Ernest Cole. Migration and Return in Modern African Literature: Black Bodies in White Spaces. University of Rochester Press, 2025. 230 pp. $89.83. Hardcover. ISBN: 9781648251122.

Migration and Return in Modern African Literature: Black Bodies in White Spaces offers a timely and insightful intervention in African literary and diaspora studies by challenging dominant narratives that link migration to the West with inevitable success.At a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric is getting stronger, racialized border policies are becoming more common, and migrant protections are being weakened in Europe and North America, Cole focuses on African literary depictions of migration as sites of instability, racial violence, and mental breakdown.His main argument is both contestable and well-reasoned: for many African migrants, going back to their home country is not a failure of mobility, but a conscious choice that might provide them more power in reaction to the structural limits of Western racial capitalism.The study is structured around a tripartite migratory framework consisting of Flight, Arrival, and Return, enabling Cole to identify the emotional, political, and epistemic transformations associated with the migrant experience.This structure gives the analysis a clear direction and shows how the costs of migration unfolds across time and space.Cole does not conceptualize migration as a single event; instead, he sees it as a process shaped by historical discontentment, racialized exclusion, and contested belonging.In the first part "Flight," Cole talks about the reasons most Africans leave Africa, such as corrupt politics, a stagnant economy, disappointment after independence, and civil war.Drawing on novels such as We Need New Names, Open City, The Other Crucifix, and Behold the Dreamers, he demonstrates that the decision to migrate is already marked by violence and loss.Migration appears as admission into a global racial system that preconditions Black people for marginalization rather than as an unrestricted quest for opportunity.Cole's readings put modern stories about migration in the context of longer histories of African discontent, while also rejecting romanticized stories of departure.The "Arrival" section constitutes one of the book's strongest analytical contributions.Through close readings of Behold the Dreamers, Blue White Red, and Harare North, Cole exposes how undocumented status, exploitative labor, and racial surveillance converge to produce migrant precarity.These texts show that Western spaces are structurally hostile places where the law only offers limited protection and racism is unavoidable.Cole's analysis emphasizes the psychological effects of this condition, highlighting how disappointment, mental collapse, and physical fatigue functions as a narrative consequence of the unfulfilled promise of the