Fitting into the critical discussion of mobility, movement, and migration, this lecture offers an intervention into this scholarly tradition through the lens of literature, poetics, and a movement-oriented politics. The main goal is to introduce a new conceptual framework through which migrant literature can be effectively analyzed – what I call a kinopoetics. The term itself is derived from Thomas Nail’s (2015) concept of ‘kinopolitics’, or a ‘politics of movement’, which suggests that regimes of social motion and circulation have created the social, economic, juridical, and material conditions for national and political formation; and thus the migrant emerges as the primary constitutive figure of social and political history.
Kinopoetics is extends the theoretical contours of kinopolitics into the realm of migrant, transnational, and diasporic literature in order to enliven the centrality of the migrant, and to affirm the affects of movement and mobility that diasporic and migrant texts produce. In this sense, kinopoetics emerges as both a method and an object of study; that is, it gives us a conceptual and theoretical lens that (re-)structures how we read and write about migrant literature and, at the same time, demonstrates the affects and poetics of movement embodied in migrant texts.
The structure of this lecture will trace the already-existing theoretical and critical background within a ‘poetics of migration’. Giving a broad (albeit not necessarily comprehensive) overview of the field - going through post-coloniality, creolization, minor literatures, and transformative poetics – I will demonstrate the manner in which kinopoetics departs from, yet also builds from, these constellations in a manner that is generative and productive for the study of migrant literatures. I will conclude, then, by mapping out in more detail the political and social stakes of a renewed poetics. In other words, I will insist on the vital political necessity of re-configuring the social logic and critical procedures built into the discourse on migration.
Moderation: Sigrid Thomsen
