ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |21 pages

Introduction

Unsettling Migrant Narratives

chapter 1|18 pages

Exploring The Immigrant Novel

Blurred Genres, Embodied Identities, and the Unsettling Migration Experience

chapter 2|28 pages

“I Dream of Cabo Verde Every Night Now”

Reflections on/from Writers in the Diaspora

chapter 3|21 pages

“The love of the people – my reward”

Sam Selvon's legacy in Caribbean London

chapter 5|17 pages

Capturing Comedy, and Tragedy

Emplacement Strategies in Migrant Writing from Sweden

chapter 6|22 pages

Migrants' Self-Narrations as Cultural Critique

Exploring Political Subjectivities through Asylum Seekers' and Returnees' Narratives and Literature

chapter 7|18 pages

The Anthropologist as Observant Reader of Migrant Literature

The Case of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

chapter 8|18 pages

At the Unsettling Limits of Collaborative Life Writing

A Memoir of an Ethnography-Memoir

chapter 9|18 pages

Scrolling through Unheard Voices

Unaccompanied Child Migrant Narratives on Social Media

chapter |11 pages

Afterword

Migrants, Anthropologists, and Writing