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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 it thinks 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 it and to the encounters it generates.

Our discussions begin in the early modern world, and move freely across periods to dwell on the urgent experience of migrancy in our own times. We also respond to an urgent need to connect the local with the global experience of migrant knowledge and migrant aesthetics. The book 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; it also needs to negotiate the points of friction between its own predilections and the matter of migration.

This book offers “migrant forms” – forms that cross boundaries naturally and are “knowing” about crossings – and offers as the means of this imaginative re-orientation and 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 it and participating in it.

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 including 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 where she grew up, and lives mainly in Cambridge. She is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Her interests and publications range across Renaissance English literature, early modern law and the theatre, literary epistemologies, migration, and contemporary Indian art.

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