A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging

Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes

Cicilie Fagerlid, Michelle A. Tisdel, Cicilie Fagerlid, Michelle A. Tisdel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030347956
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030347963
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection pushes migration and "the minor" to the fore of literary anthropology. What happens when authors who thematize their "minority" background articulate notions of belonging, self, and society in literature? The contributors use "interface ethnography" and "fieldwork on foot" to analyze a broad selection of literature and processes of dialogic engagement. The chapters discuss German-speaking Herta Müller's perpetual minority status in Romania; Bengali-Scottish Bashabi Fraser and the potentiality of poetry; vagrant pastoralism and "heritagization" in Puglia, Italy; the self-representation of European Muslims post 9/11 in Zeshan Shakar's acclaimed Norwegian novel; the autobiographical narratives of Loveleen Rihel Brenna and the artist collective Queendom in Norway; the "immigrant" as a permanent guest in Spanish-language children's literature; and Slovenian roots-searching in Argentina. This anthology examines the generative and transformative potentials of storytelling, while illustrating that literary anthropology is well equipped to examine the multiple contexts that literature engages. Chapter 4 of this book is available open access under a CC By 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

© The Author(s) 2020

C. Fagerlid, M. A. Tisdel (eds.)A Literary Anthropology of Migration and BelongingPalgrave Studies in Literary Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34796-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Literary Anthropology, Migration, and Belonging

Cicilie Fagerlid¹ and Michelle A. Tisdel²

(1)

Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway

(2)

National Library of Norway, Oslo, Norway

Cicilie Fagerlid (Corresponding author)

Michelle A. Tisdel

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

BelongingMigrationMinorityMinor literatureNarrativesDialogic engagement

End Abstract

From the seasonal Kularing (Malinowski 1922) to world-altering global expansion and conquest (Wolf 1982), anthropology has always taken an interest in movement. This collection brings periodic, cyclic, or historic migration to the fore of literary anthropology. We explore the generative potentials of writing from margins related to migration and mobility. What happens, we ask, when authors who thematize migration or their “minority” background articulate notions of belonging, self, and society in literature? How do they diversify or cosmopolitize communities “from within,” as Helena Wulff (2018a, b) persuasively phrases it? Do we find particular “revolutionary conditions,” as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari claim, in “minor literature” (1986 [1975])?

This anthology aims to fuse the theoretical interest in the potentiality of marginal, subaltern, hybrid, and créole descriptions of the world with the anthropological prerogative of thick descriptions (Geertz 1973) of micro-events and everyday life within sociopolitical contexts. Through in-depth explorations of migration and mobility in writing, we wish to contribute to uprooting, “deterritorializing,” and, in this sense, perhaps even “decolonizing” sedentary perspectives in literary anthropology.

Being “minor” or marginalized is, however, no essentialized state. Rather, we acknowledge the situationally contingent and contested, processual, and multivocal qualities of such positions. Our approaches to literature and narratives do not advocate simple binary relationships. We seek to situate the literature firmly within a nuanced context in which diaspora presupposes dwelling (see Procter 2003) and in which the world reterritorializes what the book deterritorializes (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 [1980], p. 12).

Staying and moving—or roots and routes—are intertwined in human history as well as in narrative practice. The two archaic types of storytellers, the “trading seaman” and “the resident tiller of the soil,” recounted by Walter Benjamin (1969, p. 84), are not opposites, as Wulff notes: Movement and settlement interrelate in the course of a life (2017, p. 118). When the storytellers combine “the lore of faraway places … with the lore of the past … it best reveals itself to natives of a place” (Benjamin 1969, p. 85). Tim Ingold goes further and dissolves the distinction between local and wayfaring ways of knowing. All lives are essentially lived along paths in a meshwork world of threads and knots (Ingold 2007, p. 100).¹ It is through wayfaring that we inhabit the world. Wayfaring, like storytelling, is place-making, and “it is in the movement from place to place – or from topic to topic – that knowledge is integrated” (Ingold 2007, p. 91; see also McLean 2009). In Letizia Bindi’s opening chapter in this volume, the alternate states of transhumance (literally “across earth”) are not only a metaphor but also a metamorphosis of knowing and being in the world: Transhumance—as knowing and being—“works on the limits between settlements and movements, between the sense of belonging and of up-rooting.”

Moreover, even roots transplant and thrive with proper care. Michelle A. Tisdel shows in her chapter that tending to roots in “new soil” is fundamental knowledge for the narrative of belonging of Loveleen Rihel Brenna, the Norwegian daughter of Indian immigrants. Nadia Molek illustrates that the self-proclaimed “roots searcher” of Slovenian immigration to Argentina is as much a creator, a chronicler of new roots, as he narrates their spreading across the Atlantic. Máiréad Nic Craith analyzes the oeuvre of poet, English literary scholar, and “new Scot,” Bashabi Fraser, and argues that Fraser is “at once both local and rooted as well as trans-local and transcendent.”

