Literature of Global Mobility and Migration

This seminar aims to introduce students to 20th century literature of mobility and migration. Considering the mobility turn in the humanities (Sheller and Urry 2006, 207-226) and its connection to migration, the course sets out to investigate how diasporic fiction in English by migrant writers such as Pakistani British author Kamila Shamsie, Bengali American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, and African Canadian author M.G. Vassanji, provide new perspectives on the construction of home, identity, and belonging in the age of globalisation and increasing transnational mobility. Also, the course seeks to examine the fictional representations of North-South encounters, as the main protagonists in selected novels travel and move between cultures and continents literally and metaphorically. Focusing on writers of diverse cultural backgrounds, the seminar examines how mobility and migration not only shape and transform the traditional literary genre of the novel, which tends to overlap with the historical novel, coming-of-age stories, narratives of displacement or exile, journey or quest narratives, fictional or non-fictional memoirs, or travel writing, but also facilitate our understanding of culture and nation as well as gender and identity from a broad perspective. Mobility, as mobility studies demonstrates, encompasses a wide spectrum of movements which range from the large-scale technologies of global travel to transnational interconnections. Likewise, migration is a “continual” and “multidirectional” (Ahmad 2019, xxvii) experience, which stands for voluntary and involuntary migration, leading to a new sense of being “on the move” (Urry 2007, 3). The main objective of the course is to investigate mobility and migration in literature from a female perspective and to investigate how gender shapes the experience of movement across the lines, namely national, territorial, cultural, social, linguistic, and personal, as represented in selected literary works. Upon completion of the course, it is expected that students can show their understanding of the literature of mobility and migration in class presentation and in the exam or term-paper.