Book Review: Fareda Banda, African Migration, Human Rights and Literature (Hart, 2020)

The book explores the interaction between African migration and human rights through the lens of narratives primarily told by African authors, often in the first person, and at times artists. The author recounts what literary narratives tell us about human rights, and how literature can be used to advance human rights causes. The book is divided into two parts. Part I discusses African migration from the perspective of the relation between law, justice and literature more broadly. Part II concentrates on the narrated experiences of migrant women, migrant children, and LGBTI migrants, occupying overlapping axis of identification and potential discrimination. It is a book that is attentive to disparities between human rights rhetoric and the realities of hostile immigration policies, including in their lasting impact on post-migration life. Concerned with ‘artivism,’ the use of the arts in human rights activism, the publication can be seen as part of this tradition itself.