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Bangladeshi Novels in English: Cultural Contact and Migrant Subjectivity is the first comprehensive study of Bangladeshi migration and diasporas through eight seminal Bangladeshi novels in English from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Adib Khan's Seasonal Adjustments and Spiral Road, Farhana H. Rahman's The Eye of the Heart, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Manzu Islam's Burrow, Nashid Kamal's The Glass Bangles, Zia H. Rahman's In the Light of What We Know, and Tahmima Anam's The Bones of Grace. The book situates the study within the English-language literary history and linguistic ethnography of Bangladesh while unveiling the complexities of Bangladeshi Muslim migration from men, women, and children's perspectives. It challenges the stereotyping of Bengali Muslim migrants as a failure of immigration and multiculturalism and offers a fresh view on cultural contact and the formation of migrant subjectivity at the intersections of gender, race, religion, class, culture, ethnicity, history, politics, and personality.

Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe examines migrant stories through the lens of temporality as seen in the role of such issues as integration, waiting, detention, trauma, crisis, and imagined futures. This book argues that a focus on different time scales and perceptions of time will help us understand how the intimate and affective subjectivities of more complex narratives of migration, as articulated in literature, cross into the public sphere and challenge political ‘bubbles.'This collection showcases new approaches to and innovative readings of different forms of literary and cultural migration narratives. In addition to developing theoretical tools for the study, the authors present innovative case studies addressing topics such as the European refugee crisis, migration narratives and border crossings in Britain, Spain, and Morocco, as well as experiences of migration in Finland and Norway.

A look at how ideas of translation, migration, and displacement are embedded in the works of prominent artists, from Ovid to Tacita DeanOn Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and displacement shape an astonishing range of artistic works. From the possibilities and limitations of translation addressed by Jhumpa Lahiri and David Malouf to the effects of shifting borders in the writings of Eugenio Montale, W. G. Sebald, Colm Tóibín, and many others, esteemed literary critic Mary Jacobus looks at the ways novelists, poets, photographers, and filmmakers revise narratives of language, identity, and exile. Jacobus's attentive readings of texts and images seek to answer the question: What does it mean to identify as—or with—an outsider?Walls and border-crossings, nomadic wanderings and Alpine walking, the urge to travel and the yearning for home—Jacobus braids together such threads in disparate times and geographies. She plumbs the experiences of Ovid in exile, Frankenstein's outcast Being, Elizabeth Bishop in Nova Scotia and Brazil, Walter Benjamin's Berlin childhood, and Sophocles's Antigone in the wilderness. Throughout, Jacobus trains her eye on issues of transformation and translocation; the traumas of partings, journeys, and returns; and confrontations with memory and the past.Focusing on human conditions both modern and timeless, On Belonging and Not Belonging offers a unique consideration of inclusion and exclusion in our world.

This monograph explores the concept of mobility in Zimbabwean works of fiction published in English between the introduction of the controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme and the end of the Mugabe era.Since 2000, Zimbabwe has experienced unprecedented levels of transnational out-migration in response to the political conflicts and economic downturn often referred to as the Zimbabwe Crisis. This, in turn, has led to an increased outpouring of literary texts about migration, both in locally produced texts and in works by authors based in the diaspora. Situating Zimbabwe's recent literary developments in a wider context of Southern African writing and history, this book focuses on texts that portray movement within Zimbabwe's cities, between village and city, to South Africa, and overseas. The author examines important developments and trends in recent Zimbabwean literature, investigating the link between state authoritarianism and control of mobility, and literature's potential to intervene into dominant political discourses. The book includes in-depth analyses of ten recent works of fiction published in the post-2000 era and develops mobility as a key category of literary analysis of Zimbabwe's contemporary literatures. Setting out a rich dialogue between literary criticism and mobility studies, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, Southern Africa, migration, and mobility.

