Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities.

The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the exile as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.

Daniel Stein is professor of North American literary and cultural studies and vice dean for international affairs at the University of Siegen.

Geoffroy de Laforcadeis professor of Latin American, Caribbean and world history at Norfolk State University.

Page R. Laws is professor of English and dean of the Robert C. Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University.

Cathy Covell Waegner is an independent scholar.

Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape Editors Introduction

Section 1: Literary Interventions

Chapter 1: Recuperating the Black Family in Graphic Narrative: Tom FeelingssThe Middle Passage and Kyle BakersNat Turner

Daniel Stein

Chapter 2: Generational Doubling as Eth(n)ic Narrative Strategy: Annie ProulxsBarkskins and Yaa GyasisHomegoing

Cathy Covell Waegner

Chapter 3: As Much the Invader as the Native: Investigating Immigrant and Indigenous Family Ties in Wendy RosesItch Like Crazy

Ludmila Martanovschi

Chapter 4: Mothers/Lovers of Exiles: Women Characters in Dinaw MengestusAll Our Names

Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard

Chapter 5: The Securitized Migrant: Migrant Mobility and Kindred Alliances in Post-9/11 New York Novels

Isabella Karlsson

Section 2: Filmic Interventions

Chapter 6: Mother(less) Exiles: The New Womans Absence from the Migration of the Expressionists to Hollywood

Michele Rozga

Chapter 7: Go West, Young Men: Teutonic Myths and American Westerns Blazed Path for the Acceptance of Nazism in Germany

Cathy M. Jackson

Chapter 8: What Pain It Was to Drown: Quotidian Meets Tragic in Gianfranco RosisFire at Sea

Page R. Laws

Chapter 9: Shifting Affiliations: Kinship Formation through Othering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Christopher Hansen

Section 3: Civic Interventions

Chapter 10: Son, I Am Not Coming Here Anymore: Migrations, Loss, Separation, Trauma, and the Underground Railroad

Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander

Chapter 11: Contested Affiliations: The Migration of US American War Resisters to Canada

Sarah J. Grünendahl

Chapter 12: No Asylum from the Germans: Policies of Deterrence and the Early West German Refugee Movement

Andreas Kewes

Chapter 13: Contesting Home, Nation, and Beyond: The Digital Space of New Migrants from Post-Gezi Turkey

Mine Gencel Bek

Chapter 14: Religion, Family, Community, Difference: Immigrant Millennials in Cologne, Germany

Aprilfaye T. Manalang

Chapter 15: Space, Aliens, and the Race to Belong: Changing Geographies and Moving Borders in Europe and the Americas

Geoffroy de Laforcade