Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities. The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the "exile" as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.
Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape - Editors' Introduction Section 1: Literary Interventions Chapter 1: Recuperating the Black Family in Graphic Narrative: Tom Feelings's The Middle Passage and Kyle Baker's Nat Turner Daniel Stein Chapter 2: Generational Doubling as Eth(n)ic Narrative Strategy: Annie Proulx's Barkskins and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing Cathy Covell Waegner Chapter 3: "As Much the Invader as the Native": Investigating Immigrant and Indigenous Family Ties in Wendy Rose's Itch Like Crazy Ludmila Martanovschi Chapter 4: Mothers/Lovers of Exiles: Women Characters in Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard Chapter 5: The Securitized Migrant: Migrant Mobility and Kindred Alliances in Post-9/11 New York Novels Isabella Karlsson Section 2: Filmic Interventions Chapter 6: Mother(less) Exiles: The New Woman's Absence from the Migration of the Expressionists to Hollywood Michele Rozga Chapter 7: Go West, Young Men: Teutonic Myths and American Westerns Blazed Path for the Acceptance of Nazism in Germany Cathy M. Jackson Chapter 8: "What Pain It Was to Drown": Quotidian Meets Tragic in Gianfranco Rosi's Fire at Sea Page R. Laws Chapter 9: Shifting Affiliations: Kinship Formation through Othering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Christopher Hansen Section 3: Civic Interventions Chapter 10: "Son, I Am Not Coming Here Anymore": Migrations, Loss, Separation, Trauma, and the Underground Railroad Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander Chapter 11: Contested Affiliations: The Migration of US American War Resisters to Canada Sarah J. Grunendahl Chapter 12: "No Asylum from the Germans": Policies of Deterrence and the Early West German Refugee Movement Andreas Kewes Chapter 13: Contesting Home, Nation, and Beyond: The Digital Space of New Migrants from Post-Gezi Turkey Mine Gencel Bek Chapter 14: Religion, Family, Community, Difference: Immigrant Millennials in Cologne, Germany Aprilfaye T. Manalang Chapter 15: "Space," "Aliens," and the "Race" to Belong: Changing Geographies and Moving Borders in Europe and the Americas Geoffroy de Laforcade
