New Volume—Migratory Settings: Transnational Perspectives on Place

Edited by Alex Rotas and Murat Aydemir

A clunky and oxymoronic phrase, 'migratory settings' raises more questions than it answers. 'Migratory' indexes migration, the movement of people from one place on the planet to another. 'Setting' denotes emplacement, the manner or framework in which something, especially a jewel, a play, or a narrative, is mounted or set into place. Hence, 'migratory' alludes to movement, 'settings' to emplacement; the former indicates the 'real' political, social, and economic world, the latter an assembled scenery: fictional, staged, imagined, perceived, or aesthetic in some other way. How then can 'settings' and 'migratory' be relevantly combined with each other and productively inform one another?

Our combined titular phrase, we propose, invites a shift in perspective from migration as movement from place to place to migration as installing movement within place. Migration does not only take place between places, but also has its effects on place, in place. In brief, we suggest a view on migration in which place is neither reified nor transcended, but 'thickened' as it becomes the setting of the variegated memories, imaginations, dreams, fantasies, nightmares, anticipations, and idealizations that experiences of migration, of both migrants and native inhabitants, bring into contact with each other. Migration makes place overdetermined, turning it into the mise-en-scène of different histories.

Extending from migration, migratory traces the 'life' of migration in culture. Simultaneously, the migratory remains intimately tethered to particular settings. The oxymoronic tension between the two terms prevents the transcendence as well as the reification of either. Movement does not lead to placelessness, but to the intensification and overdetermination of place, its 'heterotopicality.' Place does not unequivocally authenticate or validate knowledge, but, shot-through with the transnational and the transcultural, exceeds it ceaselessly.

Our contributions take us to the migratory settings of a fictional exhibition; a staged political wedding; a walking tour in a museum; African appropriations of Shakespeare and Sophocles; Gollwitz, Germany; Calais, France; the body after a heart transplant; refugees' family portraiture; a garden in Vermont; the womb.


CONTENTS

'Heterochronotopical' Stagings
MIEKE BAL, Heterochronotopia
MAAIKE BLEEKER, Let's Fall in Love: Staging a Political Marriage
MURAT AYDEMIR, Staging Colonialism: The Mise-en-Scène of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, Belgium

African Translations and Transcontextualizations
PAULINA AROCH, Migratory Clichés: Recognizing Nyerere's The Capitalists of Venice
ASTRID VAN WEYENBERG, Antigone on the African Stage: "Wherever the Call for Freedom is Heard!"
SARAH DE MUL, Zimbabwe and the Politics of the Everyday in Doris Lessing's African Laughter

Gollwitz, Calais, Tahiti: 'Hostipitable' Places
ANNETTE SEIDEL ARPACI, Better Germans? 'Hostipitality' and Strategic Creolization in Maxim Biller's Writings
SUDEEP DASGUPTA, The Visuality of the Other: The Place of the Migrant between Derrida's Ethics and Rancière's Aesthetics in Calais: The Last Border
WIM STAAT, The Other's Intrusion: Claire Denis' L'Intrus

Reframing the Migratory
ALEX ROTAS, Looking Again at Rupture: Crossing Borders, Family Pictures
MARIA BOLETSI, A Place of Her Own: Negotiating Boundaries in Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place and My Garden (Book)
GRISELDA POLLOCK, Beyond Words: The Acoustics of Movement, Memory, and Loss in Three Video Works by Martine Attille, Mona Hatoum, and Tracey Moffat, ca. 1989.