Mobility, Agency, Kinship

Thisvolume offers new perspectives on the ways in which migrants use storytellingpractices and kinship formations in order to navigate and modify spaces ofsovereignty, and thus to re-write narrativesportraying them as helpless andpassive victims. It provides one of the first investigations thatassembles multidisciplinarycontributions to look beyond individual acts of migrant agency and toward theentanglements of individual and collective agency, formations of kinship structures,and feelings, expressions, and representations of community and(multiple) belonging(s). Thecontributions explore the interplay between agency, kinship, and migration fromvarious fields, including sociology, psychology, philosophy, border studies, genderand queer studies, postcolonial studies,ecocriticism, film and media studies, andliterary and cultural studies - with a special focus on interdisciplinary narrativetheory. They address real and imagined assertions of migrant agency and kinshipformations; draw on empirical research, interviews, and accounts of livedexperiences; and analyze the role of narrative, media, and technologies inartistic, literary, and cinematic representations of migrantagency andkinship. By probing migrant identity discourses in different cultural andmedial contexts, the contributions examine how narratives negotiateand challenge the unequal distribution of mobility,resources, andvulnerability that preconfigures many migrant lives; they also discussnarrative devices, storytelling techniques, and other representationalstrategies that migrants employ, as well as technologiesthatthey draw on, to lay powerful claims on space and citizenship and toeschew established scripts of victimhood. As such, the volume addressesand embraces the tensions between vulnerability and agencythat come tothe fore when we try to understand the different ways in which migrants shape,and are shaped by, their (trans)local, material, economic, affective, social, cultural,and political realities.