The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture engages with migration to, within, and from Europe, foregrounding migration through the lenses of historical migratory movement and flows associated with colonialism and postcolonialism. With essays on literature, film, drama, graphic novels, and more, the book addresses migration and media, hostile environments, migration and language, migration and literary experiment, migration as palimpsest, and figurations of the migrant. Each section is introduced by one of the handbook’s contributing editors and interviews with writers and film directors are integrated throughout the volume. The essays collected in the volume move beyond the discourse of the “refugee crisis” to trace the historical roots of the current migration situation through colonialism and decolonization. 

"Migration shapes our past, present, and future. Yet its ubiquity makes migration a difficult subject to analyze. This handbook, the first of its kind, makes a case for the distinct role of literature and culture in elucidating this most persistent feature of human experience. A kaleidoscopic representation of the migratory condition, this volume will be a touchstone for scholarship in the humanities for decades to come."

 -Hadji Bakara, English Language and Literature, University of Michigan

"This handbook is an invaluable addition to migration studies. It provides in one volume a large and well-selected range of new and ambitious scholarly voices. It is immensely satisfying that these essays provide access to migrants’ creative expression– what displaced peoples write, film, and in other artistic ways produce to help us see their migration and integration through their own eyes."

 -Roland Hsu, Stanford University

This beautifully crafted handbook revisits the idea of Europe as an aspirational project through the intellectual trajectories of writers, artists, curators and activists. Migration becomes resignified as an empowering space of autonomy and creativity beyond the negative representational stereotypes and media discontent. The result is a magnificent kaleidoscope of interventions that provides innovative dialogues between migration and literature in the broadest sense, showing the imaginative power of novels, poems, films, plays and graphic novels to transmit cosmopolitan solidarities as well as to generate new scenarios for rethinking Europe ‘otherwise’. 

-Sandra Ponzanesi, University of Utrecht

 

A significant contribution to migration research, this volume deepens our understanding of Europe in profound and important ways by engaging with the most essential elements of displacement to, from and within the continent. Moving away from abstract, unified conceptions of Europe as a philosophical project, the wide range of critical approaches gathered by Corinna Stan and Charlotte Sussman reorient the study of the construct “Europe” by addressing the many historical, political, affective and formal ramifications of the representation of human mobility in literature and film across the globe. 

-Neus Rotger, Oberta de Catalunya University

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration is [both] a capacious work of reference and at the cutting edge of scholarship on the literatures of migration. It offers a wide range of approaches to cross-border movement in Europe and, at the same time, dives into the singularity of trans/national literary and visual works. The collection conveys the tension between capture and fugitivity, between the political forces that govern peoples’ mobility and the cultural forms of circulation that persist nonetheless. This volume attests to literature’s vital role as archive and ally in the strugglefor mobility and belonging in Europe. 

 -Debarati Sanyal, University of California Berkeley

A lot has been written on the topic of migration in recent years, but this is the first volume to provide such a systematic and kaleidoscopic study of European migration through and in literature. The editors have carried out this task marvellously, with a deep understanding of the challenges, complexities, but also the importance of this endeavour. 

The chosen contributions offer a balanced combination of close readings and attempts to map wider trends; of historical and contemporary works and periods; and of perspectives from several regions, communities, and national spaces – from Cyprus to Ireland, from Italy, France, and Spain to Sweden and Norway, but also from the Mediterranean and the European North to former European settler colonies like Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

Countering a conception of Europe - prominentin recent debates on migration - as a strictly demarcated and highly securitized geopolitical entity, this volume shows how past and present representations of migration and migrant experiences through literature do not only teach us about migration, but are fundamental to understanding the constitution of Europe itself: the plural, hybrid character of European identities, the fundamental contribution of migrants to European societies, the historical roots of hostility towards migrants and the darker narratives of Europe, but also the narratives we need in order to imagine more inclusive futures. 

Working with a broad understanding of forms of literary expression – including prose, poetry, graphic novels, but alsofilm, drama, and photography – this volume is a tribute to the indispensable role the humanities, and particularly literary studies can and should play in a historically grounded, multiperspectival, nuanced understanding of phenomena and experiences of migration in Europe and beyond, and their intertwinement with the realities of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental degradation.  It is a model for future scholarly work that is bound to become a major reference for anyone working on the topic of migration. 

-Maria Boletsi, Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies (Marilena Laskaridis Chair) at the University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor in Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University

Corina Stan is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Duke University, USA. She is the author of The Art of Distances. Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature (2018) and of articles published in Comparative Literature Studies, New German Critique, English Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Modern Language Notes, The European Journal of English Studies, Etudes britanniques, Critical Inquiry, Philosophy and Literature, NOVEL, several collective volumes, as well as public-oriented venues such as The Point, Aeon, LA Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Between 2017 and 2020, she was co-director of the Representing Migration Humanities Lab at Duke University, funded by a Humanities Unbounded Mellon grant.

Charlotte Sussman is Professor of English at Duke University, USA. She is the author of three books—Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus (2020); Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1660-1789 (2011); and Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833 (2000) —and the co-editor, with Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, of Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780-1830 (2008). Her articles on eighteenth-century literature, colonialism, migration, and slavery have appeared in PMLA, Modern Philology, ELH, Cultural Critique, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and other journals and edited collections. Between 2017 and 2020, she was co-director of the Representing Migration Humanities Lab at Duke University, funded by a Humanities Unbounded Mellon grant.