Mediterranean Connections: Representing the Migrant's Journey in Le voyage des âmes by Mounsi
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
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 language | English |
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Title of host publication | Figures of the Migrant |
Subtitle of host publication | The Roles of Literature and the Arts in Representing Migration |
Editors | Siobhan Brownlie, Rédouane Abouddahab |
Place of Publication | New York |
Publisher | Routledge |
Chapter | 4 |
Pages | 56-72 |
Number of pages | 16 |
ISBN (electronic) | 9781003176213 |
ISBN (print) | 9781032008806, 9781032067902 |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2021 |
Publication series
Name | Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature |
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Publisher | Routledge |