Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain offers a new approach to the cultural history of contemporary Spain, examining the ways in which Spain’s own self-conceptions are changing and multiplying in response to migrants from Latin America and Africa. In the last twenty-five years, Spain has gone from being a country of net emigration to one in which immigrants make up nearly 12 percent of the population. This rapid growth has made migrants increasingly visible in both mass media and in Spanish visual and literary culture. This book examines the origins of media discourses on immigration and takes the analysis of contemporary Spanish culture as its primary framework, while also drawing insights from sociology and history. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders introduces readers to a wide range of recent films, journals, novels, photography, paintings, and music to reconsider contemporary Spain through its varied encounters with migrants. It follows the stages of the migrant’s own journey, beginning outside Spanish territory, continuing across the border (either at the barbed-wire fences of Ceuta and Melilla or the waters of the Atlantic or the Strait of Gibraltar), and then considers what happens to migrants after they arrive and settle in Spain. Each chapter analyzes one of these stages in order to illustrate the complexity of contemporary Spanish identity. This examination of Spanish culture shows how Spain is evolving into a new space of imagination, one that can no longer be defined without the migrant—a space in which there is no unified identity but rather a new self-understanding is being born. Vega-Durán both places Spain in a larger European context and draws attention to some of the features that, from a comparative perspective, make the Spanish case interesting and often unique. She argues that Spain cannot be understood today outside the Transatlantic and Mediterranean spaces (both real and imaginary) where Spaniards and migrants meet. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders offers a timely study of present-day Spain, and makes an original contribution to the vibrant debates about multiculturalism and nation-formation that are taking

This book examines today’s massive migrations between Global South and Global North in light of Spain and Portugal’s complicated colonial legacies. It offers unique material on Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa in conjunction to transatlantic and transpacific perspectives encompassing the Americas, Asia, and the Caribbean. For the first time, these are brought together to explore how movement within and beyond these former metropoles came to define the Iberian Peninsula. The collection is composed of papers that study human mobility in Spanish-speaking or Lusophone contexts from a myriad of approaches. The project thus sheds critical light on migratory movement within the Luso-Hispanic world, and also beyond its traditional geo-linguistic parameters, through an eclectic and inter-disciplinary collection of essays, traversing anthropology, literary studies, theater, and popular culture. Beyond focusing solely on the geo-political limits of Peninsular space, several essays interrogate the legacies of Iberian colonial projects in a global perspective, and how the discursive underpinnings of these impact the politics of migration in the broader Luso-Hispanic world.

An acclaimed historian examines postwar migration's fundamental role in shaping modern Europe Migration is perhaps the most pressing issue of our time, and it has completely decentered European politics in recent years. But as we consider the current refugee crisis, acclaimed historian Peter Gatrell reminds us that the history of Europe has always been one of people on the move. The end of World War II left Europe in a state of confusion with many Europeans virtually stateless. Later, as former colonial states gained national independence, colonists and their supporters migrated to often-unwelcoming metropoles. The collapse of communism in 1989 marked another fundamental turning point. Gatrell places migration at the center of post-war European history, and the aspirations of migrants themselves at the center of the story of migration. This is an urgent history that will reshape our understanding of modern Europe.

Around the turn of 21st Century, Spain welcomed more than six million foreigners, many of them from various parts of the African continent. How African immigrants represent themselves and are represented in contemporary Spanish texts is the subject of this interdisciplinary collection. Analyzing blogs, films, translations, and literary works by contemporary authors including Donato Ndongo (Ecquatorial Guinea), Abderrahman El Fathi (Morocco), Chus Gutiérrez (Spain), Juan Bonilla (Spain), and Bahia Mahmud Awah (Western Sahara), the contributors interrogate how Spanish cultural texts represent, idealize, or sympathize with the plight of immigrants, as well as the ways in which immigrants themselves represent Spain and Spanish culture. At the same time, these works shed light on issues related to Spain’s racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spain’s economic crisis in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, the essays are a convincing reminder that cultural texts provide a mirror into the perceptions of a society during times of change.

