ABSTRACT Adriana Páramo’s (2012) creative ethnography Looking for Esperanza: The Story of a Mother, a Child Lost, and Why They Matter to Us provides important insights into the politics of race and gender in relation to mobility and migration. In telling the stories of undocumented Mexican women who perform backbreaking farmwork in Florida, Páramo aims to elicit empathy for their plight. And yet, she portrays them as helpless and dysfunctional, showing that ethnographic writing often remains enmeshed with colonial violence. Obscuring crucial differences between women, Páramo also analogises her own condition as a Colombian American immigrant to that of Esperanza Vasquez, an undocumented woman who in 2001 lost her youngest child to dehydration while crossing the Sonoran Desert from Mexico into the United States. As it reproduces some of the logics of white feminism, Looking for Esperanza echoes the politics of much scholarship on gender produced within mobility studies, which often also fails to account for racialised differences between women and to grapple with racism itself. Páramo’s work, then, unwittingly reveals the need to deploy an intersectional lens that makes racism visible when engaging the politics of gender and mobilty, and beyond.

ABSTRACT Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) features a Vietnamese American queer protagonist, Little Dog, in a non-linear narrative that unfolds as a letter to his illiterate mother. Drawing from his experiences as a refugee, Vuong explores the protagonist’s family history, interweaving past and present, tracing the displacement informing Little Dog’s identity. Whilst offering a jarring account of the forms of violence and loss shaping the lives of the protagonist and his family, the novel primarily focuses on imagining potential avenues for survival and resistance in the aftermath of trauma and displacement. This article examines how Vuong’s emphasis on the creative potential of diasporic subjects manifests in the novel through two principal axes: first, in the protagonist’s recuperation of his family’s diasporic legacies, challenging Western portrayals of the Vietnam War by uncovering his grandmother’s memories; second, in the formulation of diasporic kinship networks after resettlement, which, despite being fraught and complex, become the protagonist’s primary source of comfort and security. In both instances, Vuong’s creative effort permeates both the novel’s content and form. Furthermore, this article explores how queerness serves as a lens to grapple with the complex politics and poetics permeating narratives of migration in Vuong’s work.

ABSTRACT In grappling with mobility as an unequally distributed resource, literary texts can act as spaces for scrutinising the working mechanisms of hierarchical mobilities. The present article interrogates the links between differentiated Palestinian mobilities in British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost and its feminist narration of the relation between temporalities, mobilities, and gendered corporealities. Consulting Jasbir Puar’s analysis of spatial debilities and Michael Rothberg’s notion of implication, this article discusses the differential distribution of the capacity to move and the resulting production of carceral power dynamics, and how memory that relates past and present mobility politics potentially mobilises endeavours to counteract such order in the Palestinian/Israeli context. A close reading of Hammad’s text against this background offers an inquiry into literature’s potential to change the way we read movement outside a mobility-immobility binary, contributing to current debates in literary mobility studies. The article concludes with a reflection on the implications of the analysis for reading mobilities and imagining collective action against debilitation, suggesting that contemporary diasporic Palestinian literary production contributes to a differential understanding of mobilities in the context of historical displacements and continuous occupation as well as to feminist, solidaristic visions of collective movement.

ABSTRACT Many literary productions of the (new) African diaspora focus on Anglo-American settings, whereas diasporic communities outside the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom are often neglected. Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström’s In Every Mirror She’s Black (2021), in contrast, centres the journeys and experiences of three Black women in Sweden to interrogate its gendered and racialised politics of migration, (social) mobility and belonging. Drawing on Levine’s notion of social structures as infrastructural, this article reads the novel through the lens of (im)mobility to illustrate how the intersection of gender, race, class, religion, nationality and legal status affects the literal and metaphoric movements of the protagonists. It thereby highlights the intricate relationship between (social) infrastructures, such as stereotypical or essentialist representations that function as “controlling images,” and the spatial and metaphoric organisation of society. In playing with and transgressing generic boundaries, moreover, the novel’s poetics reflect the fluidity and mobility inherent to narratives of migration. Through its thematic engagement as well as its poetics, the novel complicates narratives of a universal diasporic experience and thus challenges narratives of (generic) confinement.

ABSTRACT Published in 2021, the novel The Island of Missing Trees by Turkish-British author Elif Shafak interlaces themes of love, loss, conflict, and struggle through alternating narrators both human and nonhuman, while switching geographically and temporally between Cyprus, both before and after the partition, and modern-day London. Within this multi-layered narrative structure, the reader is introduced to a number of characters whose stories of survival or demise unfold the damaging effects of war and the traumatic impact of migration. Among these experiences, two female registers stand out: those of a conscious fig tree and the love-lorn Defne, both of whom witness the horrors of atrocity and bear the scars of war intensely. Thus, this study examines the interconnectedness between these two characters within the framework of material ecocriticism with an emphasis on nomadic subjectivity to explore how the novel approaches the experience of migration as an entangled process. In the light of a discursive theoretical reading of the impact of migration on the human and nonhuman worlds, this work argues that both Defne and the fig tree share a common gendered experience of uprooting that empathetically intertwines the human and arboreal storyworlds represented in the novel.

ABSTRACT Tabish Khair’s novel Just Another Jihadi Jane (2016) critically examines the intertwined dynamics of gender, diaspora, migration, radicalisation, and identity through the experiences of two young British Muslim women, Jamilla and Ameena, of Pakistani descent. Marginalised within Western society, these characters seek inclusion and validation by engaging with radical Islamist ideologies only to confront intensified patriarchal subjugation and horror masquerading as religious authenticity. This paper approaches their radicalisation not as an aberration but as being symptomatic of broader socio-historical fault lines, namely the enduring legacies of colonial violence, racialised exclusion, and the entanglement of gender and power in transnational contexts. By mobilising insights from postcolonial feminist critique, intersectional analysis, and migration studies, I examine how Khair destabilises moral dualisms and foregrounds the ambivalence of agency in spaces marked by both hypervisibility and abandonment. The trajectories of Jamilla and Ameena offer a lens into the unstable negotiations of identity and the shifting contours of recognition within and beyond the nation-state. Additionally, I explore how the novel stages a critique of competing ideological systems, Western secularism and Islamist fundamentalism alike, as forces that conscript Muslim women into symbolic economies of representation, where their visibility is often tethered to regulation and containment.