Guest Editor’s Note

How do writers portray experiences related to migration, immigration, and movement? What reasons do their works offer for why people migrate, immigrate, or move from place to place? What particular rewards and challenges do writers address when dealing with geographical movements of people? What concepts of “home” and “space” do the processes of migration or immigration evoke? What roles do creative venues play in depicting historical migrations and immigrations? In what ways do various forms of cultural creations intersect with social, political, and economic occurrences in depicting people who migrate, immigrate, or move? What theoretical frameworks and methodologies help to understand creative portrayals of such movements? What stereotypical images have negatively impacted attitudes toward people who are viewed as nomadic or constantly on the move? How do writers combat those stereotypes and attitudes?

These were some questions I posed to the three speakers for the Forum at the 2012 conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) and in the call for submissions for this special issue of Pacific Coast Philology (PCP). I am pleased to present the resultant essays here because they offer perspectives on migration, immigration, and movement from six of the seven continents. (Unfortunately, the volume contains no articles on Antarctica. Perhaps Antarctica deserves its own volume anyway!) The responses to my questions in the various essays reveal the myriad ways in which writers who have immigrated, migrated, and moved deal in praxis with concepts that we scholars have identified as cosmopolitanism, diaspora, indigenism, hybridity, globalization, nativism, nationhood, nomadism, and postcolonialism.

The Forum contributions begin with Weihsin Gui’s essay “The Migrant Longing for Form: Articulating Aesthetics with Migration, Immigration, and Movement.” Arguing for a persistence of aesthetics connected with migration, Gui follows the movement of aesthetics through a host of critical texts in order to come to a more complex and nuanced understanding of aesthetics that is not divorced from the political and social realms. Gui first shows how studies on the national longing for form, about which Timothy Brennan speaks in his 1990 essay with that title, have moved from talking about nation building and more into analyzing the constructs that mediate between nations and “others,” including migrants, exiles, immigrants, or even other sovereign states. In light of this shift, Gui proposes looking at how the longing for form is in itself migrant. Aesthetic representation has migrated from its original study of art and beauty to an inquiry into the varying characteristics that art and beauty can assume. Aesthetic experience has moved from being perceived as elitist observation for pleasure into what Martin Jay sees as play, not only as a pleasurable distraction, but as a tactic or strategy that can inspire and catalyze transformation in the world. For scholars of postcolonial literature, aesthetics offers a way to envision alternative social and political relations; or, as Sue-Im Lee sees in Asian American literature, a way to maneuver literary conventions, genres, forms, and strategies. Still further, scholars have put forward the notion of a “migratory aesthetics,” in which the viewer or reader of art does not just stand by as disinterested observer, but rather gets drawn into the aesthetic experience. Gui uses a passage from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia to highlight a migrant restlessness longing for form. In Adorno’s ruminations on the difficulty of writing and then of seeing one’s writing in finished form, Gui sees a “push and pull between thought and sense,” whereby eternal motion makes writing into art. In talking specifically about the longing for form in postcolonial literary studies, Gui cites studies by Elleke Boehmer and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, both of whom question the necessity of defining what aesthetics is and advocate instead for seeing what aesthetics can do. For Spivak, aesthetics can train the imagination to learn to play; again, as with Martin Jay, this is not a play based purely on pleasure, but rather a force that can set action into motion, engage the viewer and reader, and help develop new strategies and alternatives to the standard concepts of nation and aesthetics. This complex understanding of aesthetics, according to Gui, has the potential to tie...