By George Omagbemi Sylvester
Global academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan has officially released Professor Abiodun Adeniyi’s seminal work, New Narratives of African Migration: Exploring Media and the Contestation of Space, marking a pivotal moment in contemporary migration scholarship. Published on 22 February 2026, this 272-page volume dismantles conventional media framings of migration as merely a crisis and repositions African movement within rich emotional, cultural, and mediated contexts.
Professor Adeniyi, a distinguished communication scholar at Baze University, Abuja, brings decades of research at the intersection of media, identity, and geopolitics to bear on one of the most contested issues of our time. In the opening chapters of his book, he probes the “emotional geographies of lost homes and fractured bonds,” interrogating how displacement reshapes identity long after departure. By foregrounding the experiences of intra-African migration—often sidelined in Western narratives—Adeniyi confronts what he calls the “epistemic silence” surrounding these journeys and insists that dominant media have historically rendered them invisible.
The work makes a compelling claim: in the era of surveillance and pervasive digital technologies, social media has become a “space of hybridity” where migrants assert their presence and contest reductive stories that strip them of agency. Adeniyi’s critique also extends to colonial legacies that continue to influence migration governance and reinforce fragile nation-state structures.
As migration dynamics reshape societies across Africa and beyond, this book invites policymakers, media practitioners, and scholars to rethink how movement, belonging, and media narratives intersect—rejecting simplistic headlines in favour of a deeper, nuanced understanding that respects the humanity at the heart of African mobility.
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