Visiting Africa

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Visiting Africa: A Memoir

Visiting Africa: A Memoir is a personal journey as well as a physical one: it is about my ongoing and evolving attempt to approach Africa and its cultures with humility and modesty and about my struggles as a privileged white man to ethically encounter and live in a world marked by injustice and racialized inequality. It takes up the present challenge of resurrecting stories that challenge dominant narratives. It is an investigation of privilege and how the privileged must overcome their own defensiveness and feelings of guilt if they are to stand in solidarity with those people they meet and write about. Finally, this book is an investigation into the possibilities of empathy.

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Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin’s lucid book of memories recounts the story of his personal, creative, and geographical journeys. In Visiting Africa, O’Reilly-Conlin deftly weaves his life story with narratives of travel and mobility, chronicling his experiences of discovery, education, and redemption. Visiting Africa reflects on what it means to travel, but also, importantly, on issues of xenophobia and racism. This intensely expressive book is at times introspective, at other times tracing historical, political, and social contexts. After months of Covid-19 induced isolation and lockdown, O’Reilly-Conlin’s Visiting Africa is an urgent and thought-provoking reminder of the power of language to document travel and evoke cultural and human interaction.

-- Charlotte Beyer, Senior Lecturer in English Studies, University of Gloucestershire

Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin works as an editor at Demeter Press, an Ontario-based publishing house, as well as a freelance editor. He has a bachelor degree in history and English, a MA in history (both from York University, Toronto), a MFA in creative nonfiction (University of King’s College, Halifax), and MA in refugee protection and forced migration studies (University of London. His writing has appeared in Cargo Lit Mag, Cold Noon: International Journal of Travel Writing and Travelling Cultures, and Folio Magazine. For Folio, his story “Istanbul Gone” won the journal’s 2018 Editor’s Prize for nonfiction. This is his first book.