Configurations of Migration

Front matter

DE GRUYTER

Configurations of Migration

Transnational Approaches to Culture

Chapter 1 Introduction: Configurations of Migration

At a time when state, public and sometimes even academic responses to migration have taken a hostile turn in many Western countries and along the borders of “Fortress Europe,” it is more important than ever to untangle the ways in which migration fundamentally re-configures the worlds we collectively inhabit. This volume explores how cultural productions of and about migration influence the formation and distribution of migration knowledges, as well as how representations of migration can shape our imagination. Historical and contemporary migration movements have long-reaching effects, and they deeply affect social, emotional, political, economic and ecological lived realities. The UN Refugee Agency reported the highest level of forced migration recorded yet in 2020, with more than 82.4 million people displaced globally.’ As migration scholar Elena Fiddian-Qasmiye argues, “people seeking refuge from conflict and mass human rights violations as well as from persecution and poverty across the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, have crossed and resisted national boundaries both within and across many geopolitical areas.”” Nation states and civil societies have found and still find themselves increasingly implicated in a “series of interconnected conflicts and crises,” with immense reverberations across various levels of twenty-first-century societies — the Russian military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when we are completing this introduction, being the most recent example. The need, even in times of other crises,’ to not only think about but

1 As the UNHCR reports show, the COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed down global migration and displacement processes. Cf. “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2020,” UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency, https://www.unhcr.org/flagship-reports/globaltrends/ (29 April 2022).

2 “Refuge in a Moving World: The ‘Refuge in a Moving World’ Network,” UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, https://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/news-events/news/news-archive/2015/october-2015/ref uge-in-a-moving-world (13 March 2022). Cf. also Elena Fiddian-Qasmiye, Refuge in a Moving World: Tracing Refugee and Migrant Journeys Across Disciplines (London: UCL Press, 2020).

3 “Refuge in a Moving World: The ‘Refuge in a Moving World’ Network.”

4 During the COVID-19 pandemic, media coverage has largely been redirected from capsized boats in the Mediterranean to patients and doctors in intensive care units and protests marches against restrictions. Concurrently, however, enmities towards migrants, especially of Asian descent, have risen throughout Europe. Cf. Cameron Boyle, “A Change in Tone? Media Coverage of Immigration Before and After COVID-19,” https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/04/01/2021/change-tonemedia-coverage-immigration-and-after-covid-19, Global Policy, 4 January 2021 (13 March 2022); “Sentiment towards Migration during COVID-19,” International Organization for Migration (IOM),

3 Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. [C9] BEAT] This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110783810-001 to also act on behalf of those more vulnerable, more exposed to violence, death and illness, is paramount.

The questions we would like to raise with this book pertain to the knowability, and thus to a critical and empathetic understanding, of the cultural approaches to and lived realities of displacement and migration: How can transnational migration be rendered visible in its complex social, political, personal and emotional dimensions? How can experiences of flight, exile and migration become intelligible? As literary and cultural studies scholars, we assert that art and creative expression proffer spaces of possibility to advance knowledges of and about migration: Migration (hi)stories, as they are adapted for and live forth on screens, stages and in stories influence the formation and distribution of knowledge about migration. In view of the current socio-political and economic prevalence of global migration movements, as sketched above, modes of representation, medialisation and interpretation regarding individual and collective migration need to be foregrounded more insistently. At the heights and in the aftermath of the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe, various artistic and cultural productions have vigorously engaged with migration politics, the reception of which resulted in affective responses ranging from acclaim to alarm. As early as 2015, the playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek centred the discrimination of migrants and the biased practices of “naturalisation” in Austria in Die Schutzbefohlenen (The Supplicants); the play, which premiered in Vienna on a stage flooded with water, condemned the ignorance of the “wards” towards the needs of the refugee protagonists. Other literary examples which assess fraught migrant histories include Warsan Shire’s poetry about the Somali Civil War or the Refugee Tales volumes (2016-2021), which present stories by refugees “as told to” and then written down by authors such as Ali Smith, Abdulrazak Gurnah or Bernardine Evaristo. Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary film Fuocoammare, or Fire at Sea (2016), dwells on Europe’s failure to respond to refugee needs by contrasting the plight of African migrants arriving at Lampedusa with the comforts of everyday life on the island.” Ai Weiwei’s self-portrait as Aylan Kurdi (2016), a two-year old Syrian boy of Kurdish background who had drowned and washed ashore on a

November 3, 2021, https://publications.iom.int/books/sentiment-towards-migration-during-covid-19- what-twitter-data-can-tell-us (13 March 2022).