Narratives of Mediterranean Space: Literature and Art across Land and Sea presents a comparative analysis of contemporary literary and visual narratives of movement and migration produced in Italian, Arabic and French. It analyzes how these works create a dialogue across the Mediterranean Sea. By paying attention to the multiple ways in which the Mediterranean is being narrated by contemporary writers and artists, Silvia Caserta aims to propose a reconceptualization of the Mediterranean as a polyphonic space of movement and resistance. The Mediterranean space that emerges from this study is a space that, by virtue of the instability and porosity of its geographical and cultural borders, is able to overcome normative dichotomies between north and south, east and west, local and global. This book proposes the Mediterranean is a fruitful area from which to investigate the wider contradictions of the contemporary global world while avoiding the traps of “Mediterraneanism”. For this reason, the book highlights the contradictions and dissonances that emerge from reading Mediterranean works, opening up multiple perspectives on the Sea and on the different lands that surround it.

Francophone Sephardic Fiction:Writing Migration, Diaspora, and Modernity approaches modern Sephardic literature in a comparative way to draw out similarities and differences among selected francophone novelists from various countries, with a focus on North Africa. The definition of Sepharad here is broader than just Spain: it embraces Jews whose ancestors had lived in North Africa for centuries, even before the arrival of Islam, and who still today trace their allegiance to ways of being Jewish that go back to Babylon, as do those whose ancestors spent a few hundred years in Iberia. The author traces the strong influence of oral storytelling on modern novelists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the idea of the portable homeland, as exile and migration engulfed the long-rooted Sephardic communities. The author also examines diaspora concepts, how modernity and post-modernity threatened traditional ways of life, and how humor and an active return into history for the novel have done more than mere nostalgia could to enliven the portable homeland of modern francophone Sephardic fiction.

Abbas Khider (b. 1973) has established himself as one of the leading literary voices of refugees and marginalised communities in Germany today. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Khider was at a young age a vocal critic of Saddam Hussein's regime, during which he was jailed and tortured before fleeing the country. As a refugee, he crossed many countries before arriving in Germany, where he was eventually granted asylum. His own life experiences have served as a departure point for his novels, which similarly explore the refugee experience and the challenges that migrants to Europe face. This volume represents the first collection of essays devoted to Khider's works to date. The contributions analyse his narrative works and probe important questions relating to political, cultural, and linguistic identity in Germany today. While his works explore what it means to be an immigrant, they do so with a wry sense of humour and an insight into the human condition that also reflect on the political situation in Germany today. His award-winning novels, including Der falsche Inder (2008, The Village Indian, 2013) and Ohrfeige (2016, A Slap in the Face, 2019), which have been translated into English, are discussed in detail. Additionally, an original interview with the author offers insight into his writing process and influences.

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy – to imagine possible inhabitable worlds.

This book examines the meaning of home through the investigation of a series of public and private spaces recurrent in Italian postcolonial literature. The chapters, by respectively considering Termini train station in Rome, phone centres, the condominium, and the private spaces of the bathroom and the bedroom, investigate how migrant characters inhabit those places and turn them into familiar spaces of belonging. Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature suggests “home spaces” as a possible lens to examine these specific places and a series of practices enacted by their inhabitants in order to feel at home. Drawing on a wide array of sources, this book focuses on the role played by memory in creating transnational connections between present and past locations and on how these connections shape migrants'sense of self and migrants'identity.

This volume brings together scholars, students and writers as well as artists from around the world. By choosing a thematic focus on'transition'in women's lives, we present research on women who have crossed biological, geopolitical and political borders as well as emotional, sexual, cultural and linguistic boundaries. The international approach brings together different cultures and genres in order to emphasize the links and connections that bind women together, rather than those which separate them. The chapters consider the ways in which the changes and transitions women undergo influence the world we live in. We are particularly interested in the idea of crossing borders and how this influences identity and belonging, and the theme of crossing boundaries in the context of motherhood as well as sexual orientation. The topic is timely given the waves of migration all around the world in recent times. The contributors deal with issues central to contemporary life, such as gender equality and women's empowerment, as well as understanding women's identities and being sensitive to fluid concepts of gender and sexuality.

This book examines how the transcultural and transnational migration of people, texts, and ideas has transformed the paradigm of national literature, with Britain and Ireland as case studies. The study questions definitions of migration and migrant literature that focus solely on the work of authors with migrant backgrounds, and suggests that migration is not extraneous but intrinsic to contemporary understandings of national literature in a global context. The fictional work of authors such as Caryl Phillips, Colum McCann, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Rose Tremain, Elif Shafak, and Evelyn Conlon is analysed from a variety of perspectives, including transculturality, cosmopolitanism, and Afropolitanism, so as to emphasise how their work fosters an understanding of national literature, as well as of individual and collective identities, based on transborder interconnectivity.

