Even as border crises have intensified and travel bans have proliferated around the world during the early 2020s, impressive new scholarship on the literature of migration has been opening prospects for new cosmopolitanisms. Recent essays by Nasia Anam, Marissia Fragkou, and Dominic Thomas all stress the importance of telling migration stories from the perspective of the migrants themselves. They each trace the path of a different diaspora (Muslim, Balkan, and African) and in so doing demonstrate how an ethnocentric and closed model of nationhood gives way to a more multidirectional, multicultural, and multilingual sensibility when the migrant’s perspective takes center stage.
“The Migrant as Colonist: Dystopia and Apocalypse in the Literature of Mass Migration,” Anam’s exploration of the tropes of apocalypse and utopia, is the most comprehensive of these three approaches to the migrant’s story.1 Anam places recent British and French novels envisioning Muslim immigrants in relation to European...