5 Other recent literary and artistic examples of giving voice to refugee and migrant subjectivities include the documentary theatre projects Asyl-Monologe and Asyl-Dialoge, performed by actors of the Bühne für Menschenrechte [Stage of Human Rights] (cf. also the Mittelmeer-Monologe [Mediterranean Monologues] by the same director, Michael Ruf); the drama Mediterranea (directed and written by Jonas Carpignano, 2015) which focusses on migrants en route to Italy; the collective art exhibition Borderless at London’s Migration Museum; or The Penguin Book of Migration Literature, ed. Dohra Ahmad (London: Penguin, 2019).

Chapter 1 Introduction: Configurations of Migration — 3

Turkish beach near holiday resorts at Bodrum, triggered controversial discussions about the ethics of representation and the role of art in public and political imaginaries about migration and refuge.

These are just some of the many examples with which writers and artists across the globe have recently attempted to grapple with the effects of increased (enforced) migrational mobility. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Agnes Woolley conceive of such creative output as “artistic imaginaries - literary, theatrical and cinematic work by and about refugees,” but also as ways in which refugees and migrants “are figured and interact in various social spheres.”® Within the visual, performative and literary contexts described above, different systems of knowledge emerge as a result of varying medial strategies. Warsan Shire’s now acclaimed spoken-word poem “Home,” cited by numerous media outlets to critically draw attention to the growing representation of refugees as spectacle and threat and shared thousands of times on social media platforms such as Twitter or Tumblr,’ travelled along very different routes into the public (un)conscious than, for example, Ai Weiwei’s aforementioned controversial re-enactment of the icon-like photograph of Aylan Kurdi, originally taken by Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir, which he unveiled months after Kurdi’s death at the India Art Fair in Delhi in an exhibition of self-portraits.* As Anne- Marie Fortier has succinctly argued in her work on migration,

[a]ttending to representations is attending to the ways of seeing that various texts open up (or close down) and to the range of experiences, feelings and opinions that they simultaneously produce and occlude for those who are positioned variously migrant of nonmigrant subjects in a “here” or “there” world.”

By critically exploring these intricate dynamics of migration, artistic practices can point towards the necessity of remaining critically aware of the perspectives and figurations they allow for, but may also obstruct, when migration is imagined. The humanities have long been arguing that cultural productions - literary texts, visual and experimental art, theatre and film, digital and social media -

6 Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Agnes Woolley, “Introduction,” in Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, eds. Emma Cox et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 5.

7 Cf. Jennifer Leetsch, “Ocean Imaginaries in Warsan Shire’s Afro-Diasporic Poetry,” Journal of the African Literature Association 13.1 (2019): 80-95.

8 Cf. Mette Mortensen, “Constructing, Confirming, and Contesting Icons: The Alan Kurdi Imagery Appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo,” Media, Culture & Society 39.8 (2017): 1142-1161.

9 Anne-Marie Fortier, “Migration Studies,” in Handbook of Mobilities, ed. Peter Adey (London, New York: Routledge, 2014), 69.

affect our point of view towards migration.® Such forms of cultural expression are part and parcel of what constitutes the “migration imaginary,” the social image of migrants. As a paradigmatic precedent to Cox et al.’s notion of refugee imaginaries, Fortier asserts that migration imaginaries “shape and are shaped by regimes of practices [. . .] and inform our ways of seeing and understanding the world.”" Artistic representations of migration are closely connected to the social and the political sphere, simultaneously emanating from and feeding into expansive economies of affect:

The migration imaginary shapes understandings of national borders, culture, and identity of citizenship and our relationship to others. It is structured by an ambivalent relationship between desires and anxieties: desires of enrichment, integration, cosmopolitanism; anxieties of invasion, loss (e.g. of resources, of control), chaos (e.g. social tensions, lack of planning), which in turn produce desires to secure national borders, national identity, and cultural integrity.”