According to Deleuze and Guattari (2004), multiplicity characterizes the rhizomatic assemblage (agencements). The assemblage changes in nature when it expands through connections; perhaps like Scotland, it changes through its colonial connections, according to Fraser in Nic Craith’s chapter. Whereas rhizomatic rootstalks literally set forth into new territory and produce new plants, Deleuze and Guattari (2004, p. 7) argue that any point of a rhizome can connect to diverse fields in unexpected ways. The heterogeneous reality of language can connect “to a whole micropolitics of the social field” (p. 8). In his chapter, Adrian Stoicescu describes how Herta Müller’s “language of freedom” utters “the unutterable” and recomposes realities in the face of “totalitarian culture.” Cicilie Fagerlid also explores how minorizing and hybridizing language and literary genre-blending recreate selves, belonging, and community. Nic Craith describes how Fraser, like Kafka in Prague (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 20), took “a language that is global and has forced it into a new shape – one that is neither British nor Bengali but Fraser.” In contrast, in her chapter, Macarena García-González asks what is “a tellable story” for children about immigration and finds the answer limiting.

In the first part of the introduction, we position this volume within the field of literary anthropology. In the second part, we outline our understanding of the social role and potentiality of literature.

Literary Anthropology: Literature as Source Material and Literary Production

Literary anthropology can be divided into two fields. One concerns the self-reflective theoretical exploration of ethnographic writing, and the other explores the relationship between literature and society (Rapport 2012; Wiles 2018; Nic Craith and Fournier 2016). Experimental and fictional ethnography and ethnographically inspired writing date back to the early ethnographers (e.g., Malinowski, Hurston, Benedict, and Mead; see Byler and Dugan-Iverson 2012).² The writing culture critique of the 1980s multiplied experimental ethnographic writing and focused attention on a self-reflective meta-perspective on ethnographic prose (see Clifford and Marcus 1986). This volume does not probe these discussions. Instead, we examine what Rapport (2012) describes as “the role that literature plays in social life and individual experience, in particular social, cultural, and historical settings.”

All contributors seek to “discover philosophical” and anthropological “insight about the human condition” in works of literature (Stoller 2015). This does not mean that we reduce the artists—or their characters—to “native informers” who confirm our expectations (Osborne 2016, p. 8). Rather, we acknowledge and value the extent to which the particular “aesthetic experience of reading literary works of art activates the imagination to visualize other worlds” (Cohen in Wiles 2018, p. 3). In this sense, the writer’s imagination can achieve the thickest possible descriptions, with the freedom to approach thoughts, feelings, and motivations (see Mantel 2017, in Wiles 2018; Fassin 2014).

Furthermore, literary anthropology interrogates the social life of literary practices through the study of reading and literary consumption, creativity, and literary production or Howard Becker’s (1982) notion of “art worlds” (see Wiles 2018).³ While reception theory is beyond the scope of this book, several of the chapters address processes of literary creation: the mental and physical relationships between creativity, pastoralism, and landscape (Bindi), identity processes in the self-publishing of biographies (Molek), and Meet the Author events as dialogues, with ripple effects back into the authorship (Fagerlid). The focus on the social life of literature further foregrounds an unanticipated relationship between stories and reality.

We seek to elucidate the ethnographic relevance of literary narratives by exploring literature as a mode of cognition (see Iser 1996) and as historical and sociocultural documents. A unifying epistemological concern of this work addresses the function of literature as a generative knowledge form. One assumption is that literature is part of knowledge production, with the potentiality to transform individual lives and social reality. The contributions herein explore the construction and reconstruction of self, society, and belonging in a range of creative works (see also Archetti 1994)—fiction, biography and autobiography, children’s literature, poetry, performance, and visual documentaries—stemming from mobility, migration, and an ascribed minority status. The chapters consider how literature and narratives contribute new perspectives to the public and literary record (see Trouillot 1995; Iser 1996). Tisdel’s chapter examines the ways in which life-writing addresses and contributes to common knowledge and public discourses about belonging. Nic Craith explores how “the personal” and “emotional nature of poetry” can participate in “recontextualizing and changin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Literary Anthropology, Migration, and Belonging
• 2. Take a Walk on the Shepherd Side: Transhumant Narratives and Representations
• 3. In Search of a Suitable Home or the Perpetual Minority Status: Herta Müller’s Case
• 4. When Author Meets Audience: The Potentiality of Literature to Re-narrate Selves, Belonging, and National Community
• 5. Biography, Descent, and Slovenization: Literature and Slovenian Migrants in Argentina
• 6. Narratives of Competence and Confidence: Self, Society, and Belonging in Norway
• 7. From Bengal to Scotland: Hybridity, Borders and National Narratives
• 8. The Production of the Immigrant as a Perpetual Guest
• Back Matter