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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.
List of contents
Introduction: Unsettling Migrant Narratives 1. Exploring the Immigrant Novel: Blurred Genres, Embodied Identities, and the Unsettling Migration Experience 2. "I Dream of Cabo Verde Every Night Now:" Reflections on/from Writers in the Diaspora 3."The love of the people - my reward": Sam Selvon's Legacy in Caribbean London 4. Imaginaries of Belonging in Middle-Class Relocation Narratives: The French in London 5. Capturing Comedy, and Tragedy: Emplacement Strategies in Migrant Writing from Sweden 6. Migrants' Self-Narrations as Cultural Critique: Exploring Political Subjectivities through Asylum Seekers' and Returnees' Narratives and Literature 7.The Anthropologist as Observant Reader of Migrant Literature: The Case of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong 8. At the Unsettling Limits of Collaborative Life Writing: A Memoir of An Ethnography-Memoir 9. Scrolling through Unheard Voices: Unaccompanied Child Migrant Narratives on Social Media; Afterword: Migrants, Anthropologists, and Writing
About the author
Deborah Reed-Danahay is Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA.
Helena Wulff is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden.
Summary
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.
