A New Vocabulary

Although the history of humanity is arguably the history of its global peregrinations, at no other time than today has migration so profoundly shaped our political imaginary and public discourse. As Achille Mbembe has written, “The government of human mobility might well be the most important problem to confront the world during the first half of the 21st century.”1 On the one hand, human mobility and any attempt to regulate it depend on geopolitical variables, economic calculations, and international treaties. On the other, migration is an experience that requires, both for displaced groups and for host communities, a constant effort to reimagine social relations, affective investments, and modes of belonging. In this context, literature has the peculiar ability to register the entanglements of collective histories and political conditions with the individualized experience of migrants, often challenging the ethnonationalist discourses..