In Ambivalent Encounters and Other Essays, James Yékú speaks powerfully from his personal experiences as a writer and academic living outside a homeland he sometimes recaptures through his poetry and scholarship. His encounters in several cities around the world, and in different cultural and media contexts offer an entry into the ways in which we produce collective meanings from the private notes we write to ourselves. Poignant yet exciting, the essays in the collection move in different and unruly directions: while some mourn both the diaspora-imposed loss of books that immigrant scholars often face, and the devastating disappearance of an uncle who travelled to Europe through the Sahara, other pieces reflect on a persistently stereotypic image of Africa, soccer and racial politics, and Nigerian social media cultures.