In 2003, Eve Sedgwick published an influential critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion, which in her view had grown all but synonymous with academic literary analysis itself, to its great detriment. The key to her argument, and its fatal flaw, is a conflation of the various types of skeptical interpretive attitudes and approaches—suspicion, demystification, anagnorisis, unveiling, questioning generally—with a paranoid mode of reading, clinically understood: hence the title “You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay Is about You.” For Sedgwick, the “strong” theories underwriting the dominant methods of contemporary literary scholarship and interrogation—Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive and queer—cherish and militate for a rigorous idêe fixe, which blinds their practitioners to the manifold semiotic and affective contingencies at play in their object texts. Averse to surprise, obsessed with “exposure,” devoted to forestalling “negative affect,” the hermeneutics of suspicion rewrites the documents studied in terms of its own defensive master code instead of taking them on their own terms. To this paranoiac end, it treats any given text as symptomatic of whatever motives or pathologies its own grounding theory is primed to diagnose. In this searching for the hidden, yet presupposed cause of which the text is but a mediated reflex, the hermeneutics of suspicion, on Sedgwick's quite suspicious appraisal, is itself symptomatic of a reductively tendentious disposition.

To the often “ugly prescriptions” of the dominant paranoid approach, Sedgwick counterposes what she calls “reparative reading”: one that attunes oneself to the contingencies of the text in question, allows oneself to experience the “joy-inducing” surprises they might offer, and (re)assembles the text on that basis. Perhaps because Sedgwick herself has long displayed a thoroughgoing mastery of the suspicious interpretive mode that she latterly decries, her birthing of the reparative alternative remains notably underdeveloped. It did, however, prove suggestive enough to spawn an entire post-critical movement of exegesis known as “surface reading.”

As articulated by its leading proponents, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, this (anti-) interpretive strategy contests not just the hermeneutics of suspicion and its associated methods (historicism, deconstruction, etc.), but also the “hermeneutics of depth,” the search for any truth not “evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts.”

In this book, we have tried to bring an understanding of the distinctive experiences of sub-Saharan African immigrants as well the diverse and multifaceted challenges that they encounter once they emigrate to the United States. The respondents in this study have shared their stories of relocating, adapting, and coping with their new realities. Storytelling and reflection are not only powerful but also empowering. Giving sub-Saharan African immigrants the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own voices empowers them in an authentic way to become agents of their own lives. This results in the ability to forge a meaningful future for themselves. Moreover, their lived experiences will provide helpful lessons to future immigrants as they navigate their immigration journey.

We argued that acknowledging the historical nature of racial bias and White privilege in the United States without taking time to examine issues of race and privilege or considering the importance of cultural diversity is detrimental to all. Coming from countries where Blackness is not a point of reference, the sub-Saharan African immigrants are somewhat oblivious to racism and discrimination at first. Later, they come to realize that racism is a constant reality they have to deal with on a daily basis. Dealing with race thus becomes an important component of how they adjust to their new lives as immigrants. Even those who adapt fast eventually realize they will never be American enough going by the racially charged definitions and expectations.

Personal effort, determination, and eventual success of sub-Saharan African immigrants continue to be underappreciated independent of historical colonization, marginalization, stereotypes, and tokenism among other stigmas. These stigmas cause sub-Saharan African immigrants to be viewed as not being proactive or possessing agency in the process of personal purpose and self-determination. Sub-Saharan African immigrants are therefore constantly faced with situations that require them to debunk these myths or conform and exhibit the stereotypical images society has imposed on them.

Based on the challenges experienced by our respondents as discussed in this book, we as engaged scholars realized that there is a need for supporting and coaching sub-Saharan African immigrants to succeed and to continuously create conditions and institutional interventions that foster their integration, assimilation, and success in their host countries.

Conscious Dissemblance

Me and my captain don't agree

But he don't know, ‘cause he don't ask me

He don't know he don't know my mind

When he sees me laughing

Laughing to keep from crying

Got one mind for white folk to see

Another for what I know is me.

