To all the pounding hearts
In feverish boats
I will cut
Through these paths
With my own liberated heart
And tell my soul
To shout of your silenced deaths
And fill
Palms of dust with morning dew
And song
Migration is without doubt emerging as one of the defining global issues of the twenty-first century, and related practices of interpretation, response and representation are fast becoming increasingly pressing concerns for a range of diverse disciplines. This volume enacts a timely shift in analytical perspective by urging attention away from the frequent journalistic reduction of the bodies of migrant and in-motion subjects to images or numbers, and instead towards a reclamation of those same bodies as potentially active, individual sites of signification. What I aim to build here is a study of the body as a mutable, reactive and expressive archive in which histories and experiences of mobility or migration are worked through, negotiated and rearticulated in turn. Crucially, in the chapters to come, I will locate and explore the expression of these embodied experiences in a range of diverse creative outputs, including autobiographical and fictionalised narratives, photography, film and installation art. These are works that use corporeality to tell stories that stretch beyond the map-points of their movement in order to convey identities, emotions, memories and imaginings, and imprints from elsewhere. Yet by privileging the lens of bodily expression, I will also be able to situate these outputs within a much wider theoretical landscape around trans-nationalism, in the hope of building productive intersectional links with related critical discourses around voice, visibility, race and gender identity.
At the core of the volume lies a selection of stories written in Italian by people who have crossed national borders to transit through or reside in Italy, by people who are writing in a language other than their mother tongue, or people who have family heritage in contexts of migration or diaspora. Through the analysis of a range of morphological body experiences that are described in these texts, I want to explore the logics and mechanics of representing subjectivities which may themselves be fluid or in motion, and draw conclusions about how identity and self-imaginings are affected by the often multiple shifts afforded by migration. Such stories cannot easily be classified as ‘migration narratives’ (indeed, as anticipated above, some authors included in this study have a family heritage of migration and are not ‘migrants’ themselves), rather, they might more productively be grouped together as stories written by people whose lives have, in one way or another, been impacted by their own or others’ complex decision to move country. Furthermore, in the spirit of extending the trans-national range of my arguments, I will—where possible—stretch out my analysis to draw comparative links with related outputs originating from other geographical and linguistic areas, and from other diasporically inflected zones.
My work deliberately transits between disciplinary spaces, using a range of theoretical tools to support and add critical flesh to my ideas. I therefore also seek to embed the literary analysis described above within an active conversation with key examples drawn from fields such as cultural studies, social anthropology and the visual arts. Since the series this volume appears in lies at the intersection of literary and mobilities studies, my introduction will begin by situating my textual work within a mobilities studies framework, identifying where it can dialogue with existing currents of work in the field and where it might perhaps add points of innovation in approach. Mobility is, broadly, conceived as an embodied mode of movement, and one that is imbued with a range of meanings for both the mobile subject and for the people and places that are encountered through such movement. I will therefore also highlight those aspects of other related theories (such as phenomenology, body theory and affect theory) that can best intersect with and inform a mobilities-led analysis, and in particular those that give a critical context to my use of the hyphenated trans- label. I will then expand on my choice of textual corpus, and use this overview to highlight illustrative topics such as those of space, home, journey, transition and becoming that underpin the chapters to come. Throughout, I will contextualise and interrelate recurrent themes, such as those of time, memory, language, visibility, agency and gender, which are exemplary of the way the body functions as an expressive medium in my work.
The representations of the body that form the backbone of the analysis here posit the various corporeal organs and pathways as a means of acquiring and establishing knowledge and of subverting assumptions, about both subject and world, in a dialectical fashion. They also function as channels of communication between subjects, thus forming potential narrative organs of expression, as well as allowing the embodied subject to enact strategies of agency and resistance toward the narratives of others. I want to transpose Ahmed and Stacey’s words about the skin onto the bodyscape as a whole, and thus to determine how the body becomes meaningful, how it is read, how it is written and narrated, and how is it ‘managed by subjects, others and nations’ (2001, p. 3). These are dynamic processes, socially structured and intersubjective, but—crucially—not always controlled by the subject him/herself. For although the body provides the potential for expressing subjective agency, it also poses a limit to that same agency through the perceptive gaze of the other, which can assign meaning and narrative without the knowledge or consent of the subject. Indeed, many of the actions and processes that I argue designate the body as a mobile site of meaning may also be experienced as uncomfortable, painful, traumatic, or unwanted by the subject at stake. Yet an undercurrent of agency and resistance may still be identified in such processes precisely through the narrativization of such experiences, rather than in the physical changes and movements themselves. Such movements are represented in the chapters that follow through bodily inscriptions such as tattoos and self-harming, bodies which rearticulate traditional gender allocations, maternal, fluid and eroticized bodies, bodies controlled or distorted through privation or excessive consumption, and expressions of fragmented, haunting or immaterial physicality. It is the dynamic nature of such modifications and transmogrifications that allows the body to represent and illuminate wider processes of mobility and migration, since it both absorbs information and reflects it back to the world, taking on a potentially collective meaning-making facility. This widens the ...