A global postcolonial: Contemporary Arabic literature of migration to Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 21st-century Arabic literature of migration, modernist and earlier postcolonial discourses on exile and migration have been giving way to writings that grapple with subjectivities born of mass migration and the encounter with borders and borderlands. This article puts contemporary Arabic literature of forced or precarious migration to Europe in conversation with postcolonial studies, Arabic literary studies, and border studies. Though Arabic literature and postcolonial literary theory have not been adequately co-theorized, we can draw on approaches from postcolonial studies. The article suggests that the most urgent anti-hegemonic critiques in contemporary migration literature pertain to borders, citizenship, belonging within the kinds of precarity created in contemporary contexts of migration. In border studies, we find multiple approaches to querying borders and borderlands: as barriers that uphold global inequalities, sites of transformations, and liminal spaces from which meanings can be re-imagined.