Migration imaginaries open up a space in which we can name and understand social being and social relations. In other words, “the repertory of symbolic representation and practices that constitute cultural life may exert material force in the everyday existence of a people.” An analysis of the figurations of migration and

10 See, among others, Jennifer Burns, Migrant Imaginaries: Figures in Italian Migration Literature (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013); Emma Cox, Theatre and Migration (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2014); T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Burcu Dogramaci and Birgit Mersmann, eds., Handbook of Art and Global Migration Theories, Practices, and Challenges (New York: De Gruyter, 2018); Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller, Migration and New Media (London: Routledge, 2012); or Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography and Migration (London, New York: Routledge, 2018). We also concur with Jeffrey et al., however, who caution that “artistic expressions have limits in overcoming unequal power dynamics, conveying experiences of migration and effecting long-term change in a context in which discourse on migration is dominated by short-term political decision-making, and punitive policies force migrants into precarious forms of existence,” while also advocating for the entanglements of the art and humanities with political engagement and civic responsibility in the face of oppression and racism. Cf. Laura Jeffery, Mariangela Palladino, Rebecca Rotter and Agnes Woolley, “Creative Engagement with Migration,” Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 10.1 (2019): 3-17.

11 Anne-Marie Fortier, “Migration Studies,” 69.

12 Anne-Marie Fortier, “The Migration Imaginary and the Politics of Personhood,” in Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Michi Messer, Renee Schroeder and Ruth Wodak (Vienna: Springer, 2012), 32.

13 Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York and London: NYU Press, 2008), 5.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Configurations of Migration — 5 their “specific configuration of knowledge, practice and power”"* from a comparative and transnational perspective,” as this volume offers, is therefore crucial for both assessing the cultural varieties of migration imaginaries and unravelling conflicting knowledges about migration.'° Anne Ring Petersen and Moritz Schramm have emphasised in a similar vein that art, culture, and aesthetics have an important role to play with respect to the intensified migration and globalisation that characterise the world today, because globalisation and migration present new and encompassing challenges to imagination and representation, as well as challenging the creation of images (in a broad sense), which is so essential to both individual and collective worldmaking.””

It is these challenges to and possibilities for worldmaking that our volume activates with its focus on both migration imaginaries and migration knowledges. It asks questions about how migration imaginaries fuse with and modify knowledges about migration and how such modes of interaction connect to the specific aesthetic qualities of different media. Configurations of Migration: Knowledges - Imaginaries — Media reveals the intricate relationship between creative engagements with and knowledges about migration, and probes the ways in which different medial practices are intertwined with different knowledge structures.

14 Claudia Castafieda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 4. Cited in Fortier, “Migration Studies,” 69.

15 As John McLeod has argued, concerning the potential of the transnational, we should attempt “to think [. . .] across and beyond the tidy, holistic entities of nations and cultures — transnationally, transculturally - if we hope to capture and critique the conditions of our contemporaneity.” John McLeod, “Sounding Silence: Transculturation and its Thresholds,” Transnational Literature 4.1 (2011): 1. This holds particularly true for the understanding of migrant imaginaries and a critical analysis of representations of migrants. Alicia Schmidt Camacho specifically probes the transnational regarding borders and migration, recognising that “[t]he transnational refers to the space in which distinct national localities are linked together by migratory flows, and the diaspora formed by this migration. The transnational may also stand in opposition to the bounded community of the nation-state. As migrants narrate a condition of alterity to, or exclusion from, the nation, they also enunciate a collective desire for a different order of space and belonging across the boundary.” Cf. Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 5.

16 We agree with Cox et al. who argue that “[g]iven that refugee-responsive artistic practice has increased significantly in recent decades, and even more markedly in recent years (to a large extent as a consequence of the high profile afforded to the ‘refugee crisis’, an act of critical reframing that denotes a crisis for the Global North), it has never been more urgent to ask what the relationship is between audiences and consumers, or whose interests are served by the audiencing of refugee arts.” Cox et al., “Introduction,” 5.

17 Anne Ring Petersen and Moritz Schramm, “(Post-)Migration in the Age of Globalisation: New Challenges to Imagination and Representation,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9.2 (2017): 1.

