Configurations of Migration

Knowledges – Imaginaries – Media

Jennifer Leetsch, Frederike Middelhoff, Miriam Wallraven

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110783810
• Subtopic: Art Techniques
• Index: Literature

In a global context in which phenomena of migration play an ever more important role, the ways individual and collective experiences of migration are covered in the media, represented in culture, and interpreted are coming under increasing scrutiny. This book explores the complex relationship between creative engagements with migration on the one hand, and forms of knowledge about migration on the other, inquiring into the ways aesthetic practices are intertwined with knowledge structures. The book responds to three pressing research questions. First, it analyses how fictional texts, plays, images, films, and autobiographical accounts mediate forms of knowledge about migration. Second, it identifies the ways in which specific media approaches and aesthetic practices influence people's ideas about and awareness of migratory experiences in a globalized world. Finally, it delineates how historical perspectives help us compare epistemological approaches to migration in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, and how these approaches affect the way critics and the public responded to and thought about different forms of (forced) migration. Bringing together renowned scholars working across disciplines, it investigates the possibilities and limitations that different media present when it comes to reflecting on, communicating, and imagining experiences of migration, and how these representations in turn create ways of knowing and understanding migration.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Configurations of Migration
• Section A: Visualizing Migration
• Chapter 2 Imagining Migration In-Between: A Conversation with Charl Landvreugd
• Chapter 3 “Migrating Reflections” on Misafir (2017)
• Chapter 4 Global Warming and Climate Refugees: Facts, “Alternative Facts” and the State of Emergency
• Chapter 5 Images of Migration: The Ethics and Perils of Visual Representation
• Chapter 6 On Empathy and Migratory Relationalities: A Conversation with Mieke Bal
• Section B: Writing Migration
• Chapter 7 “The Most Outcast Réfugié!” Knowing Migration in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s The Réfugié (1824)
• Chapter 8 Western Migrants in Hong Kong: Neo-Imperial Gothic and the Literary Imagination of Reverse Domination
• Chapter 9 Knowledges and Morals: Narrating Consequences of Colonial Migration in Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978)
• Chapter 10 “No narrative to make sense of what had happened”: The Genres of Narrating Migration during the Yugoslav Wars in English-Speaking Literature
• Chapter 11 You Can’t Breathe Water
• Section C: Performing Migration
• Chapter 12 Archive-Repertoires of Memory: Knowing Migration Through Shailesh Bahoran’s Dance
• Chapter 13 Performing Migration: Želimir Žilnik and Medial (Self-)Representations of “Guest Workers” in the 1970s
• Chapter 14 Walking the Land: Theatre, Landscape and Britain’s Migratory Past in Black Men Walking
• Chapter 15 Concluding Remarks: (Strange) Migratory Encounters
• Notes on Contributors
• Index