Narratives of migration: an alphabet from Africa

African migration narratives offer a compelling exploration of the intersections between diverse worlds, revealing the complex dynamics between mobility and increasingly tight border control. Questions about who can move, who can settle, where, and under what conditions, underlie these narratives, inviting readers to delve into the idiosyncratic features of the life-worlds represented. By weaving together personal and collective experiences, African migration narratives depict the journeys of individuals and communities as they navigate the challenges of displacement and integration – or the failure thereof – in new environments. This literature deepens readers’ understanding of the psychological dimensions of the migration experience, and the conflicts and connections between self-determination and troubling situational and social demands in transnational, intercontinental contexts. Through vivid storytelling, authors illustrate the difficulties migrants face in preserving meaningful forms of sociality while adapting to foreign environments, highlighting issues of alienation and discrimination. A significant aspect of this is the pervasive racism that African migrants encounter, making them more vulnerable than other migrant groups who are less easily identifiable as foreign, and placing them at a distinct disadvantage. This racial violence exacerbates the struggles of integration and acceptance, but also starkly highlights the resilience and adaptability of migrants who hold on to beauty and joy in the face of adversity. This inaugural lecture offers an eclectic reflection on this body of literature and makes a case for why it matters.

WATCH THE INAUGURAL LECTURE HERE

Short biography

After completing her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Cape Town, Tina Steiner joined Stellenbosch University (SU) as a postdoctoral fellow in 2007. Six months later, she was appointed as a lecturer in English. Steiner was promoted to full professor in 2021 and currently chairs the English Department.

An enduring interest in Anglophone African literary production has shaped her professional research trajectory. Through her research and teaching, she contributes to greater recognition for the archive of knowledge that African creative narrative expression represents. Her first monograph, based on her PhD, explored Eastern African migrant fiction, focussing on processes of linguistic and cultural translation and the ways in which they simultaneously facilitate and limit subject formation and a sense of belonging. This work was published as Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Fiction by St Jerome Press, Manchester, in 2009. The book, reissued by Routledge in 2014, remains her most cited work.

Her second monograph, Convivial Worlds: Writing Relation from Africa, published in the Routledge book series “Literary Cultures of the Global South” in 2021, highlights forms of conviviality in fiction and life-writing from Eastern and Southern Africa. It concentrates on ordinary moments of recognition, hospitality, humour and kindness to illuminate significant repertoires of repair in a world broken by unequal power relations. The book engages with ideas of world-making, personhood and relational social imaginaries from an African perspective. It received an honourable mention in the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) Humanities Book Awards 2023 in the category for established researchers.

In addition, Steiner has published widely in accredited local and international journals and co-edited special issues and scholarly books. Most notably, she was the lead editor of the English translation of DDT Jabavu’s isiXhosa travelogue In India and East Africa/E-Indiya nase East Africa, which was published in a bilingual edition by Wits Press in 2020. Through the efforts of the editorial collective, this little-known travelogue has been retrieved from the archive and made available to contemporary readers in English and in an updated isiXhosa orthography. Steiner also co-edited the collection Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah (Routledge, 2023).

She has been a co- editor of the journal Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies since 2017. This Taylor & Francis journal is closely connected to the biennial Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies conference series, which Steiner has attended since its inception. Her international collaborations on Indian Ocean studies, African popular genres, translation studies and contemporary African literature have seen her work alongside colleagues based on the continent and abroad.