Writing Migration

War refugees on their way to Germany from Hungary.

The journal Konturen has just published a special issue on “Writing Migration,” which looks wonderful. You can read it free online here. I have an article in the issue as well. Thank you to Jeffrey Librett for organizing and editing this!

Konturen, Vol 11 (2020)

Writing Migration

This issue edited by Jeffrey S. Librett with Ahmad Nadalizadeh as assistant editor.

“Writing migration”: our title comprises a mixture of heterogeneous terms, like a mixed metaphor, insofar as movement of peoples seems so concrete, as movement of living, breathing subjective spirits, while writing remains abstract; the former so alive, the latter—the letter–so dead. Or so we usually think, even without having to think it. We know that migration experiences can be written down, but we think of the migration and the writing as two fundamentally different types of experiences, two quite different types of thing. Our point of departure in the organization of this special issue was—in contrast to these overly simple conventions—a curiosity about the ways in which the two structurally intersect: writing migrates, and migration writes.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Writing Migration: Points of Departure and Arrival in History and ReasonJeffrey S LibrettHTML PDF1-10

Articles

Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History (1784-1791), or: the Anthropological De-struction of “Africa”Amadou Oury BaHTML PDF11-28
Migration’s Alienations: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother CourageDorothee Ostmeier, Michael Malek NajjarHTML PDF29-51
“We Can Do It” [Wir schaffen das]—Creative Impulses Through Migration (a Report from September 2017, with an Afterword on the Situation Today)Sabine SchollHTML PDF52-62
A Staged Migration to Europe: Ozdamar’s Perikizi and Transgenerational TraumaJocelyn AskinHTML PDF63-82
The Impossibility of Return: Güney Dal and the Exilic ConditionMert Bahadir ReisoğluHTML PDF83-99
“More Than a Trip”: Memory, Mobility, and Space in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004)Araceli Masterson-AlgarHTML PDF100-127
Brown Eyed Boy: Narrating Internalized Oppression and Misogynoir in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Everything I Don’t RememberBenjamin Mier-CruzHTML PDF128-151
Borders, Migrants, and WritingThomas NailHTML PDF152-173

Review Essays

Manlio Graziano, What is a Border? Stanford Briefs, 2018.Joscha KlueppelHTML PDF174-180

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