Migrants' self-narration as cultural critique : Exploring Political Subjectivities through Asylum Seekers' and Returnees' Narratives and Literature

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Castellano, Viola ; Riccio, Bruno:
Migrants' self-narration as cultural critique : Exploring Political Subjectivities through Asylum Seekers' and Returnees' Narratives and Literature.
In: Reed-Danahay, Deborah ; Wulff, Helena (Hrsg.): Anthropological Approaches to Reading Migrant Writing : Reimagining Ethnographic Methods, Knowledge, and Power. - New York : Routledge , 2023 . - 22 S.
ISBN 9781003355151
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003355151

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Abstract

This chapter reflects on migrant narrations in two self-published texts: one written in Italian by a Guinean asylum seeker for the Italian audience, and one written in Spanish before being translated into English by a Gambian living in Spain for a European and Gambian audience. We will discuss the representations of migration and migrants’ expectations and aspirations as described in the two publications, analyzing how their different intentions, and imagined audience shaped them. The contribution engages with migrants’ narratives to understand how they stem from specific social and political issues. In particular, the chapter will explore how the authors use their experience to talk about undocumented migratory routes, the quest for international protection, the form of hampered mobility and marginalization they endure, and the relational worlds in which they are enmeshed and which they generate in their trajectories. In doing so, we argue that such publications offer a glimpse into the political subjectivities of migrants which need to be taken into account by anthropologists in their pursuit of knowledge production on migration and border regime. The contribution argues that migrant literature could be considered a form of cultural critique that can offer anthropologists important analytical insights on the institutional and political frameworks producing them as subjects in the public and policy spheres of mobility regimes.