(Im)mobilities and migration in the work of César Mba Abogo and Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

Abstract

Many literary texts written by authors of African origin in the Spanish language engage with the experience of migration and of living in a European society that marginalizes and homogenizes migrants as the ‘African Other.’ Rather than reproduce stereotypical images of African migrants, these texts challenge a biased debate on migration to Europe, offering an alternative vision of a complex phenomenon. In these texts, migrants are individuals whose mobility is restricted because they are subjected to processes of Othering, which confine them to the margins of Spanish society, raising issues of mobility in/justice and forced im/mobilities related to hegemonic power relations, coloniality, and race. Privileging the perspective of African migrant subjects in creating new imaginaries of migration to Europe, this article examines the mobilities paradigm in the context of transnational migration in a postcolonial era and discusses the potential of literary texts to unsilence ‘immobile voices.’ Through this lens, I offer readings of César Mba Abogo’s El Porteador de Marlow: Canción negra sin color (2007) and Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo’s El Metro (2007), grounding my scholarship in Equatoguinean literature and contemporary hispanophone African literature.

Keywords: César Mba Abogo, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, African migration, Equatorial Guinea, mobility studies, African literature in Spanish