Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing examines contemporary cultural representations of transforming identities in the era of increasing global mobility. It pays particular attention to the ways in which cultural encounters are experienced affectively and discursively in migrant literature. Divided into three parts that deal with refugee writing and displacement, migration and memory, and new European identities, the volume develops current methodologies and shows how postcolonial studies can be applied to the study of cultural encounters. Writers studied include Simão Kikamba, Ishmael Beah, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Abu-Jaber, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Caryl Phillips, Jamal Mahjoub, and Monica Ali, and several refugee writers.

This edited book offers a collection of fresh and critical essays that explore the representation of the migrant subject in modern and contemporary Arabic literature and discuss its role in shaping new forms of transcultural and transnational identities. The selection of essays in this volume offers a set of new insights on a cluster of tropes: self-discovery, alienation, nostalgia, transmission and translation of knowledge, sense of exile, reconfiguration of the relationship with the past and the identity, and the building of transnational identity. A coherent yet multi-faceted narrative of micro-stories and of transcultural and transnational Arab identities will emerge from the essays: the volume aims at reversing the traditional perspective according to which a migrant subject is a non-political actor. In contrast to many books about migration and literature, this one explores how the migrant subject becomes a specific literary trope, a catalyst of modern alienation, displacement, and uncertain identity, suggesting new forms of subjectification. Multiple representations of the migrant subject inform and perform the possibility of new post- national and transcultural individual and group identities and actively contribute to rewriting and decolonizing history.

This book presents diverse, composite, non-exclusive and non-hierarchical perspectives on displacement of people as represented in literature. It examines the experiences of migration as a result of wars, natural disasters, religious strife, loss of livelihoods and shifts in local and global economies and the vulnerabilities they expose. Bringing together scholarly insights into literature about displacement and migration from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the book interrogates the development frames of Western modernity and situates displacement within the discourse of disenfranchisement of citizens by nation-states. It explores the experiences, memories and expressions of displacement in literature and how literary works critique ethical and moral responsibilities of states and communities that often do not account for the loss which displacement causes to the health, education, career, or relationships of displaced people. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, philosophy, migration and diaspora studies, development studies, African studies and Asian studies.

In Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures, Anna-Leena Toivanen explores the representations and relationship of mobilities and cosmopolitanisms in Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the 1990s to the 2010s. Representations of mobility practices are discussed against three categories of cosmopolitanism reflecting the privileged, pragmatic, and critical aspects of the concept. The main scientific contribution of Toivanen’s book is its attempt to enhance dialogue between postcolonial literary studies and mobilities research. The book criticises reductive understandings of ‘mobility’ as a synonym for migration, and problematises frequently made links between mobility and cosmopolitanism. Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms adopts a comparative approach to Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literatures, often discussed separately despite their common themes and parallel paths.

How does climate change intensify social cleavages in new configurations of knowledge and power? How does development respond to its own contradictions in such scenarios? How do extreme weather events inform population movement and challenge existing definitions of borders and citizenship? Who pays the heaviest price? Living with the Weather addresses these pressing questions by highlighting and exploring the social, economic, political, and spatial dimensions of climate disaster in South Asia. Through empirical research, reporting and documentation of the climate crisis in the countries of South Asia, along with a deep dive into the Indian Sundarbans, the book calls attention to the intermeshed predicaments the people of the subcontinent face while bearing the brunt of climate change In doing so, it seeks to enrich our understanding of how climate change transforms everyday life. It makes visible the effects of natural events, the outcomes of political decisions, how disaster and rehabilitation are interpreted by states, how resistances are staged in the form of mobility, and how dispossession and despair are embodied and articulated.

This book is concerned with food autobiographies written by men from the 1980s to the present. It concentrates on how food has transformed autobiographical narratives and how these define the ways men eat and cook nowadays. After presenting a historical overview of the place of food within men ́s autobiography, this volume analyzes the reasons for our present interest in food and the proliferation of life narratives focused on cooking. Then it centers around the identities that male chefs are taking on in the writing of their lives and the generic models they use: the heroic, the criminal and the hunting autobiographical scripts. This study gives evidence that autobiographies are crucial in the redefinition of the new masculinities emerging in the kitchen. It will appeal to readers interested in Food Studies, Autobiographical Studies, Men's Studies and American Literature and Culture.