The contributions in this collection underline the vibrancy as well as complexity that characterizes the study of American literature and culture in the twenty-first century with regard to the exploration and understanding of ethnicity and gender. The book aims at contributing to the research already taking place within American Studies, while opening up the texts discussed to further literary and cultural evaluations and interpretations. America is viewed here not in isolation but as part of a fluctuating as well as geographically and culturally expansive reality as testified by the Asian, European, and American background of the volume contributors.

This book examines the concept of translation as a return to origins and as restitution of lost narratives, and is based on the idea of diaspora as a term that depicts the longing to return home and the imaginary reconstructions and reconstitutions of home by migrants and translators. The author analyses a corpus made up of novels and a memoir by Italian-Canadian writers Mary Melfi, Nino Ricci and Frank Paci, examining the theme of return both within the writing itself and also in the discourse surrounding the translations of these works into Italian. These ‘reconstructions'are analysed through the lens of translation, and more specifically through the notion of written code-switching, understood here as a fictional tool which symbolizes the translational movements between different points of view. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation and interpreting, migration studies, and Italian and diasporic writing.

Ausgehend von der These, dass Literatur im 21. Jahrhundert in vielfacher Weise durch das Phänomen der Wanderung geprägt ist (von der Thematisierung von Migration bis zur beschleunigten ‚Wanderung‘ von Texten über Sprach- und Nationalgrenzen hinweg) stellt der aus einer internationalen Tagung an der Universität Mainz hervorgegangene Band die Frage, wie die Komparatistik auf die zügig sich verändernde literarische Welt reagieren soll. Das aus der Übersetzungstheorie Schleiermachers entlehnte, jedoch neu akzentuierte Konzept der „fremden Ähnlichkeiten“ bietet vielfältige Möglichkeiten, Antworten auf diese Frage zu finden – sowohl auf der Ebene der literaturtheoretischen Reflexion wie auch durch den konkreten Vergleich spezifischer literarischer Texte.

Around the turn of 21st Century, Spain welcomed more than six million foreigners, many of them from various parts of the African continent. How African immigrants represent themselves and are represented in contemporary Spanish texts is the subject of this interdisciplinary collection. Analyzing blogs, films, translations, and literary works by contemporary authors including Donato Ndongo (Ecquatorial Guinea), Abderrahman El Fathi (Morocco), Chus Gutiérrez (Spain), Juan Bonilla (Spain), and Bahia Mahmud Awah (Western Sahara), the contributors interrogate how Spanish cultural texts represent, idealize, or sympathize with the plight of immigrants, as well as the ways in which immigrants themselves represent Spain and Spanish culture. At the same time, these works shed light on issues related to Spain's racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spain's economic crisis in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, the essays are a convincing reminder that cultural texts provide a mirror into the perceptions of a society during times of change.

The papers in this volume include not only the traditional view of what constitutes a minority but also any individual, or group recalcitrant and reluctant, not to say resistant, to the generalized lobotomy operated by the rampant uniformisation of cultures around the world. For in the ruins of “the end of history” and its context of violence and Manichean politics, any opposition to the “general consensus” could be dismissed as anti-historical and atavistic. The objective of the book is precisely to counter such rhetoric and underscore the necessity of cultural diversity and the right to difference. This book contains what can amount to a critical response to the current context of confusion surrounding the postmodern condition that arguably dominates most societies. It stresses the issue of ethics not only in world politics but also in literature and criticism which are the main focus here. In fact, the interest in minority issues is in itself an ethical concern that contributes to give substance to the idea that postmodernity opens the gates for the long-suppressed identities and sensibilities to emerge and demand recognition. This volume intends, therefore, to contribute to the recent ethical turn that seems to take place in scholarship worldwide. Operated mainly by what is referred to as postcolonial studies this shift turned literary criticism and cultural studies into the site where a sense of literature can be envisioned that is not at all universalist, or reflecting the hegemonic temptations of the new world order. It seeks to present a patchwork of minor literatures, in the sense that besides the “major” literatures/languages, there are myriads of minor voices that express dissimilarity oftentimes under the umbrella of those major languages and literatures themselves.