“Breaking the Frame:” The Role of Artmaking in Narratives of Migration and Diaspora

In this article, I examine two works of literature that re-imagine the narrative of migration through establishing a symbiosis between artmaking and the act of writing. My analysis of Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (1944) and Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Ministry of Pain (2006) will be developed by theorizing across the disciplines of literary criticism, the visual arts, and the field of transnational migration studies. This cross-disciplinary perspective focuses on a core theme: the re-imagining of human movement and its social, political, and cultural relationalities. I will demonstrate how Carrington and Ugrešić create a lexicon of migration, which resonates with Gayle Munro’s concept of migratory life as an evolving life, subject to “multi-layered affiliations” across geographical, cultural, and state boundaries (108). The literary works under discussion draw heavily on the visual imagination and the creation of complex textual montages to present this idea of the migrant’s evolving life, across time and space. It is a process that dovetails with a key tenet of transnational social field theory: the emphasis put on what Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller describe as the simultaneity of connection, which exists for migrants who combine “ways of being and ways of belonging” differently in specific contexts (1008). The perspective achieved is of migratory life as a kind of work-in-progress, open to more expansive interpretation than that found in much contemporary public discourse, which conflates issues of immigration, race, status, and asylum to the detriment of those living migratory lives. In my analysis, I will draw on the montage aesthetics developed by the writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin in the early part of the 20th century, in particular his use of Denkbilder, “thought-images.” Historically, as Gerhard Richter states, the Denkbild was conceived as a “brief, aphoristic prose text” (7). In the 1920s and 1930s, Benjamin transformed its narrative potential to examine the cultural and political processes of a world challenged by the rise of fascism. As Susan Buck-Morss argues, he foregrounds the interpretive power of images through his use of Denkbilder in order to “make conceptual points concretely [and] with reference to the world outside the text” (6). The