When the Migrant’s Perspective Takes Center Stage

Even as border crises have intensified and travel bans have proliferated around the world during the early 2020s, impressive new scholarship on the literature of migration has been opening prospects for new cosmopolitanisms. Recent essays by Nasia Anam, Marissia Fragkou, and Dominic Thomas all stress the importance of telling migration stories from the perspective of the migrants themselves. They each trace the path of a different diaspora (Muslim, Balkan, and African) and in so doing demonstrate how an ethnocentric and closed model of nationhood gives way to a more multidirectional, multicultural, and multilingual sensibility when the migrant’s perspective takes center stage.

“The Migrant as Colonist: Dystopia and Apocalypse in the Literature of Mass Migration,” Anam’s exploration of the tropes of apocalypse and utopia, is the most comprehensive of these three approaches to the migrant’s story. ¹ Anam places recent British and French novels envisioning Muslim immigrants in relation to European colonialism, describing the latter as its own form of utopian migration. As she demonstrates in her readings of the notorious French author Michel Houellebecq and the more temperate Franco-Algerian Boualem Sansal, when that out-migration reverses and the formerly colonized subjects appear in Europe, apocalyptic fears of a Muslim planet arise. Only when the migrant’s perspective is adopted, as in the fiction of Nadeem Aslam and Mohsin Hamid, does the apocalyptic sensibility loosen its hold and allow for the emergence of the global migrant as a world citizen.

Meanwhile, in “Strange Homelands: Encountering the Migrant on the Contemporary Greek Stage,” Fragkou gives an account of contemporary Greek docudrama that turns its attention to the migrant’s voice and language.² She explains how recent works by Laertis Vasiliou, Thanasis Papathanasiou and Michalis Reppas, and Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris undercut nationalist assumptions of Greek standardization and superiority by incorporating Albanian, Bulgarian, and Georgian words, bodies, and motifs. The heteroglossic results make visible the presence of a multilingual population; in so doing, they disrupt the efforts at national cleansing associated with the Golden Dawn and other right-wing nationalisms.

Like Fragkou, Thomas, in “The Aesthetics of Migration, Relationality, and the Sentimography of Globality,” considers appeals to empathy or compassion for the migrant’s suffering a risky gesture.³ Rejecting the asymmetrical power relations of a focus on suffering in favor of a more affectively varied and multidirectional treatment of disruptions and fragments, Thomas interprets works by Ai Weiwei, Abdourahman Waberi, ZaLab documentaries, and Patrick Chamoiseau. Thomas discovers there a new map of feelings—a “sentimography”—that replaces an inward-looking and narcissistic nationalism with plural, cosmopolitan interconnections.

All three of these arguments envision the withering away of oppositions between migrant and nation. All anticipate hopefully a new cosmopolitan and postnational condition emerging, even as they document the restrictions imposed by national and nationalist security programs. Interestingly, none of these hopeful visions goes very deeply into the question of how different diasporic or migrant groups relate to one another—how their paths cross, how their interests converge and diverge, how new relations form and fall away during periods of great mobility. One wonders, then, what narratives premised on the fact of cosmopolitanism (rather than aspiring toward it) might look like. Similarly, one might also be led to ask how the economic and ecological inequalities that in part underlie migration would be rendered if or when questions of cultural superiority and inferiority are finally put away. How does the inclusivity of an ethic of world citizenship account for uneven development and its long-standing effects? These, at least, are some of the questions provoked by these three subtle and comprehensive contributions to scholarship on the vital topic of migration literature.