1st Edition
Narratives of Precarious Migrancy in the Global South
This volume sets out to challenge and expand Anglophone literary migration studies in the global North with a two-fold approach. It proposes precarious migrancy as a conceptual framework to capture hitherto neglected aspects of subaltern displacement, and it turns to the global South as a site of knowledge production about migration. The chapters discuss literary narratives originally written in Chinese, Kurdish and Italian as well as English, and covering a wide geographical range, to ask what experiences and understandings of migration emerge from Southern perspectives. Across the volume, precarious migrancy emerges as a key concept for understanding contemporary globalization in general and migration in the global South in particular. The chapters offer significant reconceptualizations of precarity and migrancy by reading Southern literatures of migration as a mode of theorization of the contemporary world, contributing to the ongoing shift in framings of migration in Anglophone and postcolonial literary studies.
This volume will be of significant interest to scholars in literary migration studies, global South studies, and postcolonial studies. It offers readings of rarely studied literary texts, as well as new concepts for scholars interested in understanding the nexus of literature and migration today.
List of Contributors
Introduction: Precarious migrancy: Towards a Southern reframing of migration
Carly McLaughlin and Gigi Adair
1 Towards a decolonial critique of caporalato: Narratives of migrant farmworkers’ struggles in Southern Italy
Sielo Longo
2 From “Harare North” to “Harare South”: Precarious migrant identities and the Zimbabwean–South African border Western
Rebecca Fasselt
3 Teeming precarity of the more-than-human in Freedom, Only Freedom
Rita Sakr
4 Estranging labor: The Gulf, capital, and the fantastic in Temporary People
Nahrain Al-Mousawi
5 An ecology of absences: Remapping North–South border narratives in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive
Michela Coletta
6 “¡Regrésenme mi país, por favor!”: Resisting the border spectacle and reconfiguring the citizen–migrant binary in short stories by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite
Joshua D. Martin
7 Withering Spring: Precarious labour migrancy, class, and capitalism in Xu Lizhi’s poetry
Federico Picerni
Coda: Southern precarity in the work of Amitav Ghosh
Gigi Adair and Binayak Roy
Index
Biography
Gigi Adair is a Junior Professor in English at the University of Bielefeld. Her research is situated at the intersection of Black Atlantic studies, gender/queer studies, and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Kinship Across the Black Atlantic. Writing Diasporic Relations (Liverpool UP, 2019) and one of the co-editors of the Routledge Companion to Migration Literature (2024).
Carly McLaughlin works at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau in Germany. She has published at the intersection of childhood studies and forced migration studies, with a particular focus on how the politics of childhood influences how child migrants are represented and treated, especially within the context of illegalized migration. She is one of the co-editors of the Routledge Companion to Migration Literature (2024).
