Figures of the Migrant

The Roles of Literature and the Arts in Representing Migration

Siobhan Brownlie, Rédouane Abouddahab, Siobhan Brownlie, Rédouane Abouddahab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000434118
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Literature

This volume seeks to investigate the representation of the migrant and migration in literary texts and the arts. Through studies that examine works in a range of art forms ? novels, theatre, poetry, creative non-fiction, documentary films and performance and video installations ? that evoke a variety of historical and (trans)national contexts, the volume focuses on the question of the roles of literature and the arts in representing migration. An important issue considered is the extent to which artistic figuration can act as a counterpoint to social discourse on migrants that often involves stereotypes and reductive views. The different contributions to the volume illustrate that literature and the arts can provide readers and viewers with a space for fluid knowledge production and affective expansion and that within that overarching function, artistic works play three main roles with regard to representing migration: undertaking a socio-political and cultural critique, presenting alternative views to stereotypes that highlight the singularity and complexity of the migrant and providing proposals for different futures.

Part I

Overview

1 The Roles of Literature and the Arts in Representing the Migrant and Migration

Siobhan Brownlie

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176213-1

Extraordinary consequences of the coronavirus pandemic that swept across the world in 2020 and into 2021 were the severe restrictions on movement to the extent of people being confined to their houses and the closure of borders between countries. This experience highlighted how movement is a fundamental human liberty that we only accept to be deprived of in extreme circumstances. Indeed, some flows of desperate people did not abate even at the height of the crisis, such as those traversing the Central Mediterranean (MDP, 2020). As normality gradually returned post-virus, the resumption of hitherto everyday displacements and travel was a priority. Migration as a socio-political phenomenon can be defined as the movement of people away from their usual place of residence across a national border or within a nation temporarily or permanently and for a variety of reasons (IOM, 2019). Migration and migrants take on greatly divergent forms from historical settler immigrants, elite cosmopolitan expatriates and international students to migrant workers, asylum seekers and refugees. The definition stretches widely to encompass more unusual categories such as girls abducted by a rebel group who are forced migrants (see Umukoro, this volume). The definition of migration and the above categories may seem fairly straightforward, but this is in fact far from being the case, since terms can be used variously in social discourse. Consider, for example, the polemic around the terms ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ used to describe the huge number of people coming into Europe mainly from Syria in 2015: by using the term ‘migrant’, media outlets could imply that these people were unwanted irregular economic migrants rather than people protected as refugees by the 1951 UN Refugee Convention (Whitham, 2017).¹ In the present volume, the novel discussed by Barclay points to another potentially contestable case of the use of terminology whereby ‘migrant’ is used to describe people who were born in a country to immigrant parents (cf. ‘second-generation immigrants’).

In the contemporary world, migration is of increased interest and urgency. This is mainly because of the increased amount of movement of people keen to find a better life, and because of the often reluctant attitudes of wealthier countries with regard to this population; ours is largely a world of militarized borders and inequitable geographies (Demos, 2013, p. xiv). To a significant extent, the battle around migration takes the form of representation in different venues and formats, notably in the broadcast and social media and in political pronouncements. Such representation of migration is vital in its role of informing attitudes and subsequently policies. As Lazarus (2004, p. 10) writes: ‘Representation produces the reality which it can then claim to merely re-present’. This quote is telling, since it shows recourse to both an older reflective sense of ‘representation’ where language is said to imitate the truth in the world and to other more recent understandings: representation is intentional where a speaker imposes his/her meaning and constructionist where we construct meaning in relation to the world using concepts and sign systems (Hall, 1997, p. 1). The focus of this volume is the roles of artistic representations of migration and how they engage with our current world.

Before exploring the roles of literature and the arts, let us first consider the question of social representation with regard to the migrant. Following Moscovici’s theorization (Farr and Moscovici, 1984), social representations are systems of opinions, knowledge and beliefs particular to a social group with regard to objects in the social environment. Social representations are collectively produced through communication, since exchanges between individuals and exposure to mass communication allow members of a group to share the elements that will constitute a social representation (Rateau et al., 2012, p. 478). Although consensus in a group provides an anchoring point for social representations, they are also dynamic reference points of debate. What then are the common social representations of migration and migrants today? The common conception of the migrant is of a person who travels from country A to country B, from one fixed social point to another. The fixity of the social points is presupposed, and it is the migrant who lacks fixity or social membership. Migration is often seen as an unfortunate circumstance and as a phenomenon of secondary importance with regard to societies (Nail, 2015, p. 12). Somewhat paradoxically, despite this derivative and inferior status signalling lack, migration is prominent in public discourses. One reason for this is that migration may be perceived as a disturbing factor: it evokes concern and fear among inhabitants of country B that their way of life and culture will be upset by the incomers. This feeling of insecurity is exacerbated if migrants are associated with criminality or terrorism. It is thus considered that migration needs to be controlled, and these attitudes give rise to stereotypes, distancing and prejudices concerning the ‘other’. The very words ‘migrant’ and ‘immigrant’ come to signify inferiority in social hierarchies and to encompass negative connotations. As a reaction to the monolithic labelling as ‘migrant’, Berlin theatre director Shermin Langhoff coined the term ‘postmigrantisches theater’, and the concept of ‘postmigration’ has subsequently been taken up more widely:

