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Introduction
The following cluster aims at exploring to which extent migration irrupts into, disturbs, and eventually interrogates given notions of language, culture and identity.
In a situation of cultural and geographical displacement marked by invisibility, speechlessness and imposed stereotypes, narrative by migrant women acquires a crucial role in the process of self representation in a context of migration. As the stereotyped literary representations of ‘other’ identities are conceived in order to control and manipulate the dangerous otherness that is thought to threaten supposedly ‘uncontaminated’ European communities, what has been defined as ‘literature of migration’ provides an empowering source of expression and recognition in a gender perspective.
It also questions canonical associations of language and race, performing a cultural dislocation where European languages travel and are brought elsewhere by the intersections of other cultures and other languages. The purpose of this cluster is also to focus on the ways in which these ‘migrant texts’ critically interrupt the supposedly homogeneous corpus of European national literatures and to analyse the degree to which they reshape and re-discuss the language and literary imagination of the host countries.
The literature of migration has already been labelled and has become a marketable issue. We, nonetheless, wish to explore the possibility for the migrant to find her own voice in the new language she has come to inhabit, where the experience of migration provides the critical tools for the creation of new forms of belonging and self-definitions, which shy from exclusivist choices.