Journal of Southern History

Voices of African Immigrants in Kentucky: Migration, Identity, and Transnationality is based on interviews from the African Immigrants in the Bluegrass Oral History Project at the University of Kentucky's Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. The book explores "the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, featuring the voices of immigrants from one continent—Africa—who came to and mostly stayed in small cities [End Page 359] in a more insular and mostly white southern state, Kentucky" (p. xiii). It offers a refreshing step away from existing research on major urban centers that host large populations of African immigrants. As the subtitle implies, these voices have something important to teach readers about migration, identity, and transnationality, concepts that are frequently theorized by academics but seldom explored via first-person narratives to the extent they are here. This book will be useful for academics from numerous fields where these themes intersect. It is especially relevant to the study of "new African diasporas," which focuses on African diaspora communities who have arrived directly from Africa in recent decades and whose sense of history, race, and identity is understandably different from the many other African diaspora communities in the United States.

The book begins with the chapter "Origins: Where We Are From," which provides both a historical overview of the places people came from and important information about the individuals at the center of this story, which will help explain their experiences in the United States. Other chapters include "Opportunity: Why and How We Came," "Struggles and Successes," "Connecting and Contributing to Two Continents," and "Family and Identity in the United States." Primarily telling personal histories, the voices of immigrants stand above academic discourse. Their stories are both fitting and refreshing, but the numerous individual ones can be difficult to follow and are at times only subtly anchored to broader analysis. However, as the stories unfold across chapters it quickly becomes a pleasurable read that falls somewhere between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americanah (2013) and a sociology textbook—a beautiful mix of highly personal experiences paired with broader insights into society.

The four authors (two are African immigrants and two are native-born Americans with extensive experience in Africa stemming from the Peace Corps) all reside in Kentucky but place minimal emphasis on explaining why Kentucky is a useful site for this study. I initially expected to learn a lot about Kentucky, of which I know very little. As an American I can relate to the African interviewee who discussed his prior knowledge of the United States by stating, "You don't hear about Kentucky" (p. xiii). The March 2020 murder of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman in Louisville, at the hands of the police brought Kentucky into the national spotlight, sparking widespread protests against police violence toward people of color and heightening public awareness of social inequity. Like the story of Breonna Taylor, the experiences of African immigrants in Kentucky are relevant beyond the state's borders.

In the final chapter, "Transnationality in the Present and Future," the authors explain how maintaining connections to more than one country is a central concept for understanding the experiences of African immigrants, and yet it is increasingly incompatible with the policies of the United States, especially during the Donald J. Trump administration. The authors observe that "it seems to many Americans as though things are falling apart and whatever center there was is not holding—not only in terms of immigration but regarding the openness of America to the world in general" (p. 163). Voices of African Immigrants in Kentucky contains the types of perspectives that need to be heard as our nation grapples with issues of race and immigration. [End Page 360]

Recordings of the interviews are available online, and an appendix lists suggested...