No Uninteresting Part of America

A migration memoir of a Black African immigrant’s journey through America—and its contested ideas of race, belonging, and the American dreamBlack African immigrants occupy a blind spot in American conversations about race and migration. Immigration debates tend to foreground migrants from other regions, while accounts of Black life center African American histories and experiences. In the space between these narratives, African immigrants often disappear. In No Uninteresting Part of America, Boukary Sawadogo brings that overlooked experience into view. Born to Burkinabe migrant parents in Côte d’Ivoire and raised in a village in northern Burkina Faso, he comes of age amid agricultural labor, colonial legacies, formal education, and the global reach of American and European popular culture. His path through Senegal and on to graduate study in the United States carries him across Iowa, Vermont, Louisiana, and Harlem—places that repeatedly reshape his understanding of race, community, and belonging. Sawadogo’s America is both expansive and intimate. In predominantly white liberal communities, promises of inclusion give way to subtle exclusion and unmistakable racism. A long road trip south ends with police surrounding his car shortly after he reaches Louisiana; yet the state also reveals unexpected kinships rooted in the French language, colonial history, music, food, and the survival of West African cultural traditions. In a Harlem barbershop, his appeal for Black solidarity exposes tensions of nationality, class, and historical memory. During the COVID-19 pandemic, closed borders turn the death of his mother in Burkina Faso into an experience of long-distance grief. As political instability in the Sahel displaces members of his family and anti-immigrant politics intensify in the United States, Sawadogo confronts the precarity of belonging on both sides of the Atlantic. What remains of the American dream for African migrants, and what forms of solidarity might still be possible?Blending memoir, travel narrative, history, and reflections on film and music, No Uninteresting Part of America offers a rare African immigrant account of contemporary America. Personal and wide-ranging, it expands prevailing narratives of immigration and Black life, showing how African migrants complicate, and reshape, what it means to be Black, immigrant, and American.