Wayfarers in the Shadow: A Rambling Exploration of Migration Literature

Abstract

This dissertation aims to focus on the sociopsychological progression of numerous refugees and migrants through the analysis of several short stories written in English language and that are collected in projects that asses these experiences, such as The Refugee Tales series edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus, Shatila Stories translated by Nashba Gowanlock (2018) and Breach (2016) by Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, amongst others, thus providing a space for deep rumination on questionable migratory policies. The short stories of the wayfarers will allow to contrast real-life testimonies with the stages of migratory grief, the so-called “Ulysses syndrome”, and to address concepts such as “assimilation versus multiculturalism”, “acculturation versus adaptations” or “xenophobia and discrimination”. Thus, this dissertation is also meant to foster a space to explore innovative content associated to topics of migratory nature that represent highly controverted discussions in today’s world and society. The research methodology will be mainly of theoretical nature, using the interdisciplinary field of “border studies” – such as Mireille Rosello and Johan Schimanski’s Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (2017) or Doris Wastl-Walter’s The Routledge Research Companion to Border Studies (2011), among others – with the aim of relativizing and conceptually framing the stories to be analyzed, allowing the exploration of their cultural and geopolitical dynamism, having as a major objective to establish bridges between theory and reality as testified to by the “walkers”