“New Hidden Narratives of African Migration: Exploring Media and the Contestation of Place” by Abiodun Adeniyi (2026) – A review by Joan Tirwyn Hassan, Ph.D

[A review by Joan Tirwyn Hassan, Ph.D, Associate Professor and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Kaduna State University (KASU), Kaduna and Visiting Faculty, Department of Mass Communication, Baze University, Abuja. March 2026.]

In an era in which African migration is too often reduced to spectacle, boats at sea, borders breached, and statistics weaponised, New Hidden Narratives of African Migration: Exploring Media and the Contestation of Place offers a bold, intellectually rigorous, and deeply humane intervention. Abiodun Adeniyi has written a work that refuses the simplifications of headline journalism and instead, excavates the layered emotional, political, and epistemic terrains that constitute African migratory experience.

This book is not merely about movement across borders; it is about movement across meanings, memory, identity, digital belonging, their fluidity and the contested politics of representation. It stands as one of the most ambitious recent scholarly engagements with African migration, media, and the politics of narrative production, curated from the lens of communication and media studies.

The opening chapter, “African Migration Beyond the Headlines,” sets the tone for the book’s intervention. Adeniyi carefully situates migration within theoretical constructs while simultaneously critiquing the dominant paradigms that overemphasise crisis and understate continuity, agency, and interiority. Rather than dismiss classical migration theory, he interrogates its limits and calls for epistemological recalibration rooted in African realities.

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Importantly, the methodological framework does not simply gather data; it maps hidden journeys enveloped by quiet and unheard voices, silent echoes, bottled emotions and repressed traumas of migrants. This metaphor is not decorative. It signals the author’s commitment to understanding migration as lived, narrated, remembered, and mediated. From the outset, the reader recognises that this is not a policy manual nor a journalistic exposé, but a reflective, critical, and interdisciplinary scholarly text.

Part I distinguishes itself by foregrounding emotional geographies. In “Lost Homes and Fractured Bonds,” Adeniyi shifts the conversation from structural explanations to affective realities. Displacement is shown not as a single rupture but as a series of subtle dislocations, of intimacy, belonging, and memory. The chapter on “The Stranger Within” is especially compelling. Here, the diasporic self is not romanticised as a hybrid cosmopolitan nor pathologised as an alienated subject. Instead, identity emerges as a negotiated terrain. The migrant becomes both witness and archive, carrying fragments of past and present that resist easy categorisation.

Equally significant is the gendered interrogation in “Who Stays, Who Goes, and Who Changes.” By highlighting those who remain, Adeniyi destabilises the migration narrative’s fixation on departure. The politics of presence and absence become central: migration is not only about mobility but about what mobility does to family structures, gender roles, and intergenerational expectations.

Part II may be the book’s most conceptually daring section. “Unspoken Journeys” and “Why the Stories We Don’t Hear Matter” directly confront the epistemic violence embedded in migration discourse. African migration, particularly intra-African migration, is routinely marginalised in global media imaginaries. Adeniyi restores these silenced histories, insisting that absence from dominant archives does not equal absence from reality. The Chapter “Traces in the Margins” is particularly evocative. By attending to objects, rituals, and intimate archives, the author broadens what counts as evidence. A photograph, a voice note, a ceremonial cloth. These become repositories of migratory meaning. The methodological implication is clear: migration scholarship must move beyond statistics toward textured human documentation.

Part III situates migration within African states’ historical and political trajectories. “Trapped in Transit” traces colonial legacies and contemporary governance fragilities without lapsing into deterministic fatalism. The mediation of nationalism is interrogated as a narrative battlefield where migrants are alternately celebrated as remittance heroes or vilified as security threats. Perhaps most innovative is Chapter Nine’s exploration of returnee knowledge and epistemic silence. Adeniyi interrogates how returned migrants negotiate credibility, belonging, and cultural authenticity. The “in-between” condition is not simply cultural hybridity; it is epistemological vulnerability. Whose knowledge counts? Whose experiences are dismissed as foreign contamination? In these Chapters, the book becomes a profound meditation on power, not only state power but narrative power.

