- Title
- Crossing the lines: passports and borders as motifs in contemporary migration literature
- Creator
- Gulddal, Jesper
- Relation
- Le Comparatisme comme approche critique Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach Vol. 5, p. 195-204
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.15122/isbn.978-2-406-06536-4.p.0195
- Publisher
- Editions Classiques Garnier
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- True to its roots in post-colonialism, recent scholarship on migration literature is marked by a strong theoretical bias and tends to approach its subject via concepts such as hybridity, liminality, transnationality, third spaces, othering and homing. Theoretically astute, these models have proved useful particularly in conceptualising the unfixing of identity that often overcomes migrants in their new countries of residence. Yet, by virtue of their abstract nature, they also carry in them the risk of removing us from the actual experience of migration. For this reason, it would be well to supplement the theoretical bird's-eye perspective with a view from below, centred on the practicalities and issues involved in migration at the level of the individual. What I want to propose in this paper is in fact a more practical approach to migration literature based on the interchanges between this literature and the institutions of international movement control: borders, passports, visa regulations. This defining institution of modernity has so far received surprisingly little attention in the fields of literary and cultural studies, and it is only within the last fifteen years that the passport has come under serious scrutiny by historians and political scientists. Even more surprisingly, this neglect carries over into the specific context of migration literature despite the fact that the barriers of movement control present an unavoidable obstacle for any would-be emigrant, whether fictitious or real. As a consequence, the passport system has a strong motivic presence within this genre and this motif often serves as a node for the literary representation of the migrant experience.
- Subject
- migration; literature; post-colonialism; transnationality
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1385803
- Identifier
- uon:32296
- Identifier
- ISSN:2103-5636
- Language
- eng
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