In this, this book pursues a two-pronged approach. First, given that imaginations of and aesthetic engagements with migration need to be connected to the epistemological dimensions of migration, the volume aims to analyse the relationship between imaginations and knowledges of migrants and migration systematically. Considering the creation, reception and circulation contexts of specific case studies, our contributors ask: How have fictional texts, performances, images, dance and autobiographical accounts of migration influenced a culturally and historically specific knowledge of migratory experiences? And how can scholars of literature, the visual arts, film, drama and media gain insights into the ways people imagine and acquire knowledge about migration in the process and as a result of reading, viewing and listening to cultural productions addressing issues of migration? In these questions and endeavours, we are motivated by scholarship on migration knowledge which foregrounds the ways in which “knowledge orients individual and collective action” and which understands migrant knowledges not only as knowledges about migration, i.e. “the making of state-centered depictions of migrants and migrations,” but also as knowledges produced by migrants themselves in “an actor-centered ‘history-from-below’ approach.”"® As the contributors to this volume show, art and literature - ranging from the nineteenth up to the twenty-first century - can bear witness to how the various “makings of” the migrant via classification and ordering processes of state, law and bureaucracy jostle against knowledges which insistently foreground migratory subjectivity, personhood and creativity.

Second, the volume examines the connections between different medial practices of imagining migration to appraise how aesthetic modes of configuring spatial, experiential and structural aspects of migration correspond to migration knowledges in specific sociocultural contexts. Which insights can we gain, and how do these insights differ from one another, when migration is imagined on stage, screen, canvas, or paper? Through touching, looking, listening, dancing? And what difference in terms of perception and response does it make if such cultural productions are either labelled as factual or fictional accounts, as documentary or feature film, (post)migrant or experimental theatre, “based on a true

18 Andrea Westermann and Onur Erdur, “Introduction: Migrant Knowledge: Studying the Epistemic Dynamics That Govern the Thinking in and around Migration, Exile, and Displacement,” Histories of Migrant Knowledge: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 15 (2020): 6-7. Cf. also Katherine Braun et al., eds. Wissensproduktionen der Migration. Special Issue of movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies 4.1. Bielefeld: transcript, 2018.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Configurations of Migration — 7 story” or “a novel”?'? Such an intermedial and comparative approach that consciously spans disciplines and media within the arts and humanities provides a crucial contribution to the field of migration and mobility studies which has, until now, been dominated by research that focusses on representations of migration unfolding in one specific medium only.”° Building on such studies, this volume reflects the entanglements of representation and migration knowledges on the one hand and reviews the premises of representation by considering imagination as the precursor to, foundation of, and immediate reaction to any mode of representation, and thus knowledge, on the other hand.

Structure and Contributors

This edited volume originates in a conference which had originally been planned for March 2020 but had to be postponed due to the spread of the corona virus and what would turn into the global COVID-19 pandemic. Contributors came together virtually in February 2021 to discuss the complexities of imagining and knowing migration across different media. This volume expands the discussions of the online workshops and draws in more wide-ranging material, stories, images and interventions. As such, Configurations of Migration: Knowledges — Imaginaries - Media brings together a range of scholars, scholar-activists and scholar-artists to investigate the specific properties, possibilities and limitations of the arts and different media to illuminate how cultural and artistic imagination might reflect, affect and produce knowledges in the context of migration. Focusing on the interplay between knowledge and imagination, and by attending to this interplay from the perspectives of literature, film, documentary, theatre, performance, visual arts and media studies, our contributors pay particular attention to the different nexuses inherent to gender, class, race, economy, politics, memory, urbanity and material culture.

The volume explores how knowledge is created, mediated and modified in film and the visual arts in section A, in fictional and autobiographical writing in section B, and on stages and in performance in section C. In following this tri-partite

19 For the concept of a “true-story pact” in life writing concerned with migration, see Miriam Wallraven’s chapter in this volume.

20 See for example Krista Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern and Ian Alan Paul, eds., Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020); Catherine Gomes, Siloed Diversity: Transnational Migration, Digital Media and Social Networks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2018) or Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography and Migration (London, New York: Routledge, 2018).

structure, the volume explores how aesthetic and imaginative modes of configuring spatial, experiential, embodied and (infra)structural aspects of migration correspond to migration knowledges in specific sociocultural, material contexts. In this respect, we aspire to capture how various forms of knowledge (popular, scientific, empirical, intuitive etc.) about migration are linked to specific cultural forms of representation. In addition, we investigate the connecting points and different strands between present-day and historical knowledge about and reconfigurations of migration. The geographical focus of the volume centres predominantly on European and English-language contexts, but what always accompanies, and indeed reconfigures, such foci are circum-European, Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean contexts that rattle notions of “Fortress Europe” so prevalent in recent discussions about migrant “crises” and that shed light on the deep transnational ties of European histories of migration.

