Writing Migration through the Body

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction: ‘Trans-Scripts’

   • Emma Bond

   Pages 1-28

3. ‘Signing with a Scar’: Inscriptions, Narration, Identity

   • Emma Bond

   Pages 29-70

4. Trans-gender, Trans-national: Crossing Binary Lines

   • Emma Bond

   Pages 71-109

5. Trans-national Mothering: Corporeal Trans-plantations of Care

   • Emma Bond

   Pages 111-153

6. Revolting Folds: Disordered and Disciplined Bodies

   • Emma Bond

   Pages 155-196

7. Absent Bodies, Haunted Spaces

   • Emma Bond

   Pages 197-237

8. Afterword

   • Emma Bond

   Pages 239-253

9. Back Matter

   Pages 255-283

   PDF

Writing Migration through the Body builds a study of the body as a mutable site for negotiating and articulating the transnational experience of mobility. At its core stands a selection of recent migration stories in Italian, which are brought into dialogue with related material from cultural studies and the visual arts. Occupying no single disciplinary space, and drawing upon an elaborate theoretical framework ranging from phenomenology to anthropology, human geography and memory studies, this volume explores the ways in which the skin itself operates as a border, and brings to the surface the processes by which a sense of place and self are described and communicated through the migrant body. Through investigating key concepts and practices of transnational embodied experience, the book develops the interpretative principle that the individual bodies which move in contemporary migration flows are the primary agents through which the transcultural passages of images, emotions,ideas, memories – and also histories and possible futures – are enacted.

• transnational literature
• Italian literature
• migration studies
• mobility studies
• mobility literary studies
• diaspora
• body studies
• corporeal studies

“Writing Migration Through the Body offers a compelling analysis of contemporary narratives of transnational migrations by way of an innovative focus upon embodied experience. By placing emphasis on agential corporeality, Bond examines the body as a “liminal, multi-faceted and generative space” which reroutes the bounded contours of the nation and conceives identity formation as “in-transit,” intersubjective and transnational. The narratives of “migration and diaspora” inflect the Italian language through descriptions of spatial and temporal movements. While these various histories of migrant mobilities, including violent displacements, persist as bodily traces, Bond attends to the narrative capacities of the body to reinscribe these traces, and thereby access “new artistic and creative constellations of mobility.” Engaging phenomenology, affect theory and mobility studies, Bond offers theoretically nuanced readings of migratory experiences as detailed through bodily inscription; trans-body subversions of gender binarism and “categories of home and belonging”; the transnational maternal body; surgical transformations; and the spectral body. ” (Shelleen Greene, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, UCLA, USA)

• University of St Andrews , St Andrews, UK

  Emma Bond

Emma Bond is Senior Lecturer in Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her previous publications include Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini (2012), and the co-edited volumes Freud and Italian Culture (2009), Il confine liquido: rapporti letterari e interculturali fra Italia e Albania (2013), Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative (2015) and Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Culture (2016).

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