Negotiations of Migration

The series Culture and Conflict aims to promote a dynamic, pluridisciplinary dialogue meant to discuss the multiple ways in which conflict influences, supports or constrains the production of meaning in modernity. It publishes innovative original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual and film studies. Culture and conflict inevitably go together. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and creative, i.e., conflictual interaction. Differential markers, such as self and other, inside and outside, high and low, pure and dirty, old and new, support the key themes of the study of culture, e.g., identity and diversity, memory and trauma, translation of cultures and globalization, mediation and exclusion. The new series Culture and Conflict aims to promote a dynamic, pluridisciplinary dialogue meant to discuss the multiple ways in which conflict influences, supports or constrains the production of meaning in modernity. It publishes innovative original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual and film studies.

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At a time when migration is mostly discussed in terms of “conflict” and “crisis”, it is decidedly important to acknowledge the discursive traditions, narrative patterns, and conceptual categories that continue to inform how migration is represented, analyzed and theorized in contemporary Europe. This volume focuses on the potential of artistic and critical practices to challenge hegemonic framings of migration and embrace the ambivalence inherent in migration as a conflictual, often violent, yet also liberating uprooting. By placing special emphasis on “peripheral” perspectives and subject positions, the volume provides new insights into topics such as belonging and exclusion, the “migrant crisis”, and memory. By bringing into dialogue creative practices and academic discourses, it explores how new modes of seeing and theorizing may emerge through experiences and representations of migration. Situated within the field of literary and cultural studies, it complements historical and social analyses in the emerging interdisciplinary field of migration studies.