The term ‘postmigration’ questions ingrained prejudice and assumptions about immigrants in the public debate and challenges the widespread perception of ‘migrants’ as the ‘other’. It challenges binary distinctions between the ‘migrant’ and the ‘non-migrant’, between the (white) ‘majority’ and (racialized) ‘minorities’, between home culture and foreign culture.

(Petersen et al., 2019, p. 4)

Of course, there are always issues with using the prefix ‘post’; it may, for example, be seen to imply a historical divide. Nevertheless, the motivations behind the adoption of the term are clear from the quotation. Another reason for the prominence of migration in public discourse is the debate created by the ambivalence of attitude towards migration. The media tend to portray migrants and refugees as either helpless victims to be pitied and helped or lawless threatening people to be feared and repudiated with a gender bias in images where helpless victims are associated with women and children and potential threats with men (Wilmott, 2017). Migrants are both feared as the ‘other’ or even the criminal and welcomed in a spirit of human generosity; they are both subject to restrictive sovereign authority and to the hospitality of human rights conventions. Papastergiadis (2012, p. 7) refers to this as dilemmas and social tensions that involve competing claims on identity. Migrants are both not wanted and wanted, notably as necessary additions to the workforce. Countries were reminded during the coronavirus pandemic of how much they rely on migrants who were suddenly thrust into the limelight as ‘critical workers’ such as medical staff and carers, but it was also reported at that time that in some places there was an increase in discriminatory attitudes and acts against people of ‘foreign’ ethnic background (EWI, 2020). A particular sector, which features in novels discussed in this volume, where there is dependence on migrant workers in England and Italy is that of domestic care-givers (see Di Ciolla and Guarracino’s chapter).

Perhaps these dilemmas with regard to prevalent social representations that embody conflicting attitudes could be resolved by adopting a different approach altogether. In an alternative view, migration is not considered as a secondary and inferior phenomenon but as a primary phenomenon of fundamental significance. In a sense we are all becoming migrants: not only has there been an increase in international migration as the result of war, poverty and climate change and an increase in forced internal displacement in the 21st century, but among privileged populations, people today often relocate great distances, commute very far to work, frequently tour internationally and change residence repeatedly. Although a distinction is usually made between ‘voluntary migration’ and ‘forced migration’, the reality on the ground is that those who move often have mixed motivations (Schuster, 2016, p. 301). Furthermore, migrants who decide to move voluntarily do not get to decide the conditions of the movement or of the place of arrival. There is thus a spectrum between free and forced movement and also in our uncertain world the possibility of slippage between ‘tourist’ and ‘vagabond’ (Nail, 2015, p. 3). If we are all migrants in some sense, then ‘migration’ needs to be adopted as a perspective on the whole of society rather than being considered as a subject on the margins of ‘majority society’ (Römhild, 2017). Movement needs to be perceived as a normal mode of being in the world and not as an awkward interval between fixed points (Huggan, 2007, p. 137). More fundamentally, inspired by Henri Bergson’s philosophy, Nail (2015) argues that movement is anterior to immobility. In this view, stasis points A and B are simply an artificial re-organization of movement by the mind. Importantly, when there is a movement from point A to point B, the whole of AB undergoes a qualitative change. The migrant not only undertakes an extensive movement (a change of place) but also causes an intensive or qualitative movement of society as a whole (a transformation). The emphasis on movement needs to be tempered by the notion of stability across time, customs and traditions, since social transformation may be the result of migrants introducing elements retained from their past. Migration is a constitutive force and a condition for the growth and change of society (Nail, 2015, pp. 13–14), indeed, then, a necessary and positive force.²

How far then can literature and the arts provide and provoke alternative views in opposition to predominant social representations that display ambivalences, ingrained prejudice and stereotypes regarding immigrants, refugees and migration? What indeed are the roles of literature and the arts with regard to the representation of the migrant and migration? Firstly, a few definitions and descriptions are needed. ‘Literature and the arts’ is quite a broad concept. A selection of types of art form is discussed in this volume: novels, poetry, theatre, documentary films and performance and video installation works.³ Interestingly, the heterogeneous nature of some of the works is noticeable, as they blur generic boundaries: a novel that contains realia in the form of e-mails and a newspaper clipping (see Di Ciolla and Guarracino); a documentary film that is partially fictionalized (Herrero); and a creative non-fiction essay (Atkinson).

