Introduction

Petersen, Anne Ring; Schramm, Moritz; Wiegand, Frauke Katharina

doi:10.4324/9780429506222-1

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…As Anne Ring Petersen, Moritz Schramm, and Frauke Wiegand (2019: 3) state, the concept of postmigration was originally developed by people working with performance arts and not in academic contexts, but has since been adopted into academic research and discourse. It began as a protest against the use of the term “migrant” and its exclusionary features (Petersen et al, 2019: 4). Since these early applications of the term, three distinct phases of development have been recognized.…”

Section: Postmigration As a Conceptual Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, the focus was on critiquing the way people kept being referred to as migrants despite never having relocated themselves. Another strand takes issue with society as a whole instead of focusing solely on those who have arrived from elsewhere, and the third use of the term sees society itself as postmigrant (Petersen et al, 2019: 5). Thus, postmigration is an ideological intervention aimed to reconsider and reinvent migration discourses.…”

Section: Postmigration As a Conceptual Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Toward postmigrant realities in Leila Aboulela’sElsewhere, Home

Englund

2020

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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The number of migration narratives published in recent years in the form of short stories, novels, poetry, and nonfiction has been considerable, particularly by writers connected with the African continent. Previous studies on this body of work have included investigations of identity and otherness, transnational connections, and cosmopolitan aspirations. Despite this abundance of perspectives on the literature, there have also been urgent calls for new ways of theorizing migration (Fasselt, 2019; Kraler, 2011; Edmunds, 2006). Postmigration is just such an intervention, a concept that aims to go beyond previous meanings of migrant and migration, to critique instances of othering and the gap between the margins and the majority society (Römhild, 2017), and to focus explicitly on trajectories relating to the future. Postmigration, as outlined by Roger Bromley (2017: 39), is not a concept solely tied to temporal distinctions, but is also ideological in its attempts to construct “a new set of emergent spaces of plurality”. The present article argues that Leila Aboulela’s short story collection Elsewhere, Home (2018) manifests such spaces, particularly through its representations and negotiations of gender, family practices, generation, and religious belief and practice. My analysis shows that Aboulela subverts tropes regarding gendered and religious identity and mobility. Elsewhere, Home is no longer primarily occupied with the displacement of individual characters but moves toward seeing migration as interaction and participation instead of integration (Moslund and Petersen, 2019), and as transcultural (Petersen and Schramm, 2017) instead of transnational.

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Section: Postmigration As a Conceptual Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Postmigration As a Conceptual Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%