Figurations of the Migrant: Introduction

Abstract

The chapters in this section pose two complementary questions: How are migrants represented in literature and culture? And how do migrants themselves transform conventional forms of figuration by representing their own experiences? In other words, the chapters consider the migrant both as the object of figuration and as its agent. These questions beg a third: Who is considered a migrant, and how does that identity, born of mobility, intersect with, or challenge, other identities related to nation, class, ethnicity, or culture? The chapters share a conviction that being a migrant has more to do with being figured or imagined as one through the conventional narratives of transit, than it does with any essential quality. As Thomas Nail has written, “The figure of the migrant… is like a social persona that bears many masks (the nomad, barbarian, etc.), depending on the relative social conditions of expulsion… a figure is a social vector or tendency. Insofar as specific individuals take up a trajectory, they are figured by it. But it is also possible for individuals to leave this vector and take up a different social position, since it does not define their essence” (Nail 2015, 16). A wealth of such personas has been produced by the long history of human mobility, many of which have exerted an outsized influence over the cultural imagination, including the exile, the immigrant, the emigrant, the vagrant, and the nomad. These individual identities share the cultural stage with equally resonant figures of human mobility in aggregate, such as the wave, the horde, the caravan, and the invasion. Any particular figuration of the migrant thus asks us to understand the relationship between the part and the whole, the individual and group. But they also require that we consider the relationship between these preexisting figures and the lives of actual people. As Edward Said famously wrote, “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” (Said 1984).