The British High Commissioner to Kenya, Neil Wigan, hosted the launch of the book Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms at his residence in Nairobi, in an evening that brought together humanitarians, artists, diplomats, and advocates for a powerful conversation on movement, belonging, and solidarity across borders.
The book, by Subha Mukherji, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, explores what the experience of migration does with, and to, knowledge, and how its own ways of knowing find expressive form.
The book was edited by Mukherji, Natalya Din-Kariuki (Associate Professor at the University of Warwick) and Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury).
The launch featured a wide-ranging conversation between Din-Kariuki and Irungu Houghton, Executive Director of Amnesty International Kenya, on the uses of history, the relationship between migration and art, and the importance of thinking expansively about the different categories of migrants and migration.
The High Commissioner congratulated the editors on the completion of the book.
He pointed out that “every human being is a migrant from East Africa originally” and explained that for both the UK and Kenya, “migration is at the heart of our history.”
Guests also heard a special message from Rowan Williams on how Crossings “opens up new spaces for thinking about a world where displacement and diversity are so much a part of both our hopes and our anxieties”.
“This may be as a result of violent, forced change; it may be a choice; it may be an individual discovery of the need to speak out against an oppressive, alienating context,” Mr Williams said. “It may be a mixture of all these. It may produce a bewildering fusion of cultural heritage; it may push us back to rethink or rework the legacies we have inherited. But the point is that displacement, encountering strangers, learning new languages, adjusting to new neighbours, is not an exception in the history of human culture but the norm.”
Mr Mukherji, who was also in attendance said that Crossings was committed to being “true” about “transitory lives.”
“When we encounter the strange, we become strangers: it can make us confront our own vulnerabilities, and open up new possibilities of solidarity[…] We tune into the paradoxes of exile in our collaborative book, Crossings, and commit to being true to the texture of transitory lives,” he said.
