In the past twenty years, scholarship on European literature of immigration has often fallen under the rubric of postcolonial studies, employing analytic lenses that are fundamentally rooted in the era of colonization (i.e., the Manichean colonizer/colonized binary of Fanon, the négritude of Aimé Césaire, the “hybridity,” and “mimicry” of Homi K. Bhabha, the different iterations of subalternity posited by the Subaltern Studies collective and Gayatri Spivak).

Though bound to the postcolonial, the literature of immigration is categorically distinct and performs a different aesthetic and political function. The predominant narrative concerns are not those of decolonization and nation-formation. Importing concepts in postcolonial thought, such as “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty), “créolité”   (Chamoiseau, Bernabé, and Confiant), “metissage” and “minor transnationalism” (Lionnet and Shih), or “decoloniality” (Mignolo) amounts to a superimposition of a theoretical concept developed, in particular, to move out of metropolitan modes of thinking.

Literature of immigration is more often concerned with the rigidities and elasticities of postcolonial Europeanness (i.e., how does mass migration into Europe transform the very concepts of “British,” “French,” “German,” “Belgian,” etc.?  How does it transform what constitutes European literature as such?). It is often filed under the imprecise categories of “diasporic, exilic, hybrid, in-between, cosmopolitan”—seemingly synonymous but with very different genealogies. The effect of employing such amorphous terms glosses over the fact that literature depicting immigration is ground in very specific historical and political moments, and bound to the legal and juridical conditions that allow for immigration to even occur. These conditions are often reciprocal: not only does immigration policy profoundly affect immigrant communities, representations of immigrant life have had spectacular effects upon the public status of immigrants (i.e., the Rushdie Affair, Charlie Hebdo, etc.)

What are the ways in which literature of immigration converges and diverges from the postcolonial? How can we conceive of a set of theoretical concerns surrounding immigration and its literary representation that is distinct from the postcolonial? What political and aesthetic roles does immigrant literature perform in the European public sphere? What is the relationship between literary and juridical discourse in the literature of immigration? How does literature participate in the political and social life of immigrants in Europe? To what degree does the work of immigrant literature envision a utopic, dystopic, or heterotopic version of Europe? What is the place of immigrant literature in larger discussions of world literature? In what ways does immigration inflect contemporary conceptions of the global or the planetary? Is there a poetics of immigration?

Proposals (250-300 word abstract and short bio) should be submitted through ACLA's online portal between Sept. 1-23:

http://acla.org/node/add/paper

http://www.acla.org/more-hybrid-theorizing-literature-immigration

Please contact the organizer for more information at na4@williams.edu