Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms

This remarkable collection of essays and dialogues illustrates the vibrancy and urgency of our emerging awarenesses of migrant knowledges and migrant forms. Through this lens, a truly diverse range of perspectives are brought to bear on such recognizable humanistic topoi as reflection, empathy, memory, and imagination – all of which are bound to the human experience of place. As the collection demonstrates, the mobility of place – not just persons or groups – is what allows thought itself to be flexible, dynamic, and occasionally true.

Crossings is moving, thought-provoking, and deeply original. This dazzlingly rich and genre-bending volume feels like wandering through a brilliantly curated museum or like having a series of urgent conversations with friends from all over the world. It is an exploration of migrant knowledge (as well as migrant suffering) from many angles, some poetic, some historical, some culinary, some political, all deeply current (or what Subha Mukherji calls “gut-wrenchingly present”). Crossings is essential reading for anyone who wants to explore some of what we all owe to migration: people, things, ideas, art, recipes, songs, languages and libraries. It moves deftly between big ambitious themes – how do cultures accommodate human difference? how can the displaced ever find home? – to small, telling details such as spoons in Syria made from bombs or the comfort of a mother’s jam. It centers and celebrates the voices of migrants themselves without glossing over the violent truth that, as Rowan Williams writes, not everyone’s voice gets heard and “not everyone survives the passage.”

When migrants move, they take things with them – memories, feelings, thoughts, things – an entire sensorium of experiences. There are profound losses, but there also gains. This beautiful cornucopia of essays, stories, poems, conversations, objects, and images lets us see the vital ways in which the world is unmade and remade by human migration. Crossings highlights the great variety of conditions under which people move and have moved in the past – some of them harrowing – and shows us what happens next. The works in this collection explore the possibility that art can, in Subha Mukherji’s words, “replenish refuge,” be a “kind of asylum.” This is a wonderfully crafted, inspiring assemblage of work by writers, artists, and scholars. Essential reading for all of us who wish to understand the condition of migrancy in the past and in the present – it gives us hope for a better future.

“The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” Hannah Arendt wrote of the reception that greeted refugees and migrants in the 1940s. Patently, it still does not. And yet, for all the grim cruelty of our current anti-migrant age, there is something else – a moving world, and a moving earth, rich, challenging, and constant. This beautiful and capacious collection of essays, artworks, interventions, and conversations brings two existences into stark and stunning relief. On the one hand, there is the arid monotony of push-backs, populist bilge, inchoate rage, and political cynicism. On the other, there is “migrant knowledge,” a way of knowing, being, and imagining that is open – that has to be open – to the reality of a shared, plural Earth. Like its authors and themes, this book crosses nations, forms, and disciplines. A landmark text at a moment when a new conversation about what it means to inhabit this land together is so desperately needed.

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