolitics. Cameron Leader-Picone offers a new conceptual framework for reading contemporary diasporic texts that do not fit easily into national or continental traditions or previous literary models. Instead, he argues for the need to embrace the overlapping instabilities - of meaning, identity, and citizenship - that characterize twenty-first-century diasporic movement in an interconnected world. These texts, and the constructions of identity that they trace, map the terrain of contemporary migration.