1st Edition
Anthropological Approaches to Reading Migrant Writing Reimagining Ethnographic Methods, Knowledge, and Power
This book brings fresh perspectives to the anthropology of migration. It focuses on what migrants write and how anthropologists may incorporate insights gained from engagement with this writing into research methods and writing practices.
The volume includes a range of contributions from leading scholars in the field, all organized around a striking set of questions about the conditions in which migrant narratives are written and translated, the audiences for which they are intended, the genres and media through which they are disseminated, and what such stories include or leave out. The contributors to this volume demonstrate an innovative shift in anthropological methods by showing how fiction and nonfiction, graphic memoir and autoethnography, song lyrics, as well as social media posts and images unsettle the power dynamics in the study of migration narrative.
This book will serve as important supplemental reading for courses on migration, literary anthropology, ethnographic methods, and sociocultural anthropology in general. Its interdisciplinary perspective will appeal to a broad range of scholars and students with interests in migration, narrative, and anthropological writing genres.
Introduction: Unsettling Migrant Narratives
Deborah Reed-Danahay and Helena Wulff
1. Exploring the Immigrant Novel: Blurred Genres, Embodied Identities, and the Unsettling Migration Experience
Caroline B. Brettell
2. “I Dream of Cabo Verde Every Night Now": Reflections on/from Writers in the Diaspora
Alma Gottlieb
3. “The love of the people – my reward”: Sam Selvon's legacy in Caribbean London
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
4. Imaginaries of Belonging in Middle-Class Relocation Narratives: The French in London
Deborah Reed-Danahay
5. Capturing Comedy and Tragedy: Emplacement Strategies in Migrant Writing from Sweden
Helena Wulff
6. Migrants’ Self-Narrations as Cultural Critique: Exploring Political Subjectivities through Asylum Seekers' and Returnees’ Narratives and Literature
Viola Castellano and Bruno Riccio
7. The Anthropologist as Observant Reader of Migrant Literature: The Case of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong
Noel B. Salazar
8. At the Unsettling Limits of Collaborative Life Writing: A Memoir of An Ethnography-Memoir
Susan Beth Rottmann
9. Scrolling Through Unheard Voices: Unaccompanied Child Migrant Narratives on Social Media
Othon Alexandrakis
Afterword: Migrants, Anthropologists, and Writing
Virginia R. Dominguez
Biography
Deborah Reed-Danahay is Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA.
Helena Wulff is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden.
