Between Displacement and Imagination

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.