—Unknown Laborer

In this chapter, the authors expound on how sub-Saharan African immigrants deal with and recreate new transnational identities by discussing some trends of behavior that seem to be used to deal with critical identity issues. Here the authors explore a variety of strategies—from assimilation, integration, and compromising to adapting and reevaluating their ways of thinking and behaving to the American context—adopted by sub-Saharan African immigrants for coping with racism and discrimination based on skin color, language, specifically accent, the transnational dimension of place of origin and other intersecting identities. This chapter also deals with the difficult reality of the lack of validation that many immigrants feel in the United States.

As sub-Saharan African immigrants, we come with our own understanding and definition of success, and we also bring our communities’ and families hopes and aspirations for success. We do everything that America says one needs to do to succeed, but there are so many impediments and outside forces to that success. To fit in and become as American as we can, we go to such extremes, including bleaching our skins and straightening our hair. And yet even that is not enough. We also come possessing a high level of self-esteem and confidence in our cultures and values demonstrated in our fashion and food. However, this does not last long.

If we were to assess Africa's development the way we assess that of a person, starting at the point where Africa's existence first appears in written records, rather than the geological history of the planet—from birth, naming and through all the stages to the present—Africa's identity would be much more understood and appreciated. Through the many courses of human history, the land and peoples of Africa have faced—and continue to face—many challenges. Fortunately, Africa is a huge and very resilient continent that continues to grow and change regardless of the centuries of plunder, genocides, and demeaning policies thrown at the land and people and all the beings that reside and depend on it.

In the last three or so decades, there has been an increased historical interest in Africa. As the oldest inhabited continent on Earth, Africa is home to all humankind. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans and human ancestors have lived in Africa for more than 5 million years. African diversity in genetic makeup is also uncontested. Britannica records that some of the oldest traces of life have been identified in the Transvaal region of South Africa, preserved as unicellular algae in rocks dating from 3.4 to 2.6 billion years ago, placing the life forms firmly during the Precambrian era, which extended from 4.6 billion to 541 million years ago (Windley 2020; Nicol et al. 2021).

Anthropological and archaeological records indicate that Africa is the oldest inhabited continent, the site where fossil evidence of human beings (Homo sapiens) and their ancestors, with evidence of critical evolution stages, has been found. Africa is one of the most linguistically diverse continents in the world. It has more than 2,000 languages and is home to more countries than any other continent (Brown and Ogilvie 2010).

The final stages of this book were completed (overshadowed, in truth) by an invisible menace whose physical, psychological and social effects were nonetheless highly tangible and observable. Although some people were fortunate enough to live in areas that did not experience this unseen ‘enemy’ as a familiar neighbourhood presence, the fear it provoked always lay close by, not just in distant parts. The COVID-19 pandemic epitomised our central concerns in ways we could never have anticipated, and certainly not welcomed. This strain of coronavirus posed existential threats to lives and livelihoods that revolved around movement and location; the challenges it presented fundamentally altered our immediate surroundings. In Gothic literature we tend to go forth to meet the unknown, yet this real-world crisis demanded retreat or seclusion. Few people could travel far. In the early stages of the outbreak, urban landscapes were eerily uninhabited, inaccessible for work or leisure purposes. Beauty spots, beaches, mountains and nature reserves similarly barred or restricted access to those seeking escape. These rural landscapes, to which many people would typically travel for recreation or solace, became empty, almost untenanted, spaces. Indoors and outdoors, social distancing rules emphasised the spatial threat, the insidious footfall, of the disease. In a climate of creeping unease and dread, the experience of risk seemed at once proximate and remote, intimate and abstract.

Medical questions about transmission (across continents, countries, neighbourhoods and households, as well as from individual to individual) rapidly became urgent matters of political, cultural and economic debate. Accelerated partly by international travel for business and leisure, or exacerbated by displacement and forced migration, the pandemic has been an issue of movement. Stay at home, we were told, a strategy intended to avoid infection and to limit the spread of the virus or confine it where it had already arrived. Set against this edict, the global supply chain struggled to transport medical equipment and supplies; research laboratories rushed to develop vaccines, produce chemical reagents or design reliable antibody tests; and manufacturers shifted production to make ventilators and visors. A state of suspension and ceaseless activity, unquiet stillness and haste ensued: in such a disorientating hiatus, the future could be viewed, alternately, with anxiety or through a peculiar nostalgia for a return to normality.

