Writing Migration through the Body (Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and

Writing Migration through the Body builds a study of the body as a mutable site for negotiating and articulating the transnational experience of mobility. At its core stands a selection of recent migration stories in Italian, which are brought into dialogue with related material from cultural studies and the visual arts. Occupying no single disciplinary space, and drawing upon an elaborate theoretical framework ranging from phenomenology to anthropology, human geography and memory studies, this volume explores the ways in which the skin itself operates as a border, and brings to the surface the processes by which a sense of place and self are described and communicated through the migrant body. Through investigating key concepts and practices of transnational embodied experience, the book develops the interpretative principle that the individual bodies which move in contemporary migration flows are the primary agents through which the transcultural passages of images, emotions, ideas, memories - and also histories and possible futures - are enacted.

Emma Bond is Senior Lecturer in Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her previous publications include Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini (2012), and the co-edited volumes Freud and Italian Culture (2009), Il confine liquido: rapporti letterari e interculturali fra Italia e Albania (2013), Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative (2015) and Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Culture (2016).

1.      1. Introduction. 'Trans-scripts'

2.      Chapter 2. 'Signing with a scar': Inscriptions, Narration, Identity

2.1  Introduction

2.2  Skin Knowledge

2.3  Skin Memory

2.4  Skin Stories

2.5  Conclusions

3.      Chapter 3. Trans-gender, trans-national: Crossing binary lines

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Out in public: Locating the trans- self

3.3 Vergine giurata

3.4 Princesa

3.5 Blackass Fairytales: A drift toward cyborg conclusions

4.      Chapter 4. Trans-national mothering: Corporeal trans-plantations of care

4.1 Introduction

4.3 Interrupted maternity

4.4 Substitutive mothering

4.5 Conclusions

5.      Chapter 5. Revolting folds: Disordered and disciplined bodies

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Disordered consumption

5.3 Hard bodies

5.4 Conclusions

6.      Chapter 6. Absent bodies, haunted spaces

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Linguistic hauntings: Specters of nation spaces

6.3 Trans-national memory and haunting commemorations

6.4 Conclusions

7.     7. Afterword