Mediterranean Connections: Representing the Migrant's Journey in Le voyage des âmes by Mounsi

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The recent migrant crisis in the Mediterranean has brought into sharp focus the potentially devastating consequences of the migrant’s journey. Of course, the Mediterranean has always constituted an important site of tense interaction and connection between Europe, Africa and the Middle East and, consequently, it has been a space across which people have always travelled. This chapter looks specifically at representations of the journey between Algeria and France, with particular focus on a text by Mounsi, Le voyage des âmes (1997), in which the motif of the journey takes on a particularly prevalent role. Drawing on both established and more recent theories of travel and mobility, the chapter will argue that depictions of the journey in the text have the ultimate effect of unsettling monocultural definitions of culture and identity, all the while emphasizing the potentially devasting consequences of migration. In this way, the text provides some nuance to the glorification of mobility by scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, highlighting instead the inhibiting effects of migration and the need to recognize the interdependence of mobility and immobility in today’s world.

Keywords

  • Migration, Literature, Mobility, Immobility, Mediterranean Sea
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFigures of the Migrant
Subtitle of host publicationThe Roles of Literature and the Arts in Representing Migration
EditorsSiobhan Brownlie, Rédouane Abouddahab
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherRoutledge
Chapter4
Pages56-72
Number of pages16
ISBN (electronic)9781003176213
ISBN (print)9781032008806, 9781032067902
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2021

Publication series

NameRoutledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
PublisherRoutledge
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