125 research outputs found
Towards a Postmigrant Reading of Literature: An Analysis of Zadie Smith’s NW
No full textThis chapter develops a postmigrant frame of analysis in interaction with a reading of Zadie Smith’s novel NW (2012). It traces overlaps between postmigrant theory and recent developments in the study of black British literature and draws comparisons between postcolonial diasporic readings of black British literature and a novel like NW, in which migration reads doubly as an omnipresent and visible force of change that is also disappearing into the inconspicuousness of the commonplace in everyday life. The chapter focuses in particular on how the concepts of identity, belonging and race – which have always been central to the study of migration – change in their meaning and in the way they work when ‘de-migratized’ in a postmigrant reading perspective. The chapter ends with a postmigrant reading of the collective ‘we’ that emerges from the omniscient narrative voice of Smith’s novel
Introduction
No full textFollowing up on the discussion of and attempt to define the concept of postmigration in Part I, this part explores the usefulness of ‘postmigration’ as an analytical perspective by developing, testing and discussing different postmigrant frames of reading works of art, using contemporary literature, film and performance art as test cases. Accordingly, the chapters in this part address the following issues. What does a postmigrant frame of reading look like and what does it do? What new perspectives and critical questions does it bring about? How does it reopen discussions on the articulation of migration and its social impact in literature, film and the visual arts? What happens when we adopt a postmigrant lens to analyse the form and content of works of art and fiction, as well as exploring the part these works may play in the more encompassing processes of social, cultural and institutional change? How does reading works of art, film and fiction through the lens of postmigration renegotiate and alter our understanding of key concepts such as identity, integration, belonging, ‘home place’ (Heimat), race, hegemony and binary distinctions between self and other, majority and minority? And how do postmigrant readings of works of art interrelate with and differ from postcolonial/decolonial and migrant readings
Postmigration:From Utopian fantasy to future perspectives
No full textThis chapter examines the normative utopian dimensions in the contemporary debates on postmigration through the analysis of two plays, Black Water (Roland Schimmelpfenning, 2014) and Crazy Blood (Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje, 2010). The authors identify two utopian visions embedded in postmigrant criticism of existing social hierarchizations and identity ascriptions which, they argue, are also at work in the plays: a longing for the recognition of a ‘banal human sameness’ beneath external identity ascriptions, and a vision of a ‘radical freedom of difference’ that liberates people to choose, assert and transform differences and identity positions in the social sphere. Both visions are shown in the plays to take form not as end-all mirrors of a perfect future society, but as limited and small-scale ‘microtopian’ interruptions of contemporary social orders and human interrelations – fleeting moments or glimpses of conviviality and equality that are not entirely outside the real. The chapter moves on to consider ways in which the ‘postmigrant theatre’, and art in a broader sense, is imagined to contribute to processes of changing social structures and how microtopias of sameness and difference in this regard work as catalysts in transforming ‘social patterns of perception’ and producing new ‘spaces of appearance’.</p
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