Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities.
The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the “exile” as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.
Table of Contents:
Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape – Editors’ Introduction
Section 1: Literary Interventions
Chapter 1: Recuperating the Black Family in Graphic Narrative: Tom Feelings’s The Middle Passage and Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner
Daniel Stein
Chapter 2: Generational Doubling as Eth(n)ic Narrative Strategy: Annie Proulx’s Barkskins and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing
Cathy Covell Waegner
Chapter 3: “As Much the Invader as the Native”: Investigating Immigrant and Indigenous Family Ties in Wendy Rose’s Itch Like Crazy
Ludmila Martanovschi
Chapter 4: Mothers/Lovers of Exiles: Women Characters in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names
Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard
Chapter 5: The Securitized Migrant: Migrant Mobility and Kindred Alliances in Post-9/11 New York Novels
Isabella Karlsson
Section 2: Filmic Interventions
Chapter 6: Mother(less) Exiles: The New Woman’s Absence from the Migration of the Expressionists to Hollywood
Michele Rozga
Chapter 7: Go West, Young Men: Teutonic Myths and American Westerns
About the Author :
Daniel Stein is professor of North American literary and cultural studies and vice dean for international affairs at the University of Siegen.
Geoffroy de Laforcadeis professor of Latin American, Caribbean and world history at Norfolk State University.
Page R. Laws is professor of English and dean of the Robert C. Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University.
Cathy Covell Waegner is an independent scholar.
Review :
Offering numerous fresh insights on migration, diaspora, and exile, this book is as timely as it is thought-provoking. Taking the familiar trope of the 'Mother of Exiles' from Emma Lazarus' public poem as starting point, it combines original work from a transdisciplinary group of scholars who approach migration and exile from the perspectives of social, literary and cultural studies as well as history and philosophy. What emerges is an intense exchange of ideas akin to what Achille Mbembe has called 'world-thinking', which can be truly transformative.
