Embodying Intersectional Narratives: Mobility, Postnationality and Marginalised Masculinity in Jamal Mahjoub’s 'Travelling with Djinns'

A remarkable body of instructive scholarship exists today on the subversive responses of postcolonial travel narratives to colonialist travel writing, branching into a trend of transcultural “mobile” stories foregrounding Europe(anness) as inescapably hybrid/transcultural/trans-local, thus rupturing the normative culturo-racial depiction of Europe as “White.” A critical silence however remains on how these postcolonial travel/mobile writings project the challenges of cultural citizenship involving male migrants framed in marginalised masculinity in Europe. Engaging Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns, I argue that some contemporary post/African novels unpack new ways of presenting postcolonial mobility by focusing on the challenges of subjectivity and sexual profiling in Europe, especially bordering on marginalised masculinity. This particularly unveils the weakness of Afropolitanism, a critical view that tends to present an unproblematic and straightforward idea of the European integration and citizenship of migrant/diasporic Africans, thus shedding further light on postcolonial African mobility and the politics of European (non-)belonging.