Special note for the contributors:

1. Please focus on the text that represents migration from the Global South to the Global North.

2. The text under consideration should be published after 2000, though it can focus on migration that happened at any time in history.

3. Please take a minimum of one and a maximum of two migration/refugee narratives for analysis.

4. Please mention within the abstract the theoretical background clearly that one wants to apply.

5. The text under consideration should be either written in English or translated into  English.

6. If you are a PhD scholar, please attach a co-author who is a PhD holder.

Concept Note

The twenty-first century has witnessed unprecedented levels of human mobility driven by conflict, ecological crises, political persecution, economic precarity, and structural inequalities. As refugees, migrants, and stateless individuals navigate borders both physically and psychologically, their experiences of displacement have become central to contemporary global discourse. Literature, as a critical site of witnessing, resistance, and imagination, provides a unique lens through which these complex realities can be examined. Narratives from the Global South document the trajectories of forced migration and also interrogate the socio-political frameworks that produce displacement, reconfigure belonging, and redefine what it means to be human in an era of heightened mobility and exclusion.

The Global South has long been at the epicentre of forced migration, political exile, and climate-driven displacement. From protracted conflicts and authoritarian regimes to extractive development, economic inequities, and environmental vulnerabilities intensified by colonial histories, the Global South’s migratory landscapes are shaped by structural violence and asymmetrical global power relations. Literary narratives emerging from these contexts challenge dominant Northern discourses that frequently depoliticise refugeehood or frame it within humanitarian crisis narratives devoid of history. Instead, Global South writers articulate displacement as a deeply historical, intersectional, and transnational condition that exposes the ongoing impacts of colonialism, global capitalism, and militarised borders.

Across South Asia, writers have explored displacement stemming from Partition, civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and climate disasters. Texts such as Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Hasan Namir’s God in Pink chronicle the volatile intersections of political violence, gender, ecological precarity, and migration. African literatures from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Abdulrazak Gurnah from Tanzania, NoViolet Bulawayo from Zimbabwe, interrogate colonial legacies, armed conflict, and economic dispossession while amplifying the diasporic and transnational trajectories of migrants navigating European border regimes.

This edited book proposes an in-depth engagement with literary works from the Global South that depict migration and displacement not merely as episodic crises but as enduring structures of everyday life. These narratives, ranging from novels and memoirs to poetry, graphic storytelling, oral narratives, and digital texts, foreground subaltern agency, local epistemologies, and community-based modes of resilience. They illuminate how displaced individuals navigate precarious mobilities, negotiate identities within and beyond the nation-state, and forge solidarities across borders and diasporas.

This book proposes to critically analyse literary narratives that portray refugees, migrants, and displaced communities, with the following objectives:

• To analyse how Global South literary narratives represent the lived realities of displacement, including trauma, resilience, community ruptures, and the reconfiguration of home and belonging.

• To examine how literary forms, fragmented structures, multilingualism, testimonial styles, and hybrid genres mirror the discontinuities and fluidities of migratory lives.

• To foreground intersectional experiences of displacement, of women, queer and trans individuals, Indigenous communities, ethnic minorities, and climate-vulnerable populations.

• To contextualise migration within broader Global South histories, including colonial extraction, developmentalism, state violence, civil wars, and environmental degradation.

The contributors may address the following questions with reference to Refugee narratives from the Global South:

• Home in Refugee Narratives

• Identity in Refugee Narratives

• Physical and Psychological journey in Refugee narratives

• Family in Refugee Narratives

• Nation in Refugee Narratives

• Trauma and memory in Refugee narratives

• Hope and hopelessness in Refugee narratives

• Joy and sorrow in Refugee narratives

• Life and death in Refugee narratives

• Human rights in Refugee narratives

• Gender in Refugee Narratives

• Nature in Refugee Narratives

• Class in Refugee Narratives

• Disability in Refugee Narratives

• Religion in Refugee Narratives

• Individual and society in Refugee narratives

• Race in Refugee Narratives

• Ethnicity in Refugee Narratives

• Violence in Refugee Narratives

• Pain and Healing in Refugee Narratives

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts of 300–400 words, along with a brief author bio, are invited. Please email migrationbookproject@gmail.com 

• Selected contributors will be asked to submit full chapters of 6,000–8,000 words.

• Contributions should engage critically with literary texts from the Global South and be grounded in relevant theoretical frameworks.

• Deadline of abstract submission is 15 March 2026. 

• The edited volume will be submitted to Springer.

Editors: Dr. Shubhanku Kochar and Dr. Tanu Priya