Feeling the city: migrant narratives and urban space (original) (raw)

Narratives of flight often depict cities and cities are often considered central to the imaginary of refugees. How is the city "felt" in these narratives and how do they portray the ways in which subjectivities are shaped in urban space? What is the role of public spaces and performances in staging narratives of colonial violence and displacement? How do the haunting returns of the traumatic past reverberate in these spaces? Exploring these questions in the context of Western colonialism and the Arab Spring, this special issue offers four studies that discuss the impact of colonialism and displacement on the formation of subjectivities in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, among other factors. The aim of the issue is twofold: apart from focusing on the role cities play in staging sometimes multiple layers of contested traumatic memories, articles also investigate the significance of affect in intersubjective encounters set in urban locations. Literary works, theatrical performances, installations, and protest marches are analysed in an interdisciplinary framework, which foregrounds the diverse yet overlapping emotions that haunt urban narratives of colonial trauma and migration. Following in the wake of Lisa Blackman, John Cromby, Derek Hook, Dimitris Papadopoulos, and Valerie Walkerdine, we define subjectivity as "the experience of the lived multiplicity of positionings" (Blackman et al. 2008, p. 6). The articles in the issue explore how subject positions are affected by the experience of colonialism and dislocatedness. Contributions focus on historical and social issues such as Paris and the massacre of Algerian protesters on October 17, 1961 (Christine Quinan); New York and the unseen experiences of illegal migrants (Aparajita Nanda); Malmö and its Community Theatre used for performing migrant narratives (Tegiye Birey); Leipzig and protest actions staged at its Main Station (Elisabeth Kirndörfer). The concept of the postcolonial city (McLeod 2004; Varma 2012), haunted by the colonial past and memories of violence, is central to Quinan's argument, while Nanda reads New York as a neocolonial metropolis where a new form of slavery prevails. Birey and Kirndörfer, on the other hand, explore how immigrants and refugees