This book discusses regional and continental integration in Africa by examining the management of migration across the continent. It examines borders and securitisation of migration and the challenges and opportunities that arise out of reconfigured continental demographics. The book offers insights on intra-Africa migrations and highlights how intra-continental migration creates socio-economic and cultural borders. It explores how these borders, beyond the physical boundaries of states, including the Berlin Conference-constructed borders, create cultural divides, challenges for economic integration and cross-border security, and irregular migration patterns. While the movement of economic goods is valued for regional economic integration, the mobility of people is seen as a threat. This approach to migration contradicts the intentions of true integration and development, and triggers negative responses such as xenophobia that cannot be addressed by simply managing the physical border and allowing free movement. This book engages in a pivotal discussion of these issues, which are hitherto missing in African border studies, by demonstrating the ubiquity and overreaching influence of various kinds of borders on the African continent. With multidisciplinary contributions that provide an in-depth understanding of intra-Africa migrations and strategies for enhanced migration management, this book will be a useful resource for scholars and students studying geography, politics, security studies, development studies, African studies and sociology.

New Voices of Muslim North-African Migrants in Europe captures the experience in writing of a fast growing number of individuals belonging to migrant communities in Europe. The book follows attempts to transform postcolonial literary studies into a comparative, translingual, and supranational project. Cristián H. Ricci frames Moroccan literature written in European languages within the ampler context of borderland studies. The author addresses the realm of a literature that has been practically absent from the field of postcolonial literary studies (i.e. Neerlandophone or Gay Muslim literature). The book also converses with other minor literatures and theories from Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Asians and Latino/as in the Americas that combine histories of colonization, labor migration, and enforced exile.

International migration presents the human face of globalization, with consequences that make headlines throughout the world. The Cross-Border Connection addresses a paradox at the core of this phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together in a variety of ways. In nontechnical language, Roger Waldinger explains how interconnections between place of origin and destination are built and maintained and why they eventually fall apart. “When are immigrants ‘us’? When are they ‘them’? Waldinger implores readers to reframe the debate from a before-after dichotomy to a new transnational approach, revealing migrants to be here, there, and in-between at all stages of their migration tenure...The book’s real strength is in the elegance of the author’s argument, supported by evidence that transnationalism itself is not static but an ongoing dialectic.” —R. A. Harper, Choice “The Cross-Border Connection is to be commended for putting substance into the black box of transnationalism, offering scholars a dynamic model to account for the ebb and flow of transnationalism in the real world and yielding testable propositions about the circumstances under which cross-border connections can be expected to expand or contract.” —Douglas S. Massey, American Journal of Sociology

This volume considers the Arabic and African diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking chapters extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.

This book focuses on varied forms of self-referential storytelling or life writing and its emergence as a democratic and inclusive genre, both globally and in India, and its intersections with history, fiction, memory, truth and identity. The book examines the practice of life writing and its scope for accommodating diverse voices, distinct identities, collaborations and non-hierarchical connections as it gives voice to oral, silenced and marginalized communities. It explores forms like auto/biographical fiction, digital storytelling, graphic memoirs, and testimonies of migration and exile, among others. The eclectic collection of essays in this volume draws attention towards the transformative possibilities of life writing as it engages with issues of resistance, recuperation, re-inscribing individual and collective memories, histories, and promotes an understanding of multicultural others. Focusing on the multiple ways in which the production, circulation, and consumption of life writing has helped to reimagine and redefine individual and collective identities in different cultural and geopolitical contexts, the collection breaks new ground by initiating a cross-cultural perspective in life writing studies. The book aims to encourage critical engagement with a vastly growing body of literature that has seen a publishing and translation boom in contemporary times, both globally and in India. With life writing emerging as a robust area of research, this edited collection provides a much-needed impetus to critically engage with issues of self-representation, memory and identity in recent times. This volume will serve as a significant and rich resource for university students, researchers, and academics of literature, comparative studies, cultural studies, history, indigenous studies and digital and media studies.