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Project

Transnational collaboration in contemporary refugee literature: authorship, textual effects, comparisons

This project studies the conceptual, textual and political implications of collaborative writing in a transnational context, i.e. involving authors with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It focuses on the increasingly prominent genre of refugee literature, in which a considerable number of recent publications are co-written by refugees and other authors, often (Western) professional writers or journalists who are not necessarily migrants themselves. By studying the context and mechanisms that shape the production of these writings, the project aims to redefine authorship as a multiple, transnational and situated activity. The project asks 1) why collaboration is particularly relevant for the production and circulation of refugee accounts, 2) how linguistic and cultural power asymmetries and diverging positionalities affect the relationship between the collaborators and 3) how this transnational exchange impacts on the content and form of the texts. My corpus draws on a cross section of collaborative refugee texts published from 2010 onwards and written in seven different languages, which I analyze from a comparative perspective, tracing recurrent narrative, thematic and formal patterns. In doing so, the project takes research in refugee and migrant writing into new directions, shifting the emphasis from the multiple affiliations of individual authors and their relation to the nation-state to a relational poetics of transnational collaboration.

Date:1 Oct 2022 →  31 Aug 2023
Keywords:Collaborative writing in transnational contexts, Refugee literature, Comparative literature
Disciplines:Comparative literature studies, Contemporary literature, Literary translation, Stylistics and textual analysis, Sociology of literary texts