Evolution of the Concept of Co-Production

Co-Production for Economic Development in International Relations by Maurice Byé and Henri Bourguinat

The concept of co-production is not new; since the beginning of the twentieth century, the term is used to refer to the industrial production of chemicals, armaments or films. In the economic aspect, it probably began to be used with the work of Maurice Byé, in 1965, which points out co-production as an essential element of international relations, since international co-production means producing in common and, therefore,

It was also in France that the term continued to be used in the economic sense of international relations for developing countries with the work of Henri Bourguinat (1968, 1969). The author argued that the concept of co-production is the bedrock of regional markets, and only when co-productions have multiplied, when irreversible links between partners have been built, can real integration be considered to exist.

Co-Production in Public Service Compiled by Jeffrey Brudney and Robert England

In the late 1970s until the mid–1990s, the term appeared in the United States associated with the Public Service, for example, in the works of Percy (1978), Whitaker (1980), Sharp (1980), Kiser and Percy (1980) and Brudney and England (1983), among others. Clearly, there are two perspectives in these two decades: in the first, ‘the concept of co-production is based on the recognition that public services are the joint product of the activities of citizens and government officials’ (Whitaker 1980, p. 242).

Brudney and England (1983) pointed to another perspective, that of economic relevance, particularly by Kiser and Percy (1980), who reopened the discussion about the distinction between ‘regular producers’ and ‘consumer producers’ introduced by Parks et al. (1981). While the former group is responsible for producing goods and services for the purpose of exchange (usually money), the latter group is responsible for producing services to consume the resulting production.

Among the many challenges sub-Saharan African immigrants face is the issue of being viewed as different yet expected to assimilate and behave as an American. To delve deeper into the identity crises that many African immigrants are experiencing, the authors use this chapter to discuss the issues related to the inner struggles that sub-Saharan African immigrants experience as they navigate between two worlds. The authors also explore how their resilience wanes and how their values and expectations evolve and change over time as a result of the pressures to adjust and assimilate. This chapter also explores the issues of trying to assimilate and fit in the American culture, negotiating race, class and gender biases, and other plurilingual challenges.

We start with language as a dimension for identification that is used more often due to the difference in accent when African immigrants speak in the United States. Then we progress to the definition of selfhood as a navigational tool towards assimilation and immersion into the United States culture. In this chapter, we also explore communication as a general tool for adaptation, assimilation, education and economic pursuits, productivity and being in a world where a slight detection of a different accent other than American English can cause one to be not only viewed, but also evaluated as being incompetent.

Research indicates that there is a relationship between identity and a sense of belonging, motivation, achievement, persistence, eventual success and general well-being.

Chapter 5 delves deeper into the challenges of coming to the United States and being confronted with issues of race, national narratives adopted to describe all peoples of color and discrimination along color lines.

Sub-Saharan African immigrants may have familiarity with what it means to be discriminated against from their colonial history and the divide-and-rule strategy that resulted in what today is evident as ethnic conflicts. However, in their homelands, they have not been exposed to the kind of color-based racism they experience when they emigrate out of Africa. The kind of discrimination based on race that Black people have been subjected to since slavery is unique. The caste system (race hierarchies) in the United States is one of the most brutal and dehumanizing in the world.

The responses from the interviewees demonstrate clearly that sub-Saharan African immigrants know what discrimination is but are not very familiar with the kind of racism that is part and parcel of the racial hierarchy in the United States. At first, they view racism as a hindrance and challenge, before coming to the realization of its historical context and the magnitude of its impact on their lives. Resilience is one competency they use to devise coping mechanisms. One respondent says:

My experience in Nigeria would be that I have to confront ethnic discrimination. We have about 250 languages in Nigeria so that in itself is a different experience and then coming here I have never up to the time I came to North America, Canada and United States, I have never confronted racial discrimination in high school. I had Irish reverend fathers as my teachers, British council teachers, and American Peacecorp volunteers. The relationship was not on the basis of race. We were more in terms of what I can benefit from my teachers.

