This book examines contemporary literary representations of global mobility. It pays particular attention to refugee writing and displacement, migration and memory, and new European identities, and revises the field of postcolonial studies.

This book presents diverse, composite, non-exclusive and non-hierarchical perspectives on displacement of people as represented in literature. It examines the experiences of migration as a result of wars, natural disasters, religious strife, loss of livelihoods and shifts in local and global economies and the vulnerabilities they expose. Bringing together scholarly insights into literature about displacement and migration from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the book interrogates the development frames of Western modernity and situates displacement within the discourse of disenfranchisement of citizens by nation-states. It explores the experiences, memories and expressions of displacement in literature and how literary works critique ethical and moral responsibilities of states and communities that often do not account for the loss which displacement causes to the health, education, career, or relationships of displaced people. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, philosophy, migration and diaspora studies, development studies, African studies and Asian studies.

This edited book offers a collection of fresh and critical essays that explore the representation of the migrant subject in modern and contemporary Arabic literature and discuss its role in shaping new forms of transcultural and transnational identities. The selection of essays in this volume offers a set of new insights on a cluster of tropes: self-discovery, alienation, nostalgia, transmission and translation of knowledge, sense of exile, reconfiguration of the relationship with the past and the identity, and the building of transnational identity. A coherent yet multi-faceted narrative of micro-stories and of transcultural and transnational Arab identities will emerge from the essays: the volume aims at reversing the traditional perspective according to which a migrant subject is a non-political actor. In contrast to many books about migration and literature, this one explores how the migrant subject becomes a specific literary trope, a catalyst of modern alienation, displacement, and uncertain identity, suggesting new forms of subjectification. Multiple representations of the migrant subject inform and perform the possibility of new post- national and transcultural individual and group identities and actively contribute to rewriting and decolonizing history.

Still Here: Memoirs of Trauma, Illness and Loss explores the history, ethics, and cross-cultural range of memoirs focusing on illness, death, loss, displacement, and other experiences of trauma. From Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries to kitchen table survivor-to-survivor storytelling following Hurricane Katrina, from social media posts from a refugee detention centre, to poetry by exiles fleeing war zones, the collection investigates trauma memoir writing as healing, as documentation of suffering and disability, and as political activism. Editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph have brought together this scholarly collection as a sequel to their earlier Mediating Memory (Routledge 2018), providing a closer look at the specific concerns of trauma memoir, including conflict and intergenerational trauma; the therapeutic potential and risks of trauma life writing; its ethical challenges; and trauma memoir giving voice to minority experiences.

In Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures, Anna-Leena Toivanen explores the representations and relationship of mobilities and cosmopolitanisms in Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the 1990s to the 2010s. Representations of mobility practices are discussed against three categories of cosmopolitanism reflecting the privileged, pragmatic, and critical aspects of the concept. The main scientific contribution of Toivanen’s book is its attempt to enhance dialogue between postcolonial literary studies and mobilities research. The book criticises reductive understandings of ‘mobility’ as a synonym for migration, and problematises frequently made links between mobility and cosmopolitanism. Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms adopts a comparative approach to Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literatures, often discussed separately despite their common themes and parallel paths.

How does climate change intensify social cleavages in new configurations of knowledge and power? How does development respond to its own contradictions in such scenarios? How do extreme weather events inform population movement and challenge existing definitions of borders and citizenship? Who pays the heaviest price? Living with the Weather addresses these pressing questions by highlighting and exploring the social, economic, political, and spatial dimensions of climate disaster in South Asia. Through empirical research, reporting and documentation of the climate crisis in the countries of South Asia, along with a deep dive into the Indian Sundarbans, the book calls attention to the intermeshed predicaments the people of the subcontinent face while bearing the brunt of climate change In doing so, it seeks to enrich our understanding of how climate change transforms everyday life. It makes visible the effects of natural events, the outcomes of political decisions, how disaster and rehabilitation are interpreted by states, how resistances are staged in the form of mobility, and how dispossession and despair are embodied and articulated.

What grows out of the ordinary? This volume focuses on that which has been regarded as ordinary and formulaic in literary and cultural phenomena and contests the hegemonic logic of revealing oppression and rebuilding liberation in contemporary critical theory.