‘Migrant literature and artworks’ can be described either as works produced by migrants or works that tell about migrants and their experiences. Three types of relationship between artist and work are apparent in this volume. Firstly, some texts and films are inspired by the artist’s own life experience such as the author Mounsi fictionalizing his disturbing experience as a child migrant in the novel Le voyage des âmes (Voyage of the souls) (Lewis). For most other works studied in the volume, while not directly inspired by their personal histories, the authors, filmmakers and installation artists have themselves migrated or are aware of their migrant heritage and bring these experiences and outlooks to bear on their artistic production. Filmmaker Nele Wohlatz, for example, who immigrated from Germany to Buenos Aires, incorporates her own issues of ‘living in a new language’ into her film El futuro perfecto (The future perfect) about the Chinese girl Xiaobin learning Spanish in the same city (Herrero). Finally, there is the case where the author does not have a migrant background. British and Italian authors, Maggie Gee and Antonio Manzini, are not themselves migrants. Rather, both authors were inspired in writing their novels, My Cleaner (Gee) and Orfani bianchi (White orphans, Manzini), by their travels and observations. Di Ciolla and Guarracino argue that these authors convey the voices of their migrant characters tellingly. It does not seem necessary then to be a migrant or of migrant extraction in order to represent migrants artistically; in fact, the view from ‘outsiders’ may be fruitful in providing complementary perspectives.

‘Migrant literature and artworks’ has been a topic of growing academic interest since the 1980s. As mentioned earlier, there are many different configurations and contexts of migration, but typical themes that have been explored in these works are the social context of the place of origin, the experience of displacement, mixed reception in the host country, guest and host communities, emigrant versus immigrant perspectives, relations between migrants and the next generations of their family, bilingualism, rootlessness and the search for identity. The tenor changes, though, in works by third-generation immigrant descendants, as issues of migration co-mingle with other life-shaping matters such as parenthood, illness and age (Moslund, 2019, p. 95). The works studied in this volume take ‘typical’ themes forward while also providing in-depth historical, psychological, inter-relational, experiential and futuristic perspectives embedded in particular contexts.

The volume is concerned primarily with the topic of the artistic representation of migration. Of course, we must also be mindful that the authors of the chapters are themselves representing the artistic works, so that there is in fact a dual-level representation. With regard to representation enacted by artistic works, there has been some debate over whether art is or should be representational in the sense of re-presenting something that is already known about. As mentioned above, artists are inspired by real-life experiences, such that the representation of the migrant has a testimonial element, but the artistic perspective does not focus on bearing witness to a ‘true’ narrative of the ‘model’; rather, a figure is created. The role of literature and the arts then is, to a certain extent, to present something new: the world experienced intimately or differently. According to O’Sullivan (2001, p. 130), art is involved in pushing forward boundaries of what can be experienced, and literature and the arts provide glimpses into the unthought and the not yet known (Littler, 2016, p. 307). What imports then is the work as a performance. It can be concluded that artistic works may have a representational role, but that they also operate a fissure in re-presentation through surprising us with new insights that may destabilize assumptions. The tortured migrant narrator in Mounsi’s Le voyage des âmes is, for example, a surprising and thought-provoking character (Lewis).

Rather than focusing exclusively on art produced by or about migrants, it is also possible to consider how art and art practices themselves migrate. Hence, Bal (2007) proposes a ‘migratory aesthetics’ of which the principles are the following: the aesthetic encounter takes place on the basis of mobility being a given in the contemporary world; ‘migratory’ does not necessarily refer explicitly to actual migrants or the actual migration of people, as the artistic work may rather give shape to an exilic experience (such as Berni Searle’s sea and land installations whose sole protagonist is the artist, see Cloete, this volume); ‘migratory’ may refer to the fact that the artistic w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Overview
• PART II Critiques of Definitions, Representations and Ideologies
• PART III Deeper Insights into Being a Migrant
• PART IV Migration through Particular Prisms
• PART V Trajectories for the Future
• Index