‘Narratives of the New Diasporas’ is an interdisciplinary, multilingual and transnational project that explores 21st century literary production about migration in the Spanish, Galician and English languages. Rather than considering migrant literature from a broad perspective, this project has a twofold structure that will focus on the concepts of ‘comfort zones’ and ‘conflict zones’. These two ‘zones’, as diaspora spaces, are the imaginary locus for exclusion or inclusion between a place’s natives and those communities or individuals that arrive from beyond its borders. The ‘pull’ and ‘push’ factors that motivate migratory movements are highly heterogeneous and bloom from the most diverse life experiences. This project will analyse the way in which contemporary writing explores the tensions that manifest in these diaspora spaces between privileged (the native) and the subaltern (the migrant) communities as they have been depicted throughout the literary world. The multilingual and transnational nature of this project alludes to the need to alter the longstanding notion of ‘literary canon’ surrounding a specific country, and/or tradition, as migration make literary borders equally conflictive.
TARGET 1
COMFORT ZONES
Different motivations make people emigrate within comfort zones. New historical and economical conditionings converge within comfort zones, forcing the reinterpretation of these diaspora spaces. For instance, the economic crisis of the beginning of the 21st century favoured intra-European migration from the south to the north, as well as from the east to the west, of the European Union. Contemporary literary production questions the idealisation of the diasporic experience within comfort zones in order to understand the subaltern position of the migrant individual in a legal context. Target 1 will focus on the analysis of fiction in Spanish, Galician and English produced by migrant authors who write about migration within these comfort zones to illustrate how conflictive this type of migration can also be despite their reasonably privileged point of departure.
Research avenues for Target 1:
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Intra-migration within comfort zones
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Legal migration as well as Return literature
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First and/or second generation migrants
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Exophony and translation
TARGET 2
CONFLICT ZONES
Contemporary authors use their writing in the most eye-opening and thought-provoking manners to draw attention to the violence that inhabits the borders within conflict zones. The motivation behind illegal migration and/or the host nation being a hostile place are but two of the most recurring topics from within the literary production that blossoms from within conflict zones. Literature, in English, Spanish or Galician, also illustrate how complex migration within conflict zones can still be. The state of emergency within some diaspora spaces regarding migration, legal or otherwise, motivates a whole generation of authors to write about these potentially conflictive experiences from a particularly critical perspective and use their literature as an empowering tool with which to fight against oppression.
Research avenues for Target 2:
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Border litreature withint conflict zones
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Refugee liteature and Re-migration
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Brexit narratives
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Migrant literature and 'Fortress Europe'
WORKING TEAM
