Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Current Issue

This article explores the embedded and embodied ‘culture of geographic mobility’ across contemporary visual artists’ careers and its impacts on their feelings towards mobility and home. This article uncovers the under-explored aspects about artists’ lifestyles, for whom geographic cross-border mobilities across Europe are a necessity throughout these artists’ careers. In addition to changes in mobility patterns, pace, motives over their careers, there are also changes in their feelings towards mobilities and home across their careers and as they become older (career and age wise). Mobile careers can often start with feelings of freedom and comfort in having mobile homes. However, the effects of having mobile careers long-term can result in feelings of ambivalence, tensions and anguish towards mobility vis-à-vis home. This longitudinal study draws upon two sets of interviews conducted eight years apart with the same fifteen contemporary visual artists from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They were first interviewed in 2013 at the emerging stage in their career and they were interviewed again in 2021 at the established stage in their career. The nexus between careers, mobility and home helps to expand the ‘mobilities paradigm’, by sharing new knowledge on contemporary visual artists’ mobilities and its effects on feelings of home across their careers.

To introduce the concept of hybrid fiction, this article critically investigates contemporary developments in migration media production. It explores a class of migration media content and elaborates on its composite-hybridized nature. The study originates from a mapping of 98 examples of digitally distributed media content (2014–21) aimed at charting their hybrid character by combining insights from genre theory, narratology and intermedial studies. The results highlight three overlapping levels of hybridization throughout the sample: medial, generic and rhetorical. Therefore, they reflect the emergence of a strand of content that, in pushing three different boundaries of conventional manifestations of fiction, challenges the uniformity of visual regimes of migrant ‘exclusion’. Hence, the article advances a politics of hybridity in media and migration by delineating the nexus between the agonistic, counter-hegemonic character of migration media content and its tendency to combine, layer and blend different rhetorical, generic and intermedial forms.

In this article, I argue that Bulawayo’s representation of precarity in her novel helps us decolonize representations of mobility in African literature. In Bulawayo’s novel, mobility undergirds the global presence of Africa and frames African identities in a cosmopolitan purview. Yet, the cultural trajectory of African migrants unveils practical realities within the nation state that shape expressions of cultural belonging in Afrodiasporic contexts. The novel’s presentation of poverty, abjection and dislocation limits the possibilities of an Afropolitan engagement with Darling’s experience in the diaspora. Her joyful, yet, precarious childhood in Zimbabwe and the illusion of an abundant life in the United States show that the postcolonial nation state and the US racial state remain unprecedented forces that constraint the fluidity of people of African descent’s identities. The metaphoric representation of her condition as a prisoner not only questions her mobility but also her difficult experience as a migrant in the United States underscores her struggles to belong in a racialized American society. Thus, the protagonist’s precarious position in her homeland and her host-land reveals the restrictive power of the state and challenges a romantic description of life in both the Global North and the Global South.

Since 2000, an exodus of Puerto Ricans leaving the island has reduced the local population by almost 20 per cent. One of the migratory waves of greatest concern is that of physicians due to its potential impact on Puerto Rico’s (PR) public health. Strategies to curtail their migration have overlooked the island’s unique cultural and geographic strengths that could encourage physicians to stay. This article, influenced by place attachment theory, explores the perspectives of physicians who have chosen to stay in PR. The presented data stems from qualitative interviews with 24 physicians. The findings underscore how place attachment, including an appreciation for PR’s geography and culture, influences their decision to stay. We discuss how it is crucial to integrate place attachment into any comprehensive strategy to retain physicians on the island, as it becomes an intrinsic part of their identities and lifestyles. Thus, emphasis should be placed on the environmental and social benefits of remaining in PR, not solely economic factors.

Indigeneity’s voluntary migrations and involuntary displacements amply testify to its mobility historically. And yet, settler-colonialism resists recognizing this fact – even suggesting that indigeneity loses its status as Indigenous by spatial and temporal relocation. This article contrasts settler-colonial and experiential frameworks of indigeneity and immigrancy to further add to efforts to more securely ground Indigenous peoples’ personhood and livelihoods in the world. Two main findings from this analysis include (1) indigeneity’s ‘inextricable’, ‘timeless’ and ‘immutable’ linkage of place, past and an unchanging sense of identity diametrically opposite to immigrancy’s ‘displacement’, ‘evolution’ and ‘mutability’ of ethnic identity as it moves ideally from immigrant toward citizen and (2) settler-colonialism’s ‘refusal to humanize’ people who never migrated (the enslaved and the Indigenous) compared to its virtually boundless faith in the possible ‘humanization’ of all immigrancy (the ‘melting pot’). These findings suggest that settler-colonialism views indigeneity as an unassimilable otherness – thus disclosing the limit and poor prospects of human rights discourses for sufficiently recognizing indigeneity outside the times and spaces settler-colonialism allots to it. Nevertheless, they also suggest fruitful changes of emphasis and existing models to learn from for better securing Indigenous personhood and its life-ways here and now.

This article addresses ongoing discussions regarding the material and cultural legacies of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It draws on texts produced by two individuals that were members of the Chilean artistic community that lived in exile in the GDR during the Chilean military dictatorship (1973–90). I argue that descriptions of musical activity and sonic memories within these texts offer a powerful counterpoint to some of the more prevailing assumptions that tend to position East German cultural history either as relic of material nostalgia or simply subsumed under capitalism after the period of German reunification. By positioning the ephemeral and unruly sonic traces of the Chilean exile community against mainstream narratives of GDR history, this article offers the possibility of examining and animating spaces subject to invisibility and disappearance in contemporary German memory.

Review of: Brexit and the Migrant Voice: EU Citizens in Post-Brexit Literature and Culture, Christine Berberich (ed.) (2022)

London: Routledge, 228 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-36770-882-5, h/bk, £35