A New Vocabulary

Abstract

A lthough the history of humanity is arguably the history of its global peregrinations, at no other time than today has migration so profoundly shaped our political imaginary and public discourse. AsAchilleMbembehaswritten, “Thegovernment of humanmobility might well be themost important problem to confront theworld during the first half of the 21st century.”1On the one hand, humanmobility and any attempt to regulate it depend on geopolitical variables, economic calculations, and international treaties. On the other, migration is an experience that requires, both for displaced groups and for host communities, a constant effort to reimagine social relations, affective investments, and modes of belonging. In this context, literature has the peculiar ability to register the entanglements of collective histories and political conditions with the individualized experience of migrants, often challenging the ethnonationalist discourses that pervade today’smediascape. Three recent essays on this topic—Nasia Anam’s “The Migrant as Colonist: Dystopia and Apocalypse in the Literature of Mass Migration,” Marissia Fragkou’s “Strange Homelands: Encountering the Migrant on the Contemporary Greek Stage,” and Dominic Thomas’s “The Aesthetics of Migration, Relationality, and the Sentimography of Globality”—powerfully showhow current aesthetic practices that engage migration provide us with a new vocabulary, necessary to restore the figure of the migrant to his or her fullness and complexity as an individual. Interestingly, Anam’s article begins by analyzing literature that tries to do the opposite, that is, works of fiction that cast migrants as hordes of invading barbarians. She focuseson recent examples ofAnglophone and French fiction that, in figuringmigration as an apocalyptic event that threatens to destroy European civilization, epitomize Europe’s transition from an outward-looking “colonial utopianism,”with its attendant myth of mission civilisatrice, to current nationalisms that cast the continent as a colonized victim of mass migration.2 This is the same ideological shift that has been analyzed in the US context, where the myth of the frontier and imperialist expansion has given way to that of the border, with its racialized and classed rhetoric of self-protection. Amid such a hostile political and cultural climate, works of imaginative literature can respond in twoways. The first is to framemigrants as absolutely innocent subjects in desperate need of FirstWorld help. This attitude ismeant to elicit a kind