1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature

Edited By Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt, Carly McLaughlin Copyright 2025
590 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

590 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

590 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature offers a comprehensive survey of an increasingly important field. It demonstrates the influence of the “age of migration” on literature and showcases the role of literature in shaping socio-political debates and creating knowledge about the migratory trajectories, lives, and experiences that have shaped the post-1989 world. The contributors... Read more

List of Figures

 

List of Contributors

 

Acknowledgements

 

Introduction: Toward Pluriversal Readings of Migration Literature

Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt, Carly McLaughlin

 

PART I

Key Terms

 

1 Cultural Hybridity and Migration: From Extraordinary States of In-Betweenness to Everyday Phenomenon

Sten Pultz Moslund

 

2 Cultural Identity: Toward Spatiotemporal Processes of Identity Formation in Migration Literature

Jopi Nyman

 

3 Tracing “Home” in the Critical Discourse on Migration

Lucinda Newns

 

4 Migration Nation: State of Contradiction

Russell West-Pavlov

 

5 Hospitality: The History of a Term, Present Perspectives and the Potential of Its Undecidability

Carmen Zamorano Llena

 

6 Exile: From Geographical Displacement to Metaphorical Condition

Antonia Wimbush

 

7 From Territorial Boundary to Polysemic Spaces: Borders, Borderization, Borderlands

Mabel Moraña

 

8 Multilingual Migration Literature as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediation

Sneja Gunew

 

9 The “Skin of Language”: Linguistic and Cultural Translation in Migrant Literature

Tina Steiner

 

PART II

Critical Approaches

 

10 Postcolonial Studies, Migration and Literature: Positions, Perspectives and Debates

Norbert Bugeja

 

11 Diaspora: Keywords, Reading Strategies, and New Approaches in Literary Studies

Christiane Steckenbiller

 

12 Migration and/as Translation: Negotiations of New Forms of Sexual Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Literature from the Maghreb

William J. Spurlin

 

13 Postmigration: A Critical Intervention in Literary Studies

Moritz Schramm

 

14 To Be Moved: Affect and Migration Literature

Carlos M. Piocos III

 

15 Reading Migration Literature through a Mobility Studies Lens

Anna-Leena Toivanen

 

16 World Literature and Migration Literature

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

 

PART III

Genres

 

17 “Language is the Translator”: Formal and Linguistic Disruption in the Migration Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña and m. nourbeSe Philip

Rachel Elizabeth Robinson

 

18 Migration Novels as Archival Spaces: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana

Sonia Weiner

 

19 Borders, Migration and the Contemporary Short Story

Laura Mª Lojo-Rodríguez

 

20 The Chronotopes of Global Movement in the Dramaturgy of Migration

Yana Meerzon

 

21 Testimonio as Migration Literature in Latinx, Latin American and Filipino Life Writing

Marta Caminero-Santangelo

 

22 Graphic Borders: Refugee Comics as Migration Literature

Dominic Davies

 

23 The Future of Immigration in Latinx Science Fiction

Matthew David Goodwin

 

PART IV

The Spectrum of Migration

 

24 Literary Representations of Forced Migration

Bishupal Limbu

 

25 Routing Return through Contemporary Novels of Migration

Amanda Lagji

 

26 Walking On the Edge: The Poetry of Chinese Rural–Urban Migrants

Federico Picerni

 

27 Genre Flailing and the Contemporary Climate Migration Novel

Bryan Yazell

 

PART V

Geographical Contexts

 

28 Gunny Sack Mementos and Shipboard Intimacies: Circulatory Objects, Migratory Subjects, and the Limits of Form in Indian Ocean Fiction

Kritish Rajbhandari

 

29 Transpacific Trajectories: Australian Migrant Literature in Spanish and Its Cono Sur Connections

Michael Jacklin

 

30 Between Mediterranean Realism and Fantasy: Migrant Divides

Nahrain Al-Mousawi

 

31 Reimagining Anti-colonial Exile and Post-independence Transnational Movements across Southern and East Africa in Intra-African Migration Literatures

Rebecca Fasselt and Isaac Ndlovu

 

32 Returns and Disenchantments: Post-Cold War Andean Migration Literature in Peru and Bolivia

Lorena Cuya Gavilano

 

33 Migration (and) Literature from the Post-Soviet South: The Mobility of Memory in Dina Rubina’s On the Sunny Side of the Street and Olga Grjasnowa’s All Russians Love Birch Trees

Marja Sorvari

 

34 Migration Narratives in Contemporary Arab Novels

Maria Elena Paniconi and Martina Censi

 

35 Transnational Solidarity: Millennial Writers and Contemporary Migration Literature in Taiwan

Min-xu Zhan

 

36 Representing the Arabian Gulf in Malayalam Migration Narratives

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil

 

37 Counter-Orientalism in Palestinian Migration Literature in Chile

Lila McDowell Carlsen

 

38 In Search of Just Memory: The Rise of Deimperialization in Asian American Narratives of Return

Patricia P. Chu

 

PART VI

Migration Literature and the Social

 

39 Migration Literature Online: Digital Readers as Consecrating Authorities

Oana Sabo

 

40 Texts That Assure: Selecting Picturebooks to Use with Displaced Children

Julia E. McAdam, Evelyn Arizpe, Susanne Abou Ghaida

 

41 Romani Literature(s) as a Political Actor: Between the Social and the Aesthetic

Ana Belén Martín Sevillano

 

42 “I am the child of Africa but a woman of Australia”: Hani Abdile and Huda Fadlelmawla on Literature, Displacement, Exile, and Somali and Sudanese Diasporic Identities – in conversation with Omid Tofighian

Hani Abdile, Huda Fadlelmawla, Omid Tofighian

Index

Biography

Gigi Adair is Junior Professor in English at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She is the author of Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing Diasporic Relations (2019).

Rebecca Fasselt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her main research interest is in intra-African migration and diasporic literatures.

Carly McLaughlin works at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Germany. Her research focuses on the intersection of forced migration with childhood.