African perspectives on migration: Re-centring Southern Africa

Despite the explosion of migration literature in recent years, there remains a bias in aca-demic literature to focus on Europe or other areas in the Global North. Migration studiestend to follow the political interests of curbing access for refugees and other migrants in the Global North, divorced from the fact that most displacement and indeed much mobil-ity takes place in the Global South (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). Worsening matters, African scholars (like scholars in other areas of the Global South) continue to be under-represented in migration literature, no matter on what geographical focus they are working on. This is related to a variety of issues linked to pervasive inequalities in knowledge produc-tion, not least access to funding, as well as various hindrances against publishing in estab-lished outlets. Anyone writing on migration, and especially those writing on migration inand out of the African continent, would benefit from taking a closer look at the scholarship written by authors from the continent.In this review essay, the focus is on three contributions, geographically placed in Southern Africa.