Postmigration: Aesthetics and interventions

Abstract

In the last decade, discussions on postmigration and postmigrant aesthetics have gained traction in European cultural studies and current discourses on the role of migration in modern societies. Our introduction to the themed issue on ‘Postmigration: Aesthetics and Interventions’ seeks to provide an overview of some of the most central developments in the field, whether it is the growing academic awareness of ‘postmigrant theatre’, which has been a major success in Germany since 2008, or the recent academic debates and international discussions about postmigration as a new theory in social and cultural studies. We distinguish at least three major tendencies within these academic debates that either focus on postmigrant subjectivities, on postmigrant societies, or on postmigration as a new analytical perspective. Furthermore, we also address some of the criticism that could be brought up against the concept of postmigration from postcolonial and decolonial approaches. Our ambition is to open the concept for future challenges and perspectives in the fields of European cultural and migration studies when investigating diverse and super-diverse social spaces and cultural productions, including their aesthetics, politics and narratives of belonging. At the end, we briefly introduce all contributions coming from anthropology, social, cultural and literary studies.