Migrant Aesthetics

By most accounts, immigrant literature deals primarily with how immigrants struggle to adapt to their adopted countries. Its readers have come to expect stories of identity formation, of how immigrants create ethnic communities and maintain ties to countries of origin. Yet such narratives can center exceptional stories of individual success or obscure the political forces that uproot millions of people the world over. Glenda R. Carpio argues that we need a new paradigm for migrant fiction. Migrant Aesthetics shows how contemporary authors—Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, and Junot Díaz—expose the historical legacies and political injustices that produce forced migration through artistic innovation. Their fiction rejects the generic features of immigrant literature—especially the acculturation plot and the use of migrant narrators as cultural guides who must appeal to readerly empathy. They emphasize the limits of empathy, insisting instead that readers recognize their own roles in the realities of migration, which, like climate change, is driven by global inequalities. Carpio traces how these authors create literary echoes of the past, showing how the history of (neo)colonialism links distinct immigrant experiences and can lay the foundation for cross-ethnic migrant solidarity. Revealing how migration shapes and is shaped by language and narrative, Migrant Aesthetics casts fiction as vital testimony to past and present colonial, imperial, and structural displacement and violence.

The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, originally published in 2009, has become a beloved and much-praised source, providing fascinating revelations into the post-war British experience of immigrants, the decoration of their living spaces and their position in society in relation to decolonisation. The 'front room' (emanating from the Victorian parlour) provides an outlet to respond to the feelings of displacement, exile and alienation and the rebuilding of a home in a strange land. Primarily concerned with Caribbean homes, The Front Room also looks at Moroccan, Surinamese, Antillean and Indonesian migrant groups in Holland--encompassing, through texts, archival documents and artistic photographs, the important cultural markers that are expressed through the domestic interiors of migrants. The author examines how this intimate space within the home raises issues of class, race, migration, aspiration, religion, family, gender, identity and alienation. He also looks at the transition from the colonial post-colonial modernity by placing the book in the context of his own family's migrant experience.

This volume addresses the impact of human movement on the aesthetic practices that make up the fabric of culture. The essays explore the ways in which cultural activities—ranging from the habitual gestures of the body to the production of specific artworks—register the impact of migration, from the forced transportation of slaves to the New World and of Jews to the death camps to the economic migration of peoples between the West and its erstwhile colonies; from the internal and external exile of Palestinians to the free movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals. Rather than focusing exclusively on art produced by those identified as migrant subjects, this collection opens up the question of how aesthetics itself migrates, transforming not only its own practices and traditions, but also the very nature of our being in the world, as subjects producing, as well as produced by, the cultures in which we live. The transformative potential of cultures on the move is both affirmed and critiqued throughout the collection, as part of an exploration of the ways in which globalisation implicates us ever more tightly in the unequal relations of production that characterise late modernity. This collection brings academic scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation with practising visual and verbal artists; indeed, many of the essays break down the distinction between artist and academic, suggesting a dynamic interchange between critical reflection and creativity.

Explores how political activism, art, and popular culture challenge the discrimination and injustice faced by “illegal” and displaced peoples. The last decade has witnessed a global explosion of immigrant protests, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This volume considers the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship and borders. Scholars, visual and performance artists, and activists explore the ways in which political activism, art, and popular culture can work to challenge the multiple forms of discrimination and injustice faced by “illegal” and displaced peoples. They focus on a wide range of topics, including desire and neo-colonial violence in film, visibility and representation, pedagogical function of protest, and the role of the arts and artists in the explosion of political protests that challenge the precarious nature of migrant life in the Global North. They also examine shifting practices of boundary making and boundary taking, changing meanings and lived experiences of citizenship, arguing for a noborder politics enacted through a “noborder scholarship.”

Migrant Form examines the works of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Satyajit Ray for the anti-colonial arguments in their unsettled, and unsettling, aesthetics. Among the questions it engages are the following: What are the aesthetic moves through which art expresses its resistance to dominance and demands for conformity? How can we define anti-colonial aesthetics? How do these aesthetics manifest themselves in different media such as literature and film? Contending that Joyce inaugurates an anti-colonial «aesthetics of reconstitution», the book mines such aesthetics in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to propose a formal model for postcolonialism. It also draws on that exercise to consider how Rushdie extends a play with reconfigured forms into an overt politics in two of his novels (Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses). Turning its attention to film, the book contests the common view of Ray as a gentle realist and examines a formal restlessness in Ray's earlier work, Charulata (The Lonely Wife), before demonstrating how Ray stages his preference for restlessness in his final film, Agantuk (The Stranger).

Where now for postcolonial studies? That is the central question in this new volume from one of the field’s most original thinkers. Not so long ago, the driving force behind postcolonial criticism was literary; increasingly, however, many have claimed that the future of postcolonial studies is interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary Measures thoroughly considers this alternative trajectory through the field of postcolonial studies by setting up a series of conversations among these newly postcolonial disciplines—notably geography, environmental studies, history, and anthropology—and literary studies in which the imaginative possibilities of non-Western epistemologies are brought to the fore.

Migration has been a phenomenon throughout human history but today, as a result of economic hardship, conflict and globalization, a higher percentage of people than ever before live outside their country of birth. Increased international migration has resulted in more movement of information, traditions and cultures. Migration acts as a catalyst: not only for social change, but also for the generation of new aesthetic phenomena. The Culture of Migration explores the ways in which culture and the arts have been transformed by migration in recent decades--and, in turn, how these cultural and aesthetic transformations have contributed to shaping our identities, politics and societies.Making an important contribution to the emerging cross-disciplinary field of migration studies, this book examines contemporary cultural and artistic representations of migration and gathers new perspectives on the subject from across the disciplines of the arts and humanities. Renowned and emerging scholars in the field of migration, culture and aesthetics--among them the distinguished theorists Mieke Bal, Nikos Papastergiadis, Roger Bromley and Edward Casey--address the broader themes and underlying discourses of recent studies in migration and culture.

Migration has been a phenomenon throughout human history but today, as a result of economic hardship, conflict and globalization, a higher percentage of people than ever before live outside their country of birth. Increased international migration has resulted in more movement of information, traditions and cultures. Migration acts as a catalyst: not only for social change, but also for the generation of new aesthetic phenomena. The Culture of Migration explores the ways in which culture and the arts have been transformed by migration in recent decades--and, in turn, how these cultural and aesthetic transformations have contributed to shaping our identities, politics and societies.Making an important contribution to the emerging cross-disciplinary field of migration studies, this book examines contemporary cultural and artistic representations of migration and gathers new perspectives on the subject from across the disciplines of the arts and humanities. Renowned and emerging scholars in the field of migration, culture and aesthetics--among them the distinguished theorists Mieke Bal, Nikos Papastergiadis, Roger Bromley and Edward Casey--address the broader themes and underlying discourses of recent studies in migration and culture.