Collaborative Practices of Making Literature in Contexts of Displacement and Migration

I am currently a first-year PhD candidate on the inter- and transdisciplinary ERC Starting Grant Project COLLAB: “Collaborative Practices of Making Literature in Contexts of Displacement and Migration” at KU Leuven, Belgium under the supervision of Prof. Núria Codina and co-supervision of Prof. Tom Toremans. The working title of my thesis, still in its nascent stages, is “In-Group Collaboration in Postcolonial Contexts: Anthologies and the Remediation of Displacement”.

Within COLLAB, the thesis is centred in a context of comparative world literature focusing on authorship, mediation and transnational collaboration through a postcolonial lens. Expanding on the term “displacement” in the project’s title, this thesis explores the notion of displacement of peoples in the postcolonial anglophone world either by choice or force. It thus includes literary works by displaced people who might identify as economic migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and Indigenous peoples amongst others. Using the genre of the anthology, the thesis analyses and compares literary case studies of displacement in UK, Canada, and Australia.

The selected  anthologies are all examples of collaborative in-group editing and authorship by writers who share the same cultural or ethnic heritage and/or identity which provides ample scope to analyse in-group curation and literary remediation within displaced communities. The thesis comparatively compares how the anthologies display, contest and contribute to literary tropes of self-(re)determination, community (re)building, (re)placement and belonging in modern nation-state societies in which they have varying legal statuses and rights.

To carry out the analyses, literary methods of close reading and in-depth textual analysis of both the body of work as well as the paratexts will be conducted. Moving away from traditional literary studies methodologies, interviews with editors and authors may also be carried out later in the project, potentially employing elements of Indigenous research methodology with all interlocutors to do so which place emphasis on the importance collaborative nature of research with involved communities. The research is not without ethnographic reflection in which I consider my own positionality and power dynamics as a Western researcher of literature created in contexts of displacement.

Key words: displacement; migrant literature; indigenous literature; refugee literature; anglophone; postcolonial; collaboration; anthology