Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T19:05:32.708Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 4 - Feminism at the Borders: Migration and Representation

from I - Frontiers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Jennifer Cooke
Affiliation:
Loughborough University
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores the role that literary texts can play in articulating a feminist approach to one of the twenty-first century’s most crucial and pressing issues: migration. Against the backdrop of significant hostility towards migration in popular, media, and governmental discourses in many locations around the world, the chapter investigates the way border crossings are depicted in Valeria Luiselli’s non-fiction book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, and in two prose poems: Warsan Shire’s ‘Conversations about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ and Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Five Measures of Expatriation’. It shows how the complex, rich, inventive use of language in the three texts works to emphasise the connections between state borders and other forms of social differentiation and oppression, including racialisation and women’s experiences of sexual violence. In this way, the texts represent the injustices and violence of contemporary bordering regimes, while also making a feminist case for the importance and necessity of migration and border crossing.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×