Transit Lit
Fictions of Migration in Twenty-First-Century African Immigrant Literature

Cameron Leader-Picone (Author)

9780810149335, Northwestern University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 December 2025

240 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.34 kg

"Transit Lit is an ambitious and timely project that makes a significant contribution to studies of new African diasporic literature in the United States. Organized and well researched, this book promises to help define future conversations in the field." - Stephanie Li, Duke University

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.

A Note on Terminology
Introduction: &
ldquo It is high time the African stood up&
rdquo
1. The Campus and Cosmopolitanism
2. Afropolitanism and the African &
ldquo Good Immigrant&
rdquo Narrative
3. Immigrant Metafictions and the Narrativizing of Bureaucracy
4. Afro-pessimist Narratives, Critical Cosmopolitanism, and Democracy
5. Slavery, Colonialism, and Conceptualizing Diaspora
Coda: Xenophobia and Cosmopolitan Optimism
Acknowledgments