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Immigrants, Pilgrimage and Imagination: Cinematic Portraits of African Immigrants in Movies (Coming to America, In America, and Coming to South Africa)

Raphael Obotama, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan
rabotam@hotmail.com

Human immigration across territories outside of their birth places is on the increase. Immigration affords people, including other members of the animal Kingdom, such as birds, to search for better environmental conditions. Some call this a survival instinct. There are many reasons for human immigrations across spaces among which a fundamental reason is the search for a better and comfortable life. According to Thomas Pettigrew, an estimated 80 million migrants, constituting about 2 % of the world’s population live permanently or for long periods of time outside of their aboriginal homelands.
Like, all humans, Africans have also been migrants across spaces for a long duree of human history. Though, seemingly contemporary history portrays such modern desire, especially to the West. Among the choice destinations of African is the United States of America where they are incrementally accreting the immigrants’ population and contributing to their new adopted homeland. African immigrants are also found in different spaces in and across spaces in Europe, Asia, Australia, and even within the African continent itself. In this respect, this presentation intends to focus analytically upon the cinematic portrayal of African immigrants in select movies as they move into spaces within the West and even within Africa, in search of existential meaning.
In this vein, I shall focus essentially on the portraits of African immigrants within the cinematic imaginations especially as presented, but not exclusively in such movies as Coming to America, In America and Coming to South Africa. Since the cinematic imagination also constructs social epistemological notions, based upon real or imagined ontological frameworks, I shall explore in depth and attempt an analytic deciphering of salient themes relative to the process of African immigration experience, and the modalities of adaptation and integration in new spaces.