Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena Rita Sakr Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland, by Carmen Zamorano Llena (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 220 p., hardcover, €75) A broad range of scholarship explores literary representations of the Irish migrant experience across the world and, more recently, the experience of migration to an increasingly multicultural Ireland (Pilar Villar-Argaiz, 2017; Ailbhe McDaid, 2017; Anne Mulhall, 2020, among others). There is an even larger body of criticism on the dynamics of migration, diaspora, and asylum-seeking in British literature (Agnes Woolley, 2014; Matthew Chambers, 2015; Deirdre Osborne, 2016, among others). Given the intertwined histories and geographies of the two islands, constructing a coherently productive methodological [End Page 154] approach to the literatures of migration in the two countries in the same study is both a convincing as well as a challenging intellectual feat, especially from the perspectives of postcolonial theory and globalization studies. Yet Carmen Zamorano Llena's Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland achieves precisely this. Zamorano Llena's monograph focuses on fiction published since the 1990s. While the pairing of Ireland–Britain in the title could suggest a duality of national literatures, the book's significant scholarly contribution is its exploration of a vast network of transnational dimensions, including the contributions of non-migrant writers on this topic. The introduction offers an overview of relevant fields, including comparative literature and world literature, as well as the multifaceted concept of cosmopolitanism. It may not necessarily be clear at the start in what ways and how successfully the study will map "the connection between present fictions of migration and earlier migration literature, as well as postcolonial writing and new forms of cosmopolitan writing, with special attention to their role in redefining national literature and literary traditions." However, the case studies in the six main chapters deliver on the promise, in some instances with astonishing rigor and originality. The succinct discussion of "new cosmopolitan theory" in terms of redefining the interrelationship of postcolonialism and globalization at the start of Chapter 2 is more impressive than the relatively brief close readings of the disruption of nationalist "home" imaginaries in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Foreigners. Chapter 3 cleverly addresses "the democratising effects" of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin as a literary rendering of Ulrich Beck's concept of "inclusive differentiation" in terms of its narration of both the experience of 9/11 as well as of exile. Engaging Global North–Global South relations in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and Gravel Heart, Chapter 4 incisively sets up Achille Mbembe's reconceptualized "Afropolitanism" as a groundwork to discover "new possible worldviews." Chapter 5 takes Jacques Rancière's work, particularly The Politics of Literature (2011), as well as Martha Nussbaum's and Sara Ahmed's writings on emotions, as a starting point to analyze Elif Shafak's Honour as "a fictional narrative that counters the simplifying narratives of the Muslim other." Chapter 6, on Rose Tremain's The Colour and The Gustav Sonata, is a standout in many respects, not least in its ambitious triangulation of Hannah Arendt's thinking on solidarity and "enlarged mentality" with Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and Michael Rothberg's notion of "noeuds de mémoire" in order to engage historical fiction in the context of what it correctly identifies as the fruitful "synergetic combination of migration studies and memory studies." The treatment of transcultural memories, particularly through Rothberg's "multidirectional memory," continues in Chapter 7 as a foundation to examine "the interconnections between Irish Famine diasporic [End Page 155] memory, transatlantic slavery past and Australian convict narratives" in Evelyn Conlon's Not the Same Sky. One of the study's strongest elements is the close analysis of formal techniques in the selected works of fiction. Zamorano Llena deftly addresses the often innovative narrative methods and motifs that approximate the sociohistorical shifts that are engendered and the ethico-political turns that are triggered by the "timespaces" of migration. This ranges from McCann's use of the metaphor of the tightrope walker signifying the migrant's "acrobatic mobility"; Gurnah's spatiotemporal "dialogism...