Writing Migration: Introduction to the Worlds of Multilingualism

This introductory class will explore the work of writers, artists and filmmakers emerging from the global experience of migration in the 21st century and the new forms of hybridized expression they have invented to deal with their uprooting. How do migrant authors challenge and reshape their languages? What is the relationship between the polyphonic character of such writing and the struggle for identity or what one might call “migrantity”? Marcel Proust says “beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language”: shouldn’t literature created in multiple foreign languages be thus at least twice as lovely as that written in just one idiom? Taught in English.