Longing, Belonging and the Other

Overview & Synopsis

How do Black African diasporic literatures articulate the desire for elsewhere and the struggle to belong? Drawing on a comparative corpus of texts written in French and Spanish, Nelson Sindze Wembe examines how migration, return, and disillusion shape diasporic subjectivities at the intersection of racialisation, alterity, and the politics of belonging. Conceptualising longing as a psychological and symbolic motor, he shows how it structures processes of affiliation, identity formation, and encounters with the Other. By foregrounding contradiction, ambivalence, and in-between positions, the study offers an original contribution to Black African diaspora studies and contemporary literary theory.