Migrating Literacies: Redefining Knowledge Mobility for the Digital Age

Abstract

This paper addresses several contexts of literary migration in the early twenty-first century that are changing how literary scholars read, the questions we pose, and the answers we find persuasive. How do ideas travel across time and space in the internet age? How does the literary engage the social, the political, the spatial and the temporal at a time of intensifying transworld connections? How are concepts of knowledge mobilization changing what we mean by the literary and how are globalizing processes changing what we mean by migration? What is the role of English in the circulation of ideas and the creation of literary value? Understanding literacy as the meaning-making practices in which readers engage, what kind of new literacies are required in our changing times? This paper adapts the concept of transnational literacies from the work of theorists such as Gayatri Spivak to engage current debates about the digital literacies of “digital natives,” whose imaginative mobility is enabled by new media, and current literary interest in revalorizing mobility and reconsidering the material conditions that make it possible.