The Bloomsbury Handbook of Anglophone Literature and Migration - (Bloomsbury Handbooks) (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

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

About the Author

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).