The 9th Annual McCready Fellow Lecture

Presented by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, in partnership with Calgary Public Library

African immigrants and refugees carry sensory memories of home as they strive to rebuild their lives in Canada. These memories remind them of their homeland–or their out-of-placeness in Canadian spaces. I term these memories “constellated” because they consist mostly of sensations and their associations with places, revealing the interplay of migration, spatiality, and memory. Constellated memories can serve as either a foundation or an obstruction in the process of building a new home. Focusing on selected fiction by African writers in Canada, this talk examines how memory shapes the construction or contestation of home by immigrants and refugees. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of migration as “skin memories,” it traces the various ways African immigrant and refugee characters remember or struggle to remember the old country as they navigate their adopted country. It argues that what African immigrants and refugees remember–and how they remember it–is shaped not only by where they came from, but also by their relationship to the new places they now call home in Canada.

Uchechukwu Umezurike is the Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Masculinities in Nigerian Fiction: Receptivity and Gender (2025), as well as the children’s novel Wish Maker (2025) and the poetry collection there’s more (2023).