New Voices of Muslim North-African Migrants in Europe captures the experience in writing of a fast growing number of individuals belonging to migrant communities in Europe. The book follows attempts to transform postcolonial literary studies into a comparative, translingual, and supranational project. Cristián H. Ricci frames Moroccan literature written in European languages within the ampler context of borderland studies. The author addresses the realm of a literature that has been practically absent from the field of postcolonial literary studies (i.e. Neerlandophone or Gay Muslim literature). The book also converses with other minor literatures and theories from Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Asians and Latino/as in the Americas that combine histories of colonization, labor migration, and enforced exile.

This volume considers the Arabic and African diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking chapters extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.

The highly-charged debate over Morocco’s diasporic minorities in Europe has led to a growing interest in the literary production of these ‘new’ Europeans. This comparative study is the first to discuss together a body of texts, including contemporary Judeo-Moroccan literature, written in French, Spanish, Catalan and Dutch, which have never been studied as a group. Faced with such a variegated field of literary production, the aim of this book is not to tie individual works of literature to their ‘national’ place of origin, but to re-conceptualize the idea of a ‘Moroccan’ literature with regard to the transnational and multilingual experiences from which it arises. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical insights, from Fatima Mernissi’s concept of female subalternity to Abdelmalek Sayad’s principle of the immigrants’ ‘absent’ history, this book allows for the re-evaluation of the relationship between migration and postcolonial literary studies. A careful analysis of the literary techniques used in the texts under scrutiny here highlights their poetic qualities, without bypassing their political relevance with regard to the intercultural relations between Morocco and Europe as they are presently unfolding across the Mediterranean, and beyond.

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts analyzes the impact migrations, both internal and external, have on Europe’s literary and visual representations in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The volume aims to subvert a centripetal reading of European cultural production by including peripheral thinkers, writers, and visual artists operating in transcultural contexts. The essays highlight and investigate the fertile artistic discourses generated in the spatial peripheries outside of Europe or its inner peripheries. The volume addresses the need for geocritical readings that overcome the engrained dichotomy of centers-peripheries. By doing so, the book brings a more nuanced approach to national literatures and proposes the idea of “contact zones of imaginative interaction”.

Transforming Family examines a selection of novels penned by francophone authors who imagine familial aspiration that is decolonial and queer, questioning how family relates to race, gender, class, embodiment, and intersectionality.

Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones offers fertile reflection on the dynamics of linguistic diversity and multifaceted literary translation flows taking place across the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical perspectives and on a historically diverse body of case studies, the volume’s sixteen chapters explore the key role of translation in shaping interliterary relations and cultural identities within Iberia. Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone metaphor is used as an overarching concept to approach Iberia as a translation(al) space where languages and cultural systems (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish) set up relationships either of conflict, coercion, and resistance or of collaboration, hospitality, and solidarity. In bringing together a variety of essays by multilingual scholars whose conceptual and empirical research places itself at the intersection of translation and literary Iberian studies, the book opens up a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry: Iberian translation studies. This allows for a renewed study of canonical authors such as Joan Maragall, Fernando Pessoa, Camilo José Cela, and Bernardo Atxaga, and calls attention to emerging bilingual contemporary voices. In addition to addressing understudied genres (the entremez and the picaresque novel) and the phenomena of self-translation, indirect translation, and collaborative translation, the book provides fresh insights into Iberian cultural agents, mediators, and institutions.