Patoimbasba Nikiema — Exile and Return in African and Caribbean Literature
University of Miami professor explores how exile and return reshape identity in African and Caribbean writing, presenting return as an 'Afrotopian project.'
Why we picked this
A scholar reimagines the African and Caribbean diaspora not as loss but as an 'Afrotopian project' — a lecture that could only happen in Miami.
Patoimbasba Nikiema examines the literature of exile and return across African and Caribbean traditions — writers who left, writers who came back, and what both movements did to their sense of identity and belonging. His framework is distinctive: rather than treating diaspora as primarily a story of loss, he reads return as an “Afrotopian project” that reimagines what Africa and the Caribbean could become.
Free at Books & Books in Coral Gables, co-presented with the University of Miami Center for the Humanities. Miami — a city shaped by Caribbean migration — is exactly the right place for this conversation.