Postcolonial Studies, Migration, and Literature: Positions, Perspectives and Debates

What is it about?

This chapter puts forward a range of critical sources, debates and theoretical positions that shed light on the affinity between postcolonial studies since their inception, literature, migration and migrant subjectivities. Mapping out various aspects of the emergence of migration flows in the long post-colonial era, and placing a focus on more recent concerns with forced migration and displacement, this overview chapter touches upon some of the salient concerns and positions that have characterised the broad field of postcolonial studies in relation to discourses of representation, agency, class, liminality and further afield. The chapter elicits insights put forward by Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ashis Nandy, Benita Parry, Iain Chambers, Aijaz Ahmad, Elleke Boehmer, Robert J.C. Young, Alina Sajed, David Farrier, Claire Gallien, and others. A range of seminal questions and aspects of historical debate within the field are revisited, as well as directions for current and future scholarship that postcolonial studies has to offer today to readers and scholars working in the broad field of literature and migration.

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Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This chapter forms part of a field-defining volume, edited by Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt and Carly McLaughlin, that ‘demonstrates the influence of the “age of migration” on literature and showcases the role of literature in shaping socio-political debates and creating knowledge about the migratory trajectories, lives, and experiences that have shaped the post-1989 world.’ The book is important for the ways in which it re-proposes the legitimacy of the literary as a core source of engagement with the urgencies presented by migration realities today, as well as its ‘contribution to a pluriversal turn in literary migration studies in future scholarship’.