The volume opens with an interview with Dutch Surinamese artist Charl Landvreugd whose creative, theoretical and curatorial practices address claims of belonging and of civic participation as an undisputable human right for migratory communities. Focusing on a specific art installation, Movt. Nr. 10: Ososma, as well as his work as head of research and curatorial practice at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Landvreugd discusses the different layers and in-between spaces of imagining and knowing migration within and beyond art and museum spaces. This opening interview, which is an expansion of Landvreugd’s artist intervention at the conference on which this volume is based, leads us from a specific local museum space to the larger theoretical questions discussed throughout our volume.

Section A continues our engagement with Visualizing Migration with a chapter on “Migrating Reflections’ on Misafir (2017)” by media and film scholar Hayriye Kapusuz who analyses the role cinema plays in construing migration imaginaries. Focusing in particular on the representation of the Syrian war in Turkish cinema, she foregrounds visual negotiations of migrant and refugee lives. Examining specific scenes and film stills vis-a-vis semiotic analysis, Kapusuz shows how Misafir (The Guest: Aleppo to Istanbul, dir. Andaç Haznedaroğlu, 2017) makes it possible to understand visual mediation as a form of knowledge production that goes beyond hegemonic migrant knowledges.

In his chapter titled “Global Warming and Climate Refugees: Facts, ‘Alternative Facts,’ and State of Exception,” scholar and activist Mahmoud Arghavan poses an intervention in current discourses about how to imagine and know (about) contemporary migration, by discussing the deeply political and politicised interlinkages of global warming and climate refugees. Focusing on how rightwing, nationalist media have propagated misinformation about climate change and biased images of refugees and migrants, he argues that it is necessary to view

Chapter 1 Introduction: Configurations of Migration — 9 global migration and “refugee crises” through an ecocritical lens to reveal different regimes of truth about migration from the Global South.

Section A closes with a reflective essay by anthropologist and documentary film maker Léa Coffineau, which takes a fresh look at the seminal work the Dutch cultural theorist and video artist Mieke Bal has contributed to the field of migration studies, outlining the relevance of (audio)visual art in cultural attitudes towards migration and how migration transgresses the boundaries between cultures. In a subsequent interview with Mieke Bal, Coffineau activates the importance Bal’s thinking has had for imagining and knowing migratory identities — and for being able to make different societies imaginable.

Section B on Writing Migration begins with an exploration of historical migration movements and their literary refractions. In her chapter “The most outcast réfugié? Knowing Migration in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s The Réfugié (1824)” Frederike Middelhoff discusses the ways in which de la Motte Fouqué’s three-volume novel The Réfugié intertwines different histories and experiences of migration related to German-speaking contexts, ranging from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. As Middelhoff shows, de la Motte Fouqué, himself descended from a long line of French religious refugees, mediates knowledges about the disintegration of Huguenot diasporas in Germany and empathetically explores the challenges of political exile around 1800.

Continuing with unexpected migration routes, the next chapter by Kai Wiegandt, titled “Western Migrants in Hong Kong: Neo-Imperial Gothic and the Literary Imagination of Reverse Domination,” argues that recent decades have seen the emergence of narratives that feature the migration of professionals from the Global North to new economic centres in the Global South, where they occupy subservient, quasi-colonised positions. By discussing Paul Theroux’s novel Kowloon Tong (1997), Wiegandt reads narratives of reverse domination as symptoms of white anxiety of losing economic, political and cultural influence to regions perceived as threats to global dominance, thus revealing slant knowledges of migration in-between Global “North” and “South.”

In her chapter on “Knowledges and Morals: Narrating Consequences of Colonial Migration in Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978),” Katrin Dennerlein discusses how Timm’s novel initiated a reflection on German colonial history, several decades before the German government spoke of “responsibility” in connection with the genocide of the indigenous population in the former colony of “Deutsch-Stidwestafrika” (German Southwest Africa). In a close reading of Morenga, commonly understood as the first German-language postcolonial novel, and its protagonist’s migrational experiences, Dennerlein traces the connections of morality, colonial and local knowledge, and their mediation through constellations of space and mobility.

