Narratives of Precarious Migrancy in the Global South

Gigi Adair, Carly McLaughlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040308974
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume sets out to challenge and expand Anglophone literary migration studies in the global North with a two-fold approach. It proposes precarious migrancy as a conceptual framework to capture hitherto neglected aspects of subaltern displacement, and it turns to the global South as a site of knowledge production about migration. The chapters discuss literary narratives originally written in Chinese, Kurdish and Italian as well as English, and covering a wide geographical range, to ask what experiences and understandings of migration emerge from Southern perspectives. Across the volume, precarious migrancy emerges as a key concept for understanding contemporary globalization in general and migration in the global South in particular. The chapters offer significant reconceptualizations of precarity and migrancy by reading Southern literatures of migration as a mode of theorization of the contemporary world, contributing to the ongoing shift in framings of migration in Anglophone and postcolonial literary studies.

This volume will be of significant interest to scholars in literary migration studies, global South studies, and postcolonial studies. It offers readings of rarely studied literary texts, as well as new concepts for scholars interested in understanding the nexus of literature and migration today.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction Precarious migrancy: Towards a Southern reframing of migration
• 1 Towards a decolonial critique of caporalato: Narratives of migrant farmworkers’ struggles in Southern Italy
• 2 From “Harare North” to “Harare South”: Precarious migrant identities and the Zimbabwean–South African border Western
• 3 Teeming precarity of the more-than-human in Freedom, Only Freedom
• 4 Estranging labor: The Gulf, capital, and the fantastic in Temporary People
• 5 An ecology of absences: Remapping North–South border narratives in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive
• 6 “¡Regrésenme mi país, por favor!”: Resisting the border spectacle and reconfiguring the citizen–migrant binary in short stories by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite
• 7 Withering spring: Precarious labour migrancy, class, and capitalism in Xu Lizhi’s poetry
• Coda Southern precarity in the work of Amitav Ghosh
• Index