When the Migrant’s Perspective Takes Center Stage

E ven as border crises have intensified and travel bans have proliferated around theworld 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. “TheMigrant 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 colonialism, describing the latter as its own form of utopian migration. As she demonstrates in her readings of the notorious French author Michel Houellebecq and the more temperate Franco-Algerian Boualem Sansal, when that out-migration reverses and the formerly colonized subjects appear in Europe, apocalyptic fears of a Muslim planet arise. Only when the migrant’s perspective is adopted, as in the fiction of Nadeem Aslam and Mohsin Hamid, does the apocalyptic sensibility loosen its hold and allow for the emergence of the globalmigrant as a world citizen. Meanwhile, in “Strange Homelands: Encountering the Migrant on the Contemporary Greek Stage,” Fragkou gives an account of contemporary Greek docudrama that turns its attention to the migrant’s voice and language.2 She explains how recent works by Laertis Vasiliou, Thanasis Papathanasiou andMichalis Reppas, and Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris undercut nationalist assumptions of Greek standardization and superiority by incorporating Albanian, Bulgarian, and Georgian words, bodies, and motifs. The heteroglossic results make visible the presence of a multilingual population; in so doing, they disrupt the efforts at national cleansing associated with the Golden Dawn and other right-wing nationalisms.