Norbert Bugeja’s book chapter ‘Postcolonial Studies, Migration and Literature: Positions, Perspectives and Debates’ has just been published in The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature (Routledge: London and New York, 2024).
The overview chapter, which opens the ‘Critical Debates’ section of the volume, puts forward a range of critical sources, debates and theoretical positions that shed light on the affinity between postcolonial studies since their inception, literature, migration and migrant subjectivities, and places a focus on more recent concerns with forced migration and displacement.
Edited by Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt and Carly McLaughlin, this is a field-defining volume that ‘demonstrates the influence of the “age of migration” on literature and showcases the role of literature in shaping socio-political debates and creating knowledge about the migratory trajectories, lives, and experiences that have shaped the post-1989 world.’ The book is important for the ways in which it re-proposes the legitimacy of the literary as a core source of engagement with the urgencies presented by migration realities today, as well as its ‘contribution to a pluriversal turn in literary migration studies in future scholarship’.
The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature will be of particular interest to scholars working on contemporary migration literature, and it also offers an introduction to new students and scholars from other fields. Pre-orders are open online.
Bugeja is Associate Professor within the Department of English and Director of the Mediterranean Institute.