Migration stories from the Global South are rarely neutral, since they are often born of struggle, shaped by colonial history, economic precarity, or climate collapse, and told in defiance of imposed silences. This panel proposes to examine how writers, scholars, and creative artists across the Global South turn to cultural production to challenge the hegemonic knowledge systems that structure how migration is seen, narrated, and understood, particularly in the Global North. From refugee testimonies and borderland fiction to diasporic films and grassroots media, these works assert the validity of local ways of knowing, remembering, and imagining movement. 

Works such as Teju Cole’s Open City, Helon Habila’s Travellers, and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children’s Archive offer formally inventive and politically resonant engagements with displacement and migratory precarity. In Open City, Cole explores the psychological and spatial dislocations of a Nigerian-German immigrant navigating New York and various European cities, offering a meditative interrogation of race, memory, and belonging. Habila’s Travelers similarly charts a constellation of African migrant lives across Europe, centering the fragmented voices of refugees and asylum seekers while blurring the boundaries between observer and participant, fiction and testimony. Luiselli’s hybrid text—part novel, part archival meditation—foregrounds the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border through a formally fragmented narrative structure that mirrors the erasures and ruptures inherent in migrant documentation processes. Taken together, these works exemplify a broader trend in Global South migration literature that mobilizes aesthetic experimentation to unsettle dominant modes of narrating migratory experience 

These narratives are often misread as mere accounts of suffering, rather than recognized as interventions that expose the limits of Western epistemologies which pathologize or sensationalize displacement. They give form to fragmented identities, embodied trauma, and fractured geographies. What they document, beyond all that is lost in migration, reveals what is also learned in motion: new solidarities, creative survival strategies, and alternative visions of the community. In so doing, they help us think critically about the politics of knowledge: who gets to narrate migratory experiences, and whose stories are heard, archived, or erased. 

This panel invites papers on including but not limited to: 

Representations of migration and displacement in literature, film, or media from the Global South 

Knowledge production and epistemic resistance in refugee or diaspora narratives 

South-South migration and its underrepresentation in global discourse 

The role of storytelling in negotiating borders, legality, and identity 

Aesthetic strategies for representing trauma, invisibility, or statelessness 

Migration and memory: archives, oral traditions, and intergenerational knowledge 

Critiques of humanitarianism, development, and state violence 

Comparative studies of migratory knowledge across regions (e.g., Latin America and Africa, South Asia and the Middle East) 

We welcome papers that examine the intersections of migration with issues of knowledge production, representation, and cultural politics in the Global South. This panel is open to scholars at all stages of their academic careers and encourages interdisciplinary approaches. 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a short bio via https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19452 by August 29th.

Contact information: ab56123@uga.edu