Research Project
Migrations in Literature
Project Team:
Reena Saini Kallat, Woven Chronicle (detail), 2011–19. Installation view, When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Photo by Charles Mayer. © Reena Saini Kallat.
Key Question
What is lost in the attempt to represent migration through literary narratives, and what is produced or preserved?
Project Summary
By developing a vocabulary and roadmap for bringing histories of migration and of literature into a mutually illuminating relation, this project will explore what is lost in the attempt to represent migration, and also what is produced or preserved.
Migrations in Literature is a pioneering collaborative and interdisciplinary research project that seeks to bring the social phenomenon of migration into conjunction with the study of literature. A defining characteristic of the present era, migration is nonetheless a transhistorical occurrence and a constant feature of human societies. The project will consider how the written word has captured and distilled a process so ubiquitous, translating it into literary forms and languages in the past and in the present. By developing a vocabulary and roadmap for bringing histories of migration and of literature into a mutually illuminating relation, the project will explore what is lost in the attempt to represent migration, and also what is produced or preserved. We plan two workshops covering Methods and Periods, and Geographies and Genres. Over 50 scholars will participate, with expertise spanning literary texts from antiquity to the present and representing fields that range from political science, geography, English, classics, comparative literature, Oceanic humanities, to South Asian Studies, Africana Studies, Latinx studies and digital humanities); their contributions will be included in the Oxford Companion to History and Literature (under contract with Oxford University Press). As a capstone to the project, a final conference will bring scholars of literature and migration into conversation with migrant writers and educators.