Press.
McBrien, Justin (2016). Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene in Jason W. Moore’s (Ed.) Anthropocene or capitalocene?: Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland: PM Press. 116-137
Mignolo, Walter (2006). Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity. American Literary History, 18(2), 312-321
Mbembe, Achille (2017). Critique of Black Reason. (translated by Lauren Dubois). Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1968). The Will to Power (translated by Walter Kauffman, and R. J. Hollindale). New York: Vintage Books
Pratt, Mary (1991). Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession, 33-40. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/25595469
Singh, Amritjit & Peter Schmidt. (2000). Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Soja, Edward (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing
Contemporary Fiction as a Cultural Map of Migration
Emma Musty
We live in a world in which everyone seems to be constantly on the move. Even as I sit to write this chapter I am doing so in an airport. I would currently say that I actually travel too much, as many others also do. I travel because I am a writer, because I am an activist, because I am an academic and because my family is spread throughout the four corners of the world. But the reason I can travel so easily is because I am British, because the forces of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism have made it so. Freedom of movement in this context has become a privilege, one often abused, and which has come from a history of abuse, and not the human right it is so often purported to be. As Mimi Sheller notes in Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes:
Freedom of mobility may be considered a universal human right, yet in practice it exists in relation to class, race, sexuality, gender and ability, exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales. (Sheller 2018, p. 20)
I come from one of the countries that drew many of our maps and created many of the borders contained within them. My freedom of movement exists in relation to this history and affords me a privileged access to the world not enjoyed by all.
To understand contemporary literature as a cultural map of migration one must draw upon similar areas to that of mobility justice, those of “colonial, corporeal and planetary histories and interrelations” (Sheller 2018, p. 21). To this end I will argue that not only can a writer be described as a cartographer, but that a novel may thus be described as a map which exists in relation to the cultural and political history of both the writer and that which is written; the characters, landscapes and intervals exposed through the narrative. As examples I will use two recent literary works, Signs Preceding the end of the World, by Mexican author and political scientist Yuri Herrera and The Gurugu Pledge, by Equatoguinean author and activist Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, novels that reflect our atomised societies.
Maps created by contemporary fiction such as these are important interrogators of existing ideas of identity and culture in this time of globalization and migration. Driving the need for critical reflection on these cultural artefacts, which not only record the times we live in, but frame the questions we ask about our increasingly diverse and transient cultures. Reece Jones (2018, p. 162) in Violent Borders asks, “Are humans defined by our attachment to place or by movement?” It seems it is increasingly the latter. The literature of migration allows us to view maps and the borders etched upon them in a different light. It shows the human impact of border systems reflects our colonial past and elucidates our mobile present.
Though there has been much research into negative and harmful aspects of migratory discourse in recent years (Greussing and Boomgaarden 2017; Matar 2017; Volpicelli 2015), few possible alternatives to these dominant narratives have been brought to light. In the area of critical migration research it has been noted by Dr Kerry Moore that, “…migrants are rarely afforded a voice in the news…” (Moore 2015, p. 1), that although they are often cited as statistics, the discourse is depersonalised and emotionally removed. Contemporary fiction can, I will argue, fill this gap and by doing so re-humanise the migration debate, furthering the discourse surrounding mobility justice while highlighting the hybrid nature of our cross border cultures.
In The Rise of Trapped Populations, April T. Humble also raises concerns, highlighting the role of the border in creating new and informal spaces, prompting the need for further academic research into the impact of border security on migrant populations:
There are many hotspots where concentrated groups of people become trapped due to border security—such as in northern France, north-west Turkey, northern Bangladesh and North Korea—often congregating in informal ‘migrant camps’, with many similar scenarios worldwide. (Humble 2014, p. 56)
Both Social and Human sciences have long histories of viewing and negotiating borders. In the Foreword to Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People, Pierre Sane asks us to “Imagine a world without borders...” (Pecoud and de Guchteneire (eds.) 2007, p. ix) while laying out a legal argument utilising current human rights legislation:
According to Article 13-2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’. But the right to leave is not complemented by the right to enter; one may emigrate, but not immigrate. From a human rights point of view, we are faced with an incomplete situation that sees many people being deprived of their right to emigrate by an absence of possibilities to immigrate. It is therefore worth envisaging a right to mobility: in a world of flows, mobility is a resource to which everyone should have access. (Pecoud and de Guchteneire (eds.) 2007, p. ix)
There is no room here to offer a comprehensive overview of the current debate in other disciplines, but I will touch upon several as we move forward.
Writer as Cartographer
“A story or novel is a kind of map because, like a map, it is not a world, but it evokes one (or at least one, for each reader)” (Turchi 2004, p. 166). In Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, the writer and academic Peter Turchi argues that there are parallels between the practice of the writer and that of the cartographer. He sees this most clearly in the editing process. In both maps and works of fiction he suggests there are choices between what is left in and what is left out, as well as the point of view inhabited. He uses early American maps as an example: “Native American tribal areas were not included on early European maps of the Americas, giving early readers of those maps the impression no one lived there—at least no one of consequence” (Turchi 2004, p. 33).
Even as I wrote this chapter I had to create order out of disorder, I had to border the sections, I had to cut and rewrite. What would be the equivalent of this editorial decision in fiction? The voices represented, perhaps? Maps and writing assign blank space, just as the American map does, as a form of silence. In poetry this could include the physical layout of a poem but it also applies in fiction to what is shown and what is hidden; the dropped stitches which allow the reader room to draw their own conclusions. Turchi goes further to suggest that a piece of fiction can act in itself as a map: “We compel readers to look in the direction we want them to look, to see what we want them to see, in the way that we want them to see it” (Turchi 2004, p.82). When writing a novel a limited number of perspectives