Miriam Wallraven, in her chapter “No narrative to make sense of what had happened’: The Genres of Narrating Migration during the Yugoslav Wars in English-Speaking Literature,” analyses two autobiographies and a novel which pivot on migration as a consequence of the Yugoslav Wars, Trebin¢evic’s The Bosnia List (2014), Reid and Schofield’s Goodbye Sarajevo (2011), as well as Novi¢’s Girl at War (2015). Focusing on migration to English-speaking countries and creating contact zones between the Balkans and Anglophone readers, the texts, even though generically different, as Wallraven shows, insistently emphasise that knowing about migration is the prerequisite for empathy.

Closing out the section on Writing Migration is a short story by the author Olumide Popoola, titled “You Can’t Breathe Water.” Posed as a response to previous chapters, this story-essay questions the fictional possibilities of representing the experiences of migration. Countering the ubiquitous medial images of refugees trying to cross the (Mediterranean) sea, the text re-creates, holds and refracts the voices of drowning refugees to not only thematise trauma’s silences, but also to explore the bounds and possibilities of literary strategies to represent migration. Like the interview with Charl Landvreugd, and the following contribution by Ananya Kabir, this story reflects the conference on which this book is based. Popoola, a London-based Nigerian-German writer, read from her novel When We Speak of Nothing (2017), the short story collection breach (2016) and this short piece, which we are grateful to be reprinting here, and the discussion with the author was vital in shaping our and our contributors’ understanding of the categories of home, displacement and belonging.

The last section, Section C on Performing Migration, opens with a chapter by Ananya Jahanara Kabir on “Archive-Repertoires of Memory: Knowing Migration through Shailesh Bahoran’s Dance.” In it, Kabir interweaves intricate and wide-reaching migration histories by paying close attention to dance, movement and bodies. Deep in conversation with dancer Shailesh Bahoran’s ceuvre and other archives, she argues for an (un)making of migration through dance, through which may be linked the African and Indian diasporas that empire and capitalism triggered in waves - the diasporas from the African continent instigated by slavery, and the subsequent diasporas from the Indian subcontinent instigated by indentured labour.

Continuing this focus on performance art in her chapter on “Performing Migration: Zelimir Zilnik and Medial (Self-)Representations of ‘Guest Workers’ in the 1970s,” Burcu Dogramaci focuses on the artistic representation of Turkish labour migration to Germany in the late twentieth century. Analysing visual art works by Zelimir Zilnik and Nil Yalter, the chapter discusses which opportunities for personal empowerment docu-artistic projects provided for migrants. She shows how the relationship between medial recording and performance makes it possible to

Chapter 1 Introduction: Configurations of Migration — 11 render experiences of migration as a performative act — with the participation of actors and audiences who produce synchronous migratory knowledges.

Section C closes with a chapter by Jennifer Leetsch on a recent Black British theatre performance, titled “Walking the Land: Theatre, Landscape and Britain’s Migratory Past in Black Men Walking.” Through articulating feelings of attachment to local landscapes, the play, as Leetsch argues, foregrounds how landscapes, both (re-)imagined and actual ones, are capable of resurrecting histories of people, places, and events - thus conveying deeply personal, embodied migratory knowledges to audiences across the UK and beyond.

By having collated these contributions in our three sections on visualizing, writing and performing migration, Configurations of Migration: Knowledges — Imaginaries — Media strives to act as a repertoire for thinking more insistently about a world which increasingly forces people to leave their homes for political, economic and ecological reasons, and, to return to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiye, for encouraging us “to critically reflect on ‘who we are’ and ‘who we are to one another’ across a range of fields of thought, practice and (in)action.”” Our authors’ contributions suggest a wide variety of possible avenues of thinking about migration in historical and contemporary contexts — from academic, activist or artistic perspectives and places of entanglement. Exploring how the arts contribute to our thinking about migration by rendering visible unnoticed (or disregarded) dimensions of displacement, exile and making home in unhomely spaces, or by challenging and countering biased narratives of migration, the chapters of this book offer important perspectives on the complex dynamics of migration imaginaries past and present. Ultimately, this volume hopes to show that by crossing between disciplines within the humanities, in relation to and in conversation with migration studies, new spaces of creative, theoretical and conceptual engagement and collaborative thinking-together can be opened up once we try to know and imagine migration differently.

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