Another respondent compares and contrasts discrimination in Nigeria and in the United States in the following words:

In 2016, Andrew Bowden, author and creator of the online walking blog ‘Rambling man’, wrote an article titled ‘Is it Safe to Walk Alone? (The Answer is Yes!)’. As the title implies, Bowden is keen to assure us all that, irrespective of age or gender, walking in the countryside in solitude is perfectly safe. As he observes, ‘Where else will you bump into a random stranger holding a rifle, and end up having a conversation about butterflies…?’ (Bowden, 2016). Bowden's partner, Catherine Redfern, in her own blog London Hiker, writes on the same subject:

What is interesting about Bowden and Redfern's advice is that both are writing in response to a perceived sense of actual threat that something fearful resides in the countryside. Despite the statistical unlikeliness of such a threat, there is something about the magnitude of the countryside, its sublime immensity, the dwarfing of our physicality by comparison and the seemingly endless, panoramic expanses of open space that unsettles us on another level. Robert Macfarlane captures this inexplicable fear in an article titled ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside’, in which he identifies it, rather less precisely, as ‘a realm that snags, bites and troubles’ (Macfarlane, 2015: 1–2).

Our book explores that less explicable interface between the actual physical geography of the landscape and its walking trails, and the sense of haunting travellers experience, or perceive to be at work when journeying across and through it. William Hughes has identified, as a staple of tourist Gothic, journeys undertaken on foot, which separate the protagonist from the comfort and security of modern forms of transport (Hughes, 2013: 242–243), but relatively little sustained critical attention has yet to be paid specifically to walking and its relation to landscapes. This book covers predominantly rural and some urban landscapes and extends into extreme terrain, vertically into the high peaks and horizontally to the poles.

The main argument that the researchers are making in Chapter 8 is that current global leadership styles, specifically those found in Africa, and the disillusionment with leaders in some of the sub-Saharan African countries were the major immigration factors for some of the respondents. To give this chapter a historical and contextual baseline, the effect and impact that colonialism had and continues to have on Africa (and most of the world that experienced this trauma) will be discussed. The authors found that time has not healed all wounds, and the impact of colonialism still causes mental stress and continues to contribute greatly to low general well-being.

African leadership and management are areas that are not widely researched or publicized. What gets people's attention is negative coverage of issues which root cause is not fully investigated. Since African leadership and management was one of the emigration reasons cited by our respondents, we decided to research and find out more about the topic. We will examine the present and the past, and present a futuristic perspective on the issue. Additionally, we will discuss the issues related to Africa's identity, leadership, and management styles. These variables are important for Africa as they support the continent's self-determined evolution and leadership styles that will shape it beyond the twenty-first century. We argue that the discussion on African leadership and management demands a theoretical framework beyond Eurocentric models or one that sees Africa as a poor continent. We also avoid limiting the discussion on African leadership and management by solely looking at post or neocolonial history, the colonizers’ conquest or savior stories, or by examining Africa as a monolithic culture ready for appropriation just like its human and natural resources.

In Chapter 7, the authors discuss the dilemma faced by sub-Saharan African immigrants trapped in the paradox and myth of going back to their native countries after graduation or “making it.” While other researchers on African immigration suggest that the major reasons for immigration are economic or conflict-related, most of the respondents interviewed gave education and family reunification as their primary reasons for immigrating. Furthermore, the myth of going back home shows that the pursuit of education was to position them for better job opportunities back in their native countries. The researchers reflect on the myth held by many immigrants in the United States: the hope of one day going back home after completing education or getting the needed resources:

You then realize first that you don't belong anywhere anymore. You don't belong back home because your mentality has shifted, your way of life has shifted. You come here and you are still traditional enough that you don't belong here either, your way of thinking is completely different. So, I think the word that comes to mind is alienation, you feel alienated no matter where you are, you just don't belong anymore. (Respondent) The reason why most researchers of sub-Saharan African immigrants describe the hope of returning to their countries of origin as a myth is because as time passes, it becomes more of a mirage than a reality for most of them. They get caught between multiple worlds that have conflicting expectations of them. Their coping strategies lose effectiveness over time, and they soon realize that succeeding within the duration they had set for themselves or that was embedded in the college program they had chosen is not realistic. Eventually, they adjust and decide to juggle school with economic pursuits just to survive. Some keep the “hope of return” by visiting their countries of origin as often as they can. The realization that they cannot fully return causes a dissonance while at the same time, it keeps their hopes up. They reason that they can at least earn a living in the United States and support their families back home, however limited that support is.