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.

~ Josephine McDonagh, author of Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876

“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.

~ Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees

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.”

~ Bee Wilson, author of The Secret of Cooking

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.

~ Michael Witmore, author of Shakesperean Metaphysics

Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms

Edited by Natalya Din-Kariuki, Subha Mukherji, Rowan Williams

Contributors Faraj Alnasser, Aditi Anand, Anupam Basu, Clelia Bartoli, Yota Batsaki, Gillian Beer, Annabel Brett, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Valentina Castagna, Amit Chaudhuri, Supriya Chaudhuri, Nadina Christopoulou, Brian Cummings, Rosita D’Amora, Edmund de Waal, Olga Demetriou, Saifoudiny (Dine) Diallo, Valerie Forman, John Gallagher, Jonathan Gil Harris, Simon Goldhill, Mina Gorji, Akid Hassan, Gabriel Josipovici, Dragana Jurišić, Bhanu Kapil, Issam Kourbaj, TM Krishna, Angela Leighton, Sue McAlpine, Joe Murphy, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Joe Robertson, Claudia Roden, Mohamed Sarrar, Efi Savvides, Regina Schwartz, Rachel Spence, A.E. Stallings, Susan Stockwell, Carla Suthren, Marina Warner, Clair Wills, Pip Williams

FORTHCOMING Fall 2024

Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms brings together activists, artists, scholars, and migrants with diverse histories to explore what the experience of migration does with, and to, knowledge, and how its own ways of knowing find expressive form. As the volume’s authors think about physical and imaginative crossings, and the traversals and transactions of knowledge they entail, the book itself crosses and complicates disciplinary and formal boundaries and the barriers between critical and creative intervention. Crucially, it brings together voices and forms emerging out of the experience of dislocation with responses to the encounters it generates.

The volume’s discussions begin in the early modern world, and move freely across periods to dwell on the urgent experience of migrancy in our own times, while also responding to an urgent need to connect the local with the global experience of migrant knowledge and migrant aesthetics. Crossings stakes the claim that creative art, backed by humanities-based thinking, can meet the imaginative and ethical demands that the unknowable reality of mass displacement places on us, in a way that governments, institutions, and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. But aesthetic practice itself needs to be re-positioned if it is to rise to these political and human challenges, negotiating the points of friction between its own predilections and the matter of migration.

Crossings offers “migrant forms” – forms that cross boundaries naturally and are “knowing” about crossings – and offers as the means of this imaginative re-orientation a tool for activating a radical alternative to economic models of social benefit. Crossings takes its place in an emergent ecology of migrant forms, both speaking to and participating in that ecology.

Read the sample chapter “Crossings: Art and Life” by Subha Mukherji

About the Editors

Natalya Din-Kariuki is from Nairobi. Migration has played an important part in her family’s history: her maternal grandfather was a stowaway on a dhow from India to Kenya in the 1930s. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, where she works on the literary and intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on travel writing, transnational and transcultural encounters, and rhetoric and poetics. This work is published or forthcoming in journals, such as the Review of English Studies, Huntington Library Quarterly, and Textual Practice. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Leeds, the Folger Institute, the University of Edinburgh, and the Newberry Library.

Subha Mukherji was born in Kolkata, India where she grew up, and lives mainly in Cambridge in the UK. She is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and her interests and publications range across Renaissance English literature, early modern law and the theater, literary epistemologies, migration, and contemporary Indian art.

Rowan Williams was born in South Wales and taught Theology at Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, and Yale. From 2002 to 2012, he was Archbishop of Canterbury, and from 2012 to 2020, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge University. He has published widely on religion, literature, and politics, and was Chair of the charity Christian Aid for eight years. He now lives in Wales, and is Chair of the Peace Academy/Academi Heddwch. Recent books include, with Mary Zournazi, Justice and Love: A Philosophical Dialogue (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2021).