Focusing on a significant 70-year period as a climactic phase of displacement, the book investigates the role of literature in producing new modes of representing and understanding migration in a global context.
Globally felt and reported as a geographical, sociological, anthropological, and historical phenomenon, migration has produced an unprecedented corpus of literary narratives that demands to be approached through its own set of cross-disciplinary critical approaches. This Handbook explores tales of migration via a systematic study of the large corpus of Anglophone literary texts that have been written by migrant authors and/or on the topic of migration between 1946 and 2016—from the start of the United Nations International Migration Report to the first year in which the number of displaced people reached the level of the Second World War, marking a new phase in global migrations.
Given the dominance of English as a world language, often used by writers who are not native speakers, the volume covers Anglophone writing, providing a substantially representative corpus that includes texts from or about Europe, Africa, North and Central America, and the South Asia and Pacific region. Starting from a critical approach that is inherently interdisciplinary, authors consider the notion of the border and how it has changed over time; show how traditional literary genres have morphed and hybridized to become suitable expressive tools for the new stories of migration; reflect on how the movement across borders and countries creates migrant identities that are not only linguistic but invests all aspects of one’s life and worldview; and includes authors’ voices (a small but representative group) to both justify and test the critical approaches proposed.
Edited by:
Professor or Dr. Nicoletta Vallorani (Associate Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies University of Milan Italy),
Professor or Dr. Simona Bertacco (Associate Professor of Comparative Humanities,
University of Louisville,
USA),
Dr. or Prof. William Boelhower (Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge,
USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 256mm,
Width: 178mm,
Spine: 36mm
Weight: 1.160kg
ISBN: 9798765103524
Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks
Pages: 536
Publication Date: 13 November 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: Storytelling Across and Within Borders (Nicoletta Vallorani, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, Simona Bertacco, University of Louisville, USA, and William Boelhower, Louisiana State University, USA) PART 1 – Survey of the Discipline 1. Nomadic Philosophy: Thresholds of Sustainability (Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht, Netherlands) 2. Borderline Stories: Migrants at the Center of World History (William Boelhower, Louisiana State University, USA) 3. America's Right Refuge (Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, USA) 4. The Edge of Continents, the Insistence of the Sea: Narratives of Mediterranean Migration (Marta Cariello, Università degli Studi della Campania, Italy) 5. Hospitality Within: Migrant Literature and the Translation Effect (Loredana Polezzi, Stony Brooke University, USA) 6. Migrant Be/longing: Digital Connectedness in an Age of Solidarity (Sandra Ponzanesi, University of Utrecht, Netherlands) 7. The Coming Migrations: Violence, Movements and Transculturation (Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto, Canada) PART 2 – Borders & Spaces 8. Writing/Reading the Black Mediterranean (Alessandra Di Maio, Università di Palermo, Italy) 9. Unaccompanied, Undocumented, Unwanted, and Underground: Contemporary Narratives of Migration al Norte (Marion Christina Rohrleitner, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) 10. Gender Violence as Metaphor: Literature of the Indian Partition (Rhadika Moanram, Cardiff University, Wales, UK) 11. Crocheting Earthly Communities into Existence: Chris Abani's Commitment to Art as Transformative Rite (Annalisa Oboe, Università di Padova, Italy) 12. The Smell of Home: East European Migration Networks in Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man (Anca Parvulescu, Washington University in St. Louis, USA and Claudia Sadowski Smith, Arizona State University, USA) 13. Charles Reznikoff's Lyrical Affirmation of Diasporic and Migratory Identities (Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Louisville, USA) 14. 