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Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities.
The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the "exile" as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.
List of contents
Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape - Editors' Introduction
Section 1: Literary Interventions
Chapter 1: Recuperating the Black Family in Graphic Narrative: Tom Feelings's The Middle Passage and Kyle Baker's Nat Turner
Daniel Stein
Chapter 2: Generational Doubling as Eth(n)ic Narrative Strategy: Annie Proulx's Barkskins and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing
Cathy Covell Waegner
Chapter 3: "As Much the Invader as the Native": Investigating Immigrant and Indigenous Family Ties in Wendy Rose's Itch Like Crazy
Ludmila Martanovschi
Chapter 4: Mothers/Lovers of Exiles: Women Characters in Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names
Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard
Chapter 5: The Securitized Migrant: Migrant Mobility and Kindred Alliances in Post-9/11 New York Novels
Isabella Karlsson
Section 2: Filmic Interventions
Chapter 6: Mother(less) Exiles: The New Woman's Absence from the Migration of the Expressionists to Hollywood
Michele Rozga
Chapter 7: Go West, Young Men: Teutonic Myths and American Westerns Blazed Path for the Acceptance of Nazism in Germany
Cathy M. Jackson
Chapter 8: "What Pain It Was to Drown": Quotidian Meets Tragic in Gianfranco Rosi's Fire at Sea
Page R. Laws
Chapter 9: Shifting Affiliations: Kinship Formation through Othering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Christopher Hansen
Section 3: Civic Interventions
Chapter 10: "Son, I Am Not Coming Here Anymore": Migrations, Loss, Separation, Trauma, and the Underground Railroad
Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander
Chapter 11: Contested Affiliations: The Migration of US American War Resisters to Canada
Sarah J. Grünendahl
Chapter 12: "No Asylum from the Germans": Policies of Deterrence and the Early West German Refugee Movement
Andreas Kewes
Chapter 13: Contesting Home, Nation, and Beyond: The Digital Space of New Migrants from Post-Gezi Turkey
Mine Gencel Bek
Chapter 14: Religion, Family, Community, Difference: Immigrant Millennials in Cologne, Germany
Aprilfaye T. Manalang
Chapter 15: "Space," "Aliens," and the "Race" to Belong: Changing Geographies and Moving Borders in Europe and the Americas
Geoffroy de Laforcade
About the author
Daniel Stein is professor of North American literary and cultural studies and vice dean for international affairs at the University of Siegen.
Geoffroy de Laforcade is professor of Latin American, Caribbean and world history at Norfolk State University.
Page R. Laws is professor of English and dean of the Robert C. Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University.
Cathy Covell Waegner is an independent scholar.
Summary
Migration, Diaspora, Exile examines narratives of affiliation and escape that imagine migration to and in Europe and the Americas in terms of kinship, community, and refuge. They investigate a broad range of literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities.
