African perspectives on migration: Re-centring Southern Africa

Despite the explosion of migration literature in recent years, there remains a bias in academic literature to focus on Europe or other areas in the Global North. Migration studies tend to follow the political interests of curbing access for refugees and other migrants in the Global North, divorced from the fact that most displacement and indeed much mobility takes place in the Global South (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). Worsening matters, African scholars (like scholars in other areas of the Global South) continue to be under-represented in migration literature, no matter on what geographical focus they are working on. This is related to a variety of issues linked to pervasive inequalities in knowledge production, not least access to funding, as well as various hindrances against publishing in established outlets. Anyone writing on migration, and especially those writing on migration in and out of the African continent, would benefit from taking a closer look at the scholarship written by authors from the continent. In this review essay, the focus is on three contributions, geographically placed in Southern Africa. While many other authors could also be highlighted, this area has faced even less attention, because the migration routes are mostly southwards, towards South Africa rather than to Europe. Thus, to really showcase African migration patterns outside of European influence, the aim of this review is to re-centre one region on the continent, in particular, and highlight the important theoretical and methodological lessons these hold for migration studies globally (see also Grosfoguel et al. 2015). First, the review introduces the three texts in the following paragraphs.