Part IV propels the discussion into contemporary digital terrains. In “African Migration in the Age of Surveillance and Digital Belonging,” Adeniyi recognises the paradox of digital life: surveillance and connection coexist. Migrants are hyper-visible and invisible at once. “From Silence to Signal” demonstrates how African migrants utilise social media to disrupt dominant narratives. Digital platforms become sites of memory, myth correction, solidarity, and self-fashioning. Rather than treating digital spaces as merely communicative tools, Adeniyi conceptualises them as arenas of narrative struggle. The discussion of misinformation and media myths is especially timely. The author does not absolve African media systems of complicity but situates misinformation within global circuits of representation. In doing so, he links local distortions to global power asymmetries.

This book makes several major and enduring contributions to the study of African migration and media. First, it offers a significant epistemological intervention by challenging the dominance of Eurocentric migration frameworks and advocating instead for narrative plurality. Rather than accepting inherited theoretical models as universal, the author interrogates their limits and re-centres African experiences as legitimate sites of knowledge production. Second, the work demonstrates impressive interdisciplinary depth. Drawing insightfully from communication studies, cultural studies, memory studies, and political sociology, it transcends disciplinary silos and situates migration within a broader intellectual landscape. This synthesis strengthens the analytical framework and enriches the interpretive possibilities available to readers.

Third, the book advances genuine conceptual innovation through its deployment of “hidden narratives” not as a rhetorical device, but as a rigorous analytic lens. The concept becomes a method of inquiry. It guides how stories are uncovered, interpreted, and positioned within wider debates about power, representation, and belonging. Fourth, the text maintains strong digital relevance. It thoughtfully integrates contemporary digital practices, particularly social media and online forms of belonging, without succumbing to technological determinism. Digital spaces are neither romanticised nor demonised; they are critically examined as contested arenas of visibility, memory, and identity formation.

Finally, despite its theoretical sophistication, the book is marked by a distinct humanistic sensibility. The prose remains accessible, reflective, and ethically grounded, ensuring that complex arguments do not eclipse the lived realities at the heart of migration. In this balance between intellectual rigour and moral attentiveness lies one of the book’s greatest strengths.

Adeniyi’s prose is reflective yet precise. The chapters build cumulatively, moving from personal and affective registers toward structural and digital analyses. Each section is supported by extensive bibliographies, underscoring the work’s scholarly credibility. While ambitious in scope, the book maintains coherence through its sustained attention to narrative, including who tells it, who suppresses it, and who contests it. The conclusion, “Making Space for Enduring Narratives,” serves not as a summary but as an invitation. It calls scholars, journalists, and policymakers to rethink how African migration is conceptualised and represented.

No work of this scope is without areas for further expansion. At times, empirical case studies could be more deeply elaborated to anchor some of the theoretical claims. Additionally, regional differentiation within Africa might benefit from more sustained comparative analysis. However, these are not weaknesses so much as directions for future research inspired by this text.

In a global climate where migration debates are increasingly polarised and securitised, New Hidden Narratives of African Migration insists on complexity. It resists reduction. It demands listening. For journalists, the book offers a corrective to sensationalism. For policymakers, it provides a reminder that governance without narrative sensitivity is governance without legitimacy. For scholars, it opens new conceptual pathways for interrogation and discourse.
For migrants and diasporic communities, it affirms lived realities too often rendered invisible.

Abiodun Adeniyi has produced a significant scholarly work, published by no other than Palgrave McMillan, and echoes round the world by SpringerNature, Switzerland. It is theoretically rich, politically conscious, and morally attentive. New Hidden Narratives of African Migration is not merely a contribution to migration studies, but also to how we understand Africa, media, and the politics of belonging in the twenty-first century. It deserves wide circulation in universities, newsrooms, policy institutes, and public discourse spaces across the continent and beyond. Rating: Essential Reading

● Joan Tirwyn Hassan, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Deputy Dean, Faculty of Communication and Media Studies,
Kaduna State University (KASU)
Kaduna.