Worlds Apart and Worlds Together: Migration, Imagination and Identity in 21st Century Fiction

Dear Colleagues,

The politics of memory, language and identity and its relation to migration occupies the imagination of many contemporary philosophers, writers and educators. In this Special Issue, we explore the social and literary roles of imagination as it unravels the ideological and philosophical complexities of migration and its impact on identity formation. This interdisciplinary issue will provide an in-depth study of literary representations of transcultural identities of migrants in 21st century fiction. We will also examine the role of exiled writers/translators as ambassadors and agents; in addition, we will reveal the impact of imagination on our models of culture, interpretation and evaluation.

The constant reconfiguring of the relationships between the self and the other has always been at the core of identity formation and renewal, which mass migration arguably makes more intensive, dynamic and unpredictable. As the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, suggests, the architectonics of being has three fundamental elements, around which all values of actual life and culture are arranged: “I, the other, and I-for-the other.” He affirms that life that ignores these relationships falls away from responsibility or answerability and cannot have a philosophy. Emphasizing the importance of the transition from abstract models to the empirical world of action, Bakhtin underscores singularity and uniqueness of each particular action, performed answerably or responsibly by a particular individual in a particular time and a particular place. Each of these actions either explicitly or implicitly exemplifies interaction, which is essential for the identity formation and renewal that is for bringing an individual to ‘Being’ in a responsible and answerable way. We suggest that migration intensifies this interaction and makes defining identity a particularly challenging task. Instead, migration allows one to view identity, which is fueled to a large extent by the “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg, 2009), as ‘a work in progress,’ a creation ‘on the move’ and in need of continuous renewal. This renewal is shaped by both the apparent geographical, cultural and economic flexibility, which globalization brings, and the reaction to it: the growing sense and even fear of insecurity.

We share Robin Van Den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen’s view (2017) that postmodern discourses have lost their critical value when it comes to understanding contemporary arts, culture, aesthetics and politics. Thus, through the lenses of an in-depth exploration of intercultural and transcultural identities, our goals are to attempt to (1) map dominant cultural developments by looking at some of the representative works that deal with migration; (2) contribute to the development of an adequate language to discuss literary representations of migration and identity as ways of feeling, doing and thinking; and (3) relate these concepts, perceptions and affects to recent global political developments/reconfigurations.

It is our hope that this volume will help students, researchers and practitioners to come to an understanding of our current historical moment. In the preface to the last edition of Orientalism (2003), Edward Said wrote that the great danger to the world, and particularly the Middle East, was the reduction of people to single identities. He saw the duty of the scholar to fight this and reminded readers that we are all interconnected, that there is no such thing as one identity, that everybody has several identities, and that there is an interconnectedness of the world. Essays that will be included in our volume can play their part in achieving Said’s aim.

Furthermore, this issue will be of interest to a broad audience of students and researchers who are eager to come to terms with the gap between what we thought we knew about migration and identity and the things we experience in our daily lives. It will unravel social fragmentation, a quest for networking and cooperation, and will uncover the power of imagination in our perceptions and constructions of reality. This project will ultimately become another step in fostering cross-cultural understanding and acceptance while contributing to developing respect for various members of the world’s population, which is indispensable for democratic citizenship.

Along with Homi K. Bhabha (2018), David Damrosch (2019, 2023) and Galin Tihanov (2021), we see the art of global diaspora as the art of the future, a projected future of multicultural societies, well-traversed territories and translated traditions.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome.

We are looking forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Nataly Tcherepashenets
Guest Editor

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• migration
• imagination
• identity
• memory
• translation