Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Languages, Literatures and Cultures

First Advisor

Anne Gulick

Second Advisor

Jeanne Garane

Abstract

Migration is a human practice as old as human society. It is primarily triggered by a human urge for self-preservation or the quest for better standards of living. Various periods of human history have known great flows of voluntary, semi-voluntary, and forced migrations. In contemporary days, people move more than ever before, mostly from countries of the Global South to countries of the Global North, mainly from African countries. These migrants flee from poverty, armed conflicts, unemployment, and repression from despotic leaders. While the question of migration has consistently and extensively been addressed, the focus in the mainstream migration studies has always been on the movement from the home country to a host country, neglecting return migration, which, despite being less intensive, remains important for fully understanding the human migration experience. Focusing on Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel Ambiguous Adventure and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, this thesis analyzes the migration and return journey of two protagonists, drawing from Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial notions of hybridity and estrangement. The main argument of this thesis is that the return journey is similar to the migration to a new country. Both require the subject to undergo a re/integration process to be able to be socially active.

Rights

© 2025, Babila Bengala Samuel

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