'An alphabet of hereness': Literature and Migration in Aotearos/New Zealand (Michelle Keown, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK) PART 3 – Hybrid Forms and Texts 15. ""I am anger myself"": British New Slaveries and Genre Fiction in Jonathan Coe's Number 11 (Pietro Deandrea, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy) 16. Muslim Immigrants and American Comics (Esra Santesso, University of Georgia, USA) 17. Unruly Migration Narratives in the Neoliberal World-System: Subverting the 'Success Story' in Neel Mukherjee, Roxanne Gay and Julie Otsuka (Lucio De Capitani, Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Italy) 18. The Middle Passage Refigured: African Migration in Science Fiction (Nicoletta Vallorani, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy) 19. Travel and Translation in Anglophone Diaspora Poetry (Simona Bertacco, University of Louisville, USA) PART 4 – Language, Identity, Belonging 20. An Ethics of Nonmonolingualism: Migration in and into Derek Walcot's Omeros (Till Dembeck, University of Luxembourg, France) 21. The Migrant Experience in Italian-Canadian Women's Writing (Deborah Saidero, Università delgi Studi in Udine, Italy) 22. Re-grounding through Estrangement: Myth, Technology, and Identity in African Women's Migration Narratives (Anna Pasolini, Università delgi Studi in Milan, Italy) 23. Vietnamese Literature of Migration (Marguerite Nquyen, Wesleyan University, USA) 24. The Rise of Black British Consciousness and Its Effects on British Cultural Identity (Ester Gendusa, Independent Scholar, Italy) 25. Deracination & Overseas Trajectories: Speculations on the Filipino Diasporic Experience (E. San Juan, Jr, University of Texas, USA) PART 5 – Authors’ Voices 26. The Art of Not Belonging (Pauline Melville) 27. No matter where I am, I am an exile (Tlotlo Tsamaas) 28. Lazarus's Silence (Maaza Mengiste, in conversation with S. Bertacco) 29. We are human beings (Behrouz Boochani, in conversation with N. Vallorani) 30. To Undo and Undo (Dionna Brand) 31. A Story with Many Names (Chika Unigwe, in conversation with S. Bertacco) 32. Crossing Borders through Storytelling (Merlinda Bobis and Marie-Therese Sulit) 33. Trojan Women Project, and Beyond (William Stirling and Charlotte Eagar)
Nicoletta Vallorani is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Milan, Italy. She has published on colonialism and postcolonialism, on urban geographies and on the intersections between Crime Fiction and Migration Studies. She recently contributed to The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2019). With Simona Bertacco, she co-authored The Relocation of Culture: Translations, Migrations, Borders (Bloomsbury, 2021; prefaced by H. K. Bhabha). She is the Head of the School of Journalism Walter Tobagi and co-directs the online journal Altre Modernità. Simona Bertacco is Professor of Postcolonial and Translation Studies at the University of Louisville, USA, where she teaches courses on the global and translational humanities. Her research focuses on Caribbean literatures, gender and translation studies. Her most recent publications include: The Relocation of Culture: Translation, Migration, Borders, co-authored with Nicoletta Vallorani. Foreword by H. Bhabha. (Bloomsbury 2021), Time, Space, Matter in Translation, co-edited with P. Beattie and T. Soldat-Jaffe (Routledge 2022), and is currently is co-editing the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation (forthcoming in 2027). William Boelhower is Adams Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, USA, and currently a member of the Department of Linguistic and Comparative Literatures, Ca’foscari University, Venice. He has recently published: co-editor, “Literature and Migration.” Annali di Ca’ Foscari, Serie Occidentale 54 (September 2020); Immigrant Autobiography in the United States. A Revised and Enlarged Edition (2021); “’Liberty or Death!’ An Archaeology of the Freedom Narrative in the Age of Revolution.” The New Centennial Review 22.3 (Winter 2022): 119-139; “Decolonization, diversity and accountability: The role of museums in democracies of the global north.” Atlantic Studies, 21.1 (March), 2024: 14-29; “Narrating and Archiving Social Movements and Migrations,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (forthcoming).
Reviews for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Anglophone Literature and Migration: Critical and Creative Voices (1946-2016)
This outstanding collection of essays brings the social sciences and the humanities into dialogue. Utilizing anglophone writing as a globally representative corpus, it binds scholarly studies to the voices of the migrants themselves – a ground-breaking discussion of the literature of migration as a global field of inquiry, highlighting the diversity of the texts, themes, genres, and styles. * Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Co-founder and co-editor of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents * No medium captures both the sweeping scope of migration politics and the intimate realities of individual lives quite like literature. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Anglophone Literature and Migration is a learned and passionate guide to the field. It engages the central debates on human dignity and hospitality while charting the rich and varied local manifestations of diasporic literature over the past eight decades. * Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Professor of Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Denmark *
