Call for Abstracts/Articles for Special Issue “Postmigration Beyond National Borders”
Guest editors:
Anna-Lena Eick (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) &
Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
The Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (ISSN 2506-8709; www.jlic.be) offers an open-access peer-reviewed online publication platform to researchers who wish to explore various ‘crossings’ concerning media, genres and/or spaces. Targeted squarely at investigating the ‘in-between,’ the journal seeks contributions from scholars broadly covering medial, literary, generic, spatial and cultural crossings that bridge a plurality of potential discourses, modalities, and methodologies. This special issue, titled “Postmigration Beyond National Borders”, aims to enhance the understanding of the postmigrant as analytical framework within literary and cultural studies. We invite contributions that explore how interdisciplinary dialogue across fields such as postcolonial studies, sociology, media and theatre studies can provide new conceptual insights into the analysis of contemporary artistic representations of belonging, identity and mobility within a postmigrant framework that transcends national borders and cultural contexts.
The term ‘postmigrant’ (Sharifi 2018; Foroutan 2016, 2018; Schramm et al. 2019) has gained significant traction in the humanities and is used to describe societies shaped by ongoing migration and cultural transformation. The postmigrant paradigm was coined by Shermin Langhoff in the artistic-activist context of theatre to describe and empower the plural realities and lived experiences of second- and third-generation individuals in Germany (Langhoff 2018). Concurrently, the term has also been applied more broadly and in different cultural and societal contexts (Geiser 2015; Moslund and Ring-Petersen 2019; Coste and Kopf 2025). In establishing postmigration as a transcultural lens for ‘societal analysis’ (cf. Yildiz 2014: 22), however, it is important to reflect on its conceptual reach and adaptability to diverse socio-historical and cultural landscapes. Central to this is the need to critically consider which criteria should be used to identify a society as “postmigrant”.
Building on this, the Special Issue aims to explore the affordances and limitations of the notion of ‘postmigration’ for describing societal and cultural transformation processes and their reverberations in and across different countries across the globe. We will also probe and critically assess the heuristic potential of the postmigrant for analysing literary and cultural artefacts across media from an aesthetic angle. Enabling scholars to move beyond binary notions of ‘migrant’ and ‘native’ and to reveal how cultural identities are continually renegotiated within plural societies (Petersen & Schramm 2017), we wish to demonstrate how the postmigrant opens up new ways of understanding belonging, representation, and power across diverse national contexts.
With this Special Issue, we seek to advance the ongoing conceptual dialogue between postmigration and postcolonial thought. While the foundational interrelation between the two concepts has been addressed in recent research (Römhild 2021, Yildiz 2022; Yildiz and Rotter 2023), it has not yet been conