1 Introduction

When you enter the permanent exhibition of the Austrian literary museum, which opened its doors to the public in 2015, you will be told the story that Austrian literature has always been multicultural and multilingual, from its very beginning in the Habsburg Empire to the present day. The Austrians are not the only ones who have rewritten their national literary history in this way. There has been a strong tendency in the twenty-first century to rewrite literary histories as having always been global (Richter, 2017; Suleiman & McDonald, 2010). Similar tendencies exist in art and musical history. While the individual approaches differ, their joint aim is to rewrite national histories from the margins and to open them to global links that remain invisible in a nationalised understanding of history. I share this general aim, although I do not agree with the methodology of replacing the long history of the national, invented in the nineteenth century, with the long history of the global, multicultural and multilingual. I argue that we need to tell this story as a narrative of constant change in order not to overlook exclusion, discrimination and racism. To come back to my example: Austrian literature was indeed multicultural and multilingual at the turn of the twentieth century. This tradition was taken up again after the end of the national socialist regime and had an impact at least up until the end of the 1950s. However, at this time, the literary actors began to establish an Austrian literary field that led to the exclusion of immigrants and their descendants between the 1960s and the 1980s. Immigrants have fought to overcome this exclusion since the 1990s. Selected literary actors who opened their literary journals and publishing houses to immigrants have supported them in this struggle.

This contribution intends to present the theoretical and methodological approach I have developed to write what I call post-migrant literary history. I use the term post-migrant in the sense in which it has been used in sociological and ethnographic studies in Germany over the last decade (Bojadžijev & Römhild, 2014). This means that I am not interested in analysing migrants but in understanding societal change through migration. I discuss migrants as part of the society in which they live and consider their exclusion as well as their attempts to overcome it. Literary fields are an interesting case study through which to observe such a change, as immigrants and their descendants have found recognition in these fields since the 1980s (Sievers & Vlasta, 2018a), much earlier than in other fields, such as politics. This change had an impact far beyond the field itself since immigrants, through their recognition in this field, had the opportunity of raising their voice in the public debate about immigration. However, little is known about how these fields changed. My approach makes this change visible. As such it is not only of interest to literary studies but may also serve as a basis for similar historical analysis in other fields, including above and beyond the arts.

My theoretical and methodological approach draws on Bourdieu’s literary field theory. Bourdieu locates authors and their works in the structures of their recognition, which he calls literary fields. This method enables him to explain a central process of change in French society and literary history in the nineteenth century. In his monograph, The rules of art (1996), he discusses how French authors from Baudelaire to Zola managed to free themselves from the strong economic and political pressures on literature. This process allowed them to establish themselves as intellectuals and thereby gain access to the discussion of the societal self-understanding which, until that time, was negotiated mainly between economic, political and religious actors (Bourdieu, 1996). Bourdieu’s work thus allows us to understand authors and their works as part of a societal process of change. In this respect, it is an ideal point of departure enabling us to grasp how literary fields have changed in response to immigration. However, Bourdieu regards immigration as marginal for literary developments. He does not regard immigrants as being able to change the field. The same holds true for more-recent literary studies that draw on his approach. It is therefore necessary to develop a new approach that allows the application of Bourdieu’s ideas to processes of change initiated by immigrants. This mainly implies questioning the “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) of research on literary fields.Footnote 1

After discussing the marginalisation of immigration in literary field research from Bourdieu to the present day, I focus on nationalisation in literary fields and on the boundaries that were drawn towards immigrants and their descendants in this process. Subsequently, I explain the determinants of a post-migrant literary history.

2 The Marginalisation of Immigration in Literary Field Research

Bourdieu did not explicitly comment on immigration until the 1990s but then named it as one of the pressing problems of the present (Horvath, 2017; Kastner, 2002). This becomes clear from his text “The abdication of the state”, in which he argues that “the opposition between ‘natives’ and ‘immigrants’ […] has supplanted the once salient opposition between dominants and dominated” (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 187). Long before this observation, Bourdieu used the term “racism”, which authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre had introduced into the French debate to discuss the discrimination of immigrants. Bourdieu, however, uses the term to describe the attitude of the dominant towards the dominated. In his text, “The racism of ‘intelligence’” which goes back to a lecture held in 1978, he defines the “racism of intelligence” as “what causes the dominant class to feel justified in being dominant: they feel themselves to be essentially superior” (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 177). This feeling conceals inequality. Those who see themselves as superior beings no longer have to justify their own domination.

For the literary and artistic fields, however, Bourdieu explicitly indicated that racism – i.e. the exclusion of those regarded as ethnic others – can be considered negligible:

[R]acial discrimination is generally less strong in the intellectual and artistic field than in other fields; and in any case, because of the significance of style and lifestyle in the personage of the writer or artist, it is undoubtedly not as strong as purely social discrimination (against provincials especially) – witness the innumerable manifestations of class contempt in polemics. (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 227)

Bourdieu may be right that the explicit discrimination and exclusion of those regarded as ethnic others is rare in literary fields today. Yet it is often exercised unconsciously, because it is taken for granted in literary fields that are nationally organised. In other words, nationalisation has been central to the concealment of ethnic exclusion in literature.

Bourdieu overlooks this concealment process in his analyses, which is why he takes it for granted that immigrants and their descendants had only a supporting function in the transformation of the French literary field in the nineteenth century. He conceded them no potential to succeed as authors because of their foreign origin (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 57). In his opinion, they lack a sense of placement. They know too little about the history and circumstances of the field to recognise the possibilities for new aesthetic positions. For this reason, they usually join existing positions and often do so at a time when these are already on the decline (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 262). Bourdieu thus did not believe that immigrants could change literary fields and thereby increase their overall influence on societal debates.

That Bourdieu gave immigrants a marginal role in literary fields may be due to immigration being considered a twentieth-century topic in literary studies. Moreover, French literary research was particularly late in taking up this topic. While France has a long history of immigration and a long history of immigrating authors, it was not until the 1990s that French literary studies began to perceive immigrants as part of French literature (Reeck, 2018). Research on this question had thus just begun when Bourdieu published The rules of art in the original French in 1992.

However, it is not only Bourdieu who is unaware of the discrimination against immigrants and their descendants in nationally organised literary fields. This blind spot in his works continues to shape literary field research today. This does not mean that this research has not dealt with globalisation. The works of Pascale Casanova (2004) and Gisèle Sapiro (2010) clearly illustrate a global turn in literary field research. However, they mainly view globalisation as a process that takes place between nations. Migration, on the other hand, as a type of globalisation that takes place not only between but also within nations and literatures, is largely ignored (Sievers, 2020). A recent example of this blind spot is a 2015 special issue of the journal Cultural Sociology, which seeks to rethink literature from the margins after the end of the nation-state but does so without any reference to the issue of migration (Franssen & Kuipers, 2015). Similarly, Heribert Tommek (2015) does not mention authors such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Yoko Tawada in his recent analysis of the German literary field from 1960 to 2000, while in literary research focusing on immigrants and their descendants, these authors’ works have been read as the avant-garde of cultural change. It is therefore high time to analyse the processes that led to the exclusion of immigrants and their descendants in literary fields.

3 Nationalisation as a Process of Linguistic and Literary Boundary-Drawing

Since the 1980s, research has challenged the notion of the nation as a linguistic and cultural community that can refer to a common history and literature. However, the nation-state has been considered a desirable form of societal organisation at least since the nineteenth century and has become the dominant one in the twentieth century. Many processes of nationalisation took place in the latter century, not only in former colonies but also in the European centre, such as in Austria. Even today, the nation still forms the natural framework of many people’s daily lives. This does not mean that they daily “express their desire to continue a common life”, as Ernest Renan presented it in a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882 (Renan, 1990, p. 19). Rather, they think and act nationally without being aware of this fact.

That the imagined community has structured our thinking up to the present is mainly related to the education system, which has been teaching individuals to become citizens of their nation-states since the nineteenth century. This education has been strongly national from the beginning, as Bourdieu noted:

By universally imposing and inculcating (within the limits of its authority) a dominant culture thus constituted as legitimate national culture, the school system, through the teaching of history (and especially the history of literature), inculcates the foundations of a true ‘civic religion’ and more precisely, the fundamental presuppositions of the national self-image. (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 8, italics in the original)

The internalisation of the national self-image involves drawing boundaries vis-à-vis those who are considered to not belong to the respective nation (Sapiro, 2013, p. 75). The teaching of language and literature had an important impact on this process, as Bourdieu points out in the quote above. For example, textbooks for teaching English in the United States around 1900 saw the task of language and literature instruction as counteracting the “social decay” that had ostensibly taken hold with immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. The teaching of English language and literature was seen as a means of instilling a national consciousness in these “uneducated” people (Brass, 2013).

Of course, the understanding of language and literature teaching has changed since then – and not only in the US. Among other things, the literature of immigrants and their descendants is now also given space. Nevertheless, its national structuring has been preserved insofar as language, literature and nation continue to be thought of as a unity. For this reason, language and literature classes in schools are still closely intertwined today. Literatures in languages that are not taught in the respective national context remain invisible in this system. Until the seventeenth century, this kind of national language categorisation of literature was completely unknown. It was not until the nineteenth century that this idea developed into the norm it constitutes today (Leerssen, 2008, pp. 14–15).

This new unity of language, literature and nation was not only the result of the nationalisation process. Instead, this idea was one of the driving forces of nation-building, as Benedict Anderson pointed out in his work Imagined communities. Language served to create the solidarities that allowed groups of individuals to become nations (Anderson, 1991, p. 133). With the printing of books, people became aware of these solidarities: “These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed [...] the embryo of the nationally imagined communities” (Anderson, 1991, p. 44). Along with newspapers, novels were particularly important for creating in people a sense of connection beyond individual acquaintance. Novels circulated throughout the national space and connected readers in very different places.

Print also brought the fixation and standardisation of languages, which found expression in grammars and dictionaries. All this led to the conviction that the respective language was the property of the group of people who spoke and read it every day (Anderson, 1991, p. 84). The descendants of this group have since been considered native speakers and are strictly distinguished from those who cannot claim such ancestors – a distinction that was unimaginable until the seventeenth century:

Given a pre-modern Europe where orthography and grammatology were primarily scholastic practices, and not yet strategies of nationalization and naturalization, it would be less than tenable to speak of pre-seventeenth-century languages as having de jure ‘native speakers’ in contradistinction to ‘non-native speakers’ […]. (Gramling, 2016, p. 9)

Gramling points out that, before the seventeenth century, languages were not understood as systems but as a kind of personal repertoire from which the respective individual picked the best option for the specific situation without thereby expressing a sense of belonging (Gramling, 2016, p. 13). Only in the eighteenth century did language become an instrument through which an affective connection to the nation could be established: “Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures are dreamed” (Anderson, 1991, p. 154).

Literary field researchers were not explicitly concerned with the nationalisation of literature. The focus of their interest was, rather, its autonomisation – i.e. the struggle of literary actors for a certain independence from church, economy and state. However, the autonomisation and the nationalisation of literature are intricately linked. The authors of literary works belonged to the group of people who gave the vernacular languages the meaning that enabled them to become national languages. For them, this came with a certain independence from church and state. Pascale Casanova (2004) has shown that these were international processes in which authors adopted models from other languages and literatures to invent their own. Nevertheless, they resulted in nationalised literatures that were inscribed with boundaries against all those who were not considered to belong to the nation.

In this context, borders were drawn against immigrants on four levels: linguistic, literary, thematic and legal. The authors were denied linguistic, literary and thematic competence, not because they did not have it but because it was assumed that they did not have it due to their origin. This ideological exclusion was cemented at the legal level with the introduction of state subsidies for writers who are citizens of the respective nation-state, a policy that remained relevant up to the end of the twentieth century in many European states.

4 Mechanisms of Exclusion of Immigrants and Their Descendants

When language became the property of a group in the process of nation-building, those not speaking this language as their mother tongue came to be regarded as incapable of becoming creative in it (Yildiz, 2012, pp. 6–11). Many texts published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries justify this exclusionary idea with the intimate connection between language and nation. The philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who was among the first to argue for a unity of nation, language and literature, stated in a text first published in 1764: “If every language has its distinct national character, then nature imposes upon us an obligation only to our mother tongue, for it is perhaps better attuned to our character and coextensive with our way of thinking” (Herder, 1992, p. 30). Friedrich Schleiermacher built on this argument when he argued in a lecture on translation in 1813 that “each person produces originally only in his [sic!] mother tongue” (2012, p. 57). The philologist Heymann Steinthal explained this idea in more detail in his essay “On the love of the mother tongue”, which first appeared in 1866 (Steinthal, 1880). In his opinion, there is no emotional link to the foreign language, as there is to the mother tongue: “For this reason, we are creatively active only in the mother tongue, while we merely absorb and use the given in the foreign language” (Steinthal, 1880, p. 104).Footnote 2 Steinthal emphasised that the mother tongue is naturally given. Another language can never take over this function, even if one is born into it and has grown up with it: “[W]ho can doubt that the N[…] in America, who suddenly finds himself with a compatriot from Africa, will glow with love for the mother tongue?” (Steinthal, 1880, p. 101). The quote illustrates that the author discarded any changes of national affiliation – and therefore of mother tongue – as unimaginable.

Linguistic research has shown that some of these exclusionary ideas continue to have an impact today, far beyond the German-speaking world. Clear boundaries are still drawn between native speakers and non-native speakers in a wide variety of languages. This is not necessarily related to whether the respective persons actually master the language but to whether they are accepted by those who see themselves as native speakers. Class, gender and ethnicity play a role in this process. In a study of French immigrants and their descendants in France, Maya Angela Smith demonstrates that they are categorically denied linguistic competence because of the colour of their skin, even if they were born and raised in France:

Linguistic competence, therefore, is often determined by more than just the ability to use a language; linguistic competence depends on the ability to prove cultural legitimacy, whether one is a well-known writer or the average immigrant from a former colony. This claim on legitimacy extends beyond language to include nationality, ethnicity, race, religion and the colour of one’s skin. (2015, p. 326)

To deny someone linguistic competence means to draw a cultural boundary against him or her. At the same time, it confirms one’s own belonging to the culture in question. Only those who can claim this belonging through their mother tongue may judge what is correct or incorrect in a language. The right to standardise or change the language is reserved for these people alone. The German writer Franco Biondi, who originates from Italy, observed this claim of linguistic superiority to all those who are not born into the language in many of his readers:

In this interaction [between the author and her/his readers], the German reader is defined as the one born into her/his German mother tongue and is considered as a person endowed with more power over the language. The foreign writer, on the other hand, is seen as one who has been planted in the German language, s/he is defined as a guest. Accordingly, s/he is seen as having less power – and authority – over the language. (Biondi, 1986, p. 29)

That this denial of linguistic authority is closely related to the nationalisation of literature becomes clear from studies that look at immigrants who became writers when the nationalisation of the respective literary field was still in process. This holds true for the Austrian literary field in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Elias Canetti, György Sebestyén and Milo Dor were not automatically denied linguistic and thus literary competence in this field, even though German was not their mother tongue (Englerth, 2016; Schwaiger, 2016; Sievers, 2016). Moreover, our research demonstrated for Sebestyén that his transition from a Hungarian to a German-language writer was anything but easy (Schwaiger, 2016). Nevertheless, he was accepted as an Austrian author within fewer than ten years after his arrival.

However, it is not only this linguistic boundary that restricts literary recognition to a particular group. The recognition of immigrants and their descendants in literature is further complicated by literary boundaries which, just like linguistic boundaries, became inscribed in thinking about literature during nationalisation in the nineteenth century. Steinthal continued his thoughts on the mother tongue with the thesis that poetry in our mother tongue, because of our emotional connection to that language, must always have the greatest effect on us: “Therefore no foreign poet, not even the greatest, has so powerful an effect on us as our classics” (Steinthal, 1880, p. 103). The French philologists Gaston Paris and Ferdinand Brunetière argued similarly at the end of the nineteenth century. Although their ideas of French national literature differed significantly, they agreed that the understanding of this literature was reserved for the French (Bähler, 2011, pp. 153, 158). French literature would strike a secret and intimate chord in Frenchmen that would remain mute in strangers when they read it, Paris argued in a lecture in 1870 (Paris, 1885, pp. 99–100). Similarly, Brunetière claimed in 1897 that strangers could not understand or feel the characteristics of French literature (1897, pp. 192–193).

At the time when these authors denied immigrants and their descendants the ability to develop a feeling for the respective national literature, the explicit and implicit reference to this literature was becoming increasingly central to recognition in literary fields, as Bourdieu shows:

In effect, to the extent that the field closes in on itself, a practical mastery of the specific attainments of the whole history of the genre which are objectified in past works and recorded, codified and canonized by the whole corpus of professionals of conservation and celebration – historians of art and literature, exegetes, analysts – becomes part of the conditions of entry into the field of restricted production. (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 242)

Knowledge of literary traditions developed into a prerequisite for entry into the literary field as literature became nationalised. At the same time, the notion emerged that this knowledge could only be truly acquired by those who were born into the language and thus into literature. These two developments established a second mechanism by which immigrants were denied access to the field simply because of their origin.

Finally, the process of nationalisation was accompanied by the thematic exclusion of those not regarded as belonging to the nation. In 1808, Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued in his Addresses to the German nation, that: “The noblest privilege and the most sacred function of the man [sic!] of letters is this: to assemble his [sic!] nation and to take counsel with it about its most important affairs” (Fichte, 1922, p. 217). During this period, authors of literary works began to focus on the nation. This does not mean that they were necessarily in favour of the nation – in fact, many writers adopted critical positions. Nonetheless, their texts contributed to an increasing focus on the nation in literature that has remained significant until the recent past (Schmitz, 2010).

This thematic focus on the nation had two effects for the recognition of immigrants and their descendants as writers. First, they had to gain acceptance for topics not regarded as part of the national, such as immigration and the lives of immigrants and their descendants in the respective national context. Second, their contribution to national debates often went unnoticed because they were not regarded as having a say on this topic, as Leslie Adelson notes for German-Turkish authors: “[D]espite the fact that ensuing migrations and births have made Turks the largest national minority residing in unified Germany, they are rarely seen as intervening meaningfully in the narrative of postwar German history” (Adelson, 2000, p. 96). If these authors are recognised at all, they are seen as authorities on migration but not on National Socialism, the Holocaust or reunification. At the same time, dealing with the national past and present is often cited as a prerequisite for full recognition as a writer. This is evidenced by the reception of Herta Müller in literary circles. Many critics felt that her true literary capability would only become obvious when she dared to move beyond Romania and dealt with German topics in her writing (Wichner, 2002, p. 3). Similarly, Terézia Mora was not considered by literary critics to have fully arrived in German literature until she placed a German character, Darius Kopp, at the centre of her second novel, Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (The only man on the continent, 2009) (Case, 2015, p. 212).

The nationalisation of literary fields can thus result in the exclusion of immigrants and their descendants at various levels. How exactly this process took place in the respective literary fields, however, has not yet been researched in detail. This is precisely where post-migrant literary history comes in.

5 Determinants of a Post-migrant Literary History

Post-migrant literary history takes the exclusion of immigrants in nationalised literary fields as the starting point for a field analysis that seeks to explain whether, how and to what extent immigrants and their descendants have succeeded in overcoming this exclusion in the particular field. Such an analysis has to proceed in three steps: first, to explain when and how authors and institutions inscribed national boundaries in the field that led to the exclusion of immigrants and their descendants; second, to identify the developments in and beyond the field that led to the questioning of these boundaries; and, third, to describe how individual authors contributed to the shifting of these boundaries. In what follows, I explain how far we can work with Bourdieu’s approach in such a post-migrant field analysis and where we need to adapt his theory and methodology to the post-migrant context.

5.1 Analysis of National Boundaries in Literary Fields

Bourdieu has been presented in this text as a theorist who allows us to think processes of change in literary fields. However, he also showed in The rules of art that only a select group of people profited from the process of literary autonomisation. The literary field offers a structural advantage to those who have been surrounded by literature from childhood (cultural capital), know writers, publishers and critics (social capital) and whose financial situation implies that they do not have to make a living from writing (economic capital). This structural advantage is obscured in the field. The structures and actors give the impression that the path to literature is open to everyone, as long as their texts meet certain quality criteria. These rules of art are accepted not only by those who are denied access to the field due to a lack of cultural, social and economic capital – all those who hold positions in the field also act in the firm belief that they are concerned with promoting good literature. This illusio, Bourdieu argues, gives all those involved the sense that they are not acting in their own interests but in pursuit of a noble goal that legitimises selection as objectively justified (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 227–228).

Bourdieu points out that this is not true. The criteria that are applied in this selection process are created in the field. A text becomes literature by gaining recognition, not the other way around:

The producer of the value of the work of art is not the artist but the field of production as a universe of belief which produces the value of the work of art as a fetish by producing the belief in the creative power of the artist. (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 229, italics in the original)

The publisher who decides to publish the text, the critics who review it, the juries who award it a prize, the scholars who interpret it, they all give the text the value that makes it literature in the first place. These mechanisms have not lost their importance, despite the increasing economisation of literature in recent decades, as John B. Thompson notes in his study of the American book market:

Big books do not exist in themselves: they have to be created. They are social constructions that emerge out of the talk, the chatter, the constant exchange of speech acts among players in the field whose utterances have effects and whose opinions are trusted and valued to varying degrees. (Thompson, 2010, p. 195, italics in the original)

The structure of the field thus leads to the reproduction of an elite and, at the same time, disguises this reproduction as natural. Bourdieu analysed in detail how this symbolic violence denied members of the lower classes access to the field. Post-migrant literary history, by analogy, seeks to understand when and how the exclusion of immigrants becomes natural in the field. This has to be described for each individual literary field because the nationalisation of literary fields not only occurred at different times but also took different forms depending on the context. It is therefore necessary to examine when, how and to what extent selected literary institutions normalise national thinking in the respective field. Of central interest is the question of how far boundaries are drawn against immigrants in this process. This allows us to make visible how their exclusion becomes a matter of course in the literary field.

5.2 Social Crises as Triggers for Questioning National Norms

Literary fields are constantly in flux. While all actors in the field are united by an interest in literature, there is no agreement on what literature means. Rather, the understanding of literature is determined by those actors who receive recognition in the field. Distinction is crucial to generate attention for one’s text. Newcomers can only make a name for themselves by breaking “with current modes of thought” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 240). Hence, change is part of the logic of the field and, in principle, independent of external factors. However, these constant changes are to be distinguished from comprehensive processes of change, as Bourdieu describes them for the French literary field in the nineteenth century. In the course of such a process, fundamental norms and rules that are taken for granted in the field are called into question.

Such fundamental processes of change cannot be explained by the logic of the field. Rather, any questioning of social norms that are taken for granted results from a broader social crisis, as Bourdieu explains in his work Outline of a theory of practice. The crisis makes apparent that categories of perception and objective structures no longer coincide.

The critique which brings the undiscussed into discussion, the unformulated into formulation, has as the condition of its possibility objective crisis, which, in breaking the immediate fit between the subjective structures and the objective structures, destroys self-evidence practically. (Bourdieu, 2013, pp. 168–169)

The crisis that ultimately led to the recognition of immigrants and their descendants in literature is not triggered by increasing immigration per se but by the question of whether immigrants and their descendants have a right to equal participation in the respective society (Foroutan, 2019). Different actors in the various fields, including the economy, politics, religion and literature, take a position on this issue. In the process, antipoles develop not only within individual fields but also between fields. The respective positioning is thus always to be understood in relation to other positionings within a field. At the same time, positionings in dominant fields, such as politics and economics, exert an influence on positioning in less-important fields such as literature. In politics, for example, parties such as the Greens argue that immigrants have a right to participate while right-wing populist parties such as the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) or the Altnative for Germany (AfD) deny them this right. The dominant actors in the field of literature have long positioned themselves counter to political mobilisation against immigrants. However, especially in Germany, a counter-position has emerged in recent years in literature around writers such as Uwe Tellkamp and Monika Maron, who are critical of migration. The crisis is thus consciously conceived here as an “encounter between the literary field and a particular political conjuncture of crisis” (Gobille, 2004, p. 174, italics in the original).

At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the positionings are always related to developments in a particular context. The year 1968, for example, resulted in an opening for immigrants in literature in Germany (Sievers & Vlasta, 2018b, p. 220). In France, change only began in the 1980s, when immigrants and their descendants demanded equal rights (Reeck, 2018, p. 178). In Austria, it was not until the debates surrounding the election of President Waldheim in 1986 that the corresponding changes in the literary field began. Moreover, factors internal to the field may also play a role in the crisis in the field. For example, the reaction to immigration can be closely related to the importance that immigrants have had in the past in the respective literary field. This history can take on new relevance in the process of recognising current immigrants. In addition, general processes of change in the field, such as the internationalisation, medialisation or even politicisation of literature, can influence whether and how the field opens up to immigrants. To take these processes into account means to illuminate the space of possibilities that is offered to this group at the time of their entry into the field. For, even if immigrants and their descendants are considered a novelty in the literary field, the positions they occupy must at least be framed as a possibility for them to gain visibility. Whether and how the authors perceive these possibilities depends on their habitus.

5.3 The Interaction of Habitus and Field in the Gradual Process of Change

Bourdieu considered Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert to be initiators of the process of change in the nineteenth-century French literary field. He explained their central role in this process in terms of their habitus. The habitus “is acquired and it is also a possession” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 179). It unites everything that a person learns from birth but does not perceive as learned but as natural. An important foundation of this knowledge is laid in the family, which constitutes the key to social reproduction. The family not only bequeaths to its offspring the economic capital that will decisively determine their place in the social hierarchy. Through the family, cultural capital such as education and social capital – that is, social networks – are also passed on to future generations (Bourdieu, 1986). However, habitus cannot be reduced to origins. It also includes experiences that question origins and thus enable boundary-crossing. These are central for those “hybrid and unclassifiable beings” to emerge who produce revolutions in literature because they unite positions that are considered incompatible (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 111).

Baudelaire and Flaubert are among these. They both came from the bourgeoisie. This background shaped their perception of possibilities in literature and allowed them to establish positions that would not even have been conceivable, let alone feasible or financially viable, for others who did not have the same capital. At the same time, however, the two authors were critical of this bourgeois background. Neither of them wanted to take the path that the bourgeoisie set out for them. Rather, they rejected the moral concepts that went hand in hand with their bourgeois origins. This habitus explains why they criticise the bourgeoisie but in a linguistic and literary style that is deeply bourgeois.

Despite these comparable positions, the specific aesthetic positionings of the two authors in the literary field differ. This is explained by the fact that the habitus must not be understood as deterministic:

Because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions – whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings. (Bourdieu, 2013, p. 95)

The habitus thus forms an unconscious framework within which writers operate, although this framework still grants them an infinite number of possibilities. They only ever realise a small selection of these in their writing. The decision for a specific literary positioning is also related to the possibilities that are available in the respective literary field at the time. Thus, no matter how similar two people may be in their habitus, their writing will always differ.

These individual positionings, in turn, bring about a gradual process of change in the field. Bourdieu describes Baudelaire as the legislator of the process that eventually brought French writers a certain autonomy from the political and the economic fields. He embodied “the most extreme position of the avant-garde, that of revolt against all authorities and all institutions, beginning with literary institutions” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 65). He broke radically with the bourgeois works of his time not only in the linguistic and formal design of his works but also in his explicit questioning of the Académie française, in his choice of publishers and in his conception of criticism (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 60–68). He thus initiated a debate that Flaubert continued, albeit in a far less radical form. This is explained precisely by Baudelaire’s radical break, with which “the heroism of these beginnings” became redundant (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 68). The first rupture was complete and Flaubert took it from there.

Post-migrant literary history builds on this earlier analysis of a process of change in literature. It regards the authors and their works as questioning the national boundaries in the literary field. In this process, the habitus of the authors plays a decisive role. This does not mean a relapse into a form of biographism that was rightly criticised in research on the literature of immigrants and their descendants, because it reduces the authors to migration biographies. Rather, it is precisely this reduction to a single biographical element that is to be overcome. We can only understand the habitus – and thus the positioning of the writers in the field – if we take a comprehensive view of their biographies, including, for example, their education or their relations in the literary field. Our analysis thus extends far beyond ethnic or biological origin and, following Pascale Casanova, establishes the author’s references to the intellectual world (Casanova, 2011, p. 21). Moreover, it is not only the immigrants and their descendants who are subjected to such a biographical analysis. The background of publishers and critics who have supported or opposed them in the process of recognition of their literature are just as relevant, because their positioning in this debate can also be explained by their habitus.

I use the example of Vladimir Vertlib, an Austrian writer born in Leningrad of Jewish parents, to explain what this means in practice. Vertlib fled with his parents from the Soviet Union when he was five years old. The family spent the next ten years in continuous migrations that took them, inter alia, to Israel, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and the United States before they finally settled in Austria when he was sixteen. Many critics have argued that this eventful childhood and youth paved the way for Vertlib’s writing career. The author’s autobiographical essays, however, show that the opposite is true. These experiences silenced him: “We were foreigners in this country. Better be silent, wait, and smile. I was told that this was the most sensible and adequate behaviour in my position. The less you say, the less you attract attention” (Vertlib, 2000). Even when he talked about his migrations to friends, there was not much interest in what he had to say because they usually did not understand what he was talking about. His narratives did not coincide at all with their experiences of growing up. This further confirmed his feeling that what he had to say was irrelevant to the general public. This only changed when Vertlib met Konstantin Kaiser, an Austrian writer and publisher actively engaged in increasing the visibility of Austrian exile writers who had to flee from the Nazis. Kaiser read one of Vertlib’s very early texts and immediately saw the links of his writing to the older generation of exile writers. Reading their works, Vertlib slowly became aware that his writing was part of a long history of exclusion and discrimination, a shadow image of official history as he called it in one of his essays. This new understanding of the world was the impetus for him to overcome his silence and write novels based on his migration experiences that focus in particular on silence in migration (Sievers, 2021).

Vertlib was one of the very first authors to write about migration in the Austrian literary field. He turned migration into a literary topic in this field. The authors who followed him could build on this achievement. In other words, Vertlib changed the field. He made it easier for the immigrants following his example to become writers. However, this does not mean that he abolished all boundaries. Authors face new boundaries as the process continues. These include, for example, the exoticising and thus limiting labels – such as “migration literature” in the German context or “Black writing” in the British context – that other actors in the field use to describe their literature. These terms signify an initial recognition as literature. However, they also imply a new demarcation from the respective national literature. This new mechanism of exclusion may then be taken up by emerging authors who develop innovative positions to counter it. Each author is thus confronted with specific boundaries and responds with an individual positioning.

When discussing the transgressions of boundaries at the author level, we always need to take into account the other actors in the literary field who support them in this process. As the example of Vertlib clearly shows, these “post-migrant alliances”, as they are called in post-migrant studies today (Foroutan, 2019, pp. 198–202), are extremely important for the authors. The boundary in the literary field, then, does not separate natives from immigrants and their descendants but, rather, those who promote the inclusion of these newcomers in the field from those who fear for their own position and therefore reject their inclusion in the field. The actors and institutions who support these authors also change in the process. Moreover, authors who never migrated adopt the new aesthetic and thematic positions that enter the field. This does not mean, however, that all boundaries are overcome. Any post-migrant literary history therefore has to conclude by examining which boundaries faced by immigrants and their descendants continue to be effective in the respective literary field.

6 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have presented a theoretical and methodological approach for analysing how societies change through migration. The cornerstones of this approach are Bourdieu’s field theory and the post-migrant perspective. The first enables me to think about social change, the second allows me to apply this model to post-migrant societies – i.e. societies that have long histories of immigration but are still characterised by discrimination and racism. The resulting approach makes visible the nationalist exclusion of immigrants and their descendants as well as their struggle to overcome these barriers in order to make their voices heard in public debates about immigration. As such, my approach moves beyond telling history as either national or transnational. Since the emergence of nations, the two have coexisted, with one or the other dominating in particular periods. This struggle is at the centre of the change I have tried to identify with my approach. This process of change is not necessarily linear – as Michael Parzer and Ana Mijić show in Chap. 3 – and it certainly does not happen in all fields at once, as Joanna Jurkiewicz and Jens Schneider highlight in Chap. 5 of this volume. However, my aim was to put centre stage first how exclusionary mechanisms were implemented and work in cultural fields and second how authors and their allies in the field have tried to overcome this exclusion.

My focus in this chapter was on literary fields but I hope the approach may also serve as an inspiration to identify similar dynamics in other fields. I have explained how we can analyse change through migration in literary fields. Unfortunately, the limits of the chapter did not allow me to describe how I translated this approach into practice in my empirical analysis of the Austrian literary field. In fact, it takes another chapter to analyse the emergence of this field as well as the concomitant nationalist exclusion of immigrants and their descendants and a further four chapters to explain how individual authors overcame these barriers. What I found the most astounding result of my empirical study is that there was a time when migration was not regarded as being a topic for literary writing. In fact, when Vertlib began to write, the ignorance about migration in the literary field was, for him, the most difficult hurdle to overcome. It took several years before the author found support beyond his allies, since the critics needed time to accept migration as a literary topic and to grasp that his individual story has a wider relevance not only with regard to understanding migration but also to understanding that societies have to change in response to migration. Several authors have followed Vertlib since but, despite all of their efforts, they have not yet managed to abolish the borders drawn against immigrants and their descendants in the Austrian literary field and in Austrian society. However, this is not surprising if we consider that several Austrian political parties perpetuate these borders with a view to gaining votes. As we know from Bourdieu, cultural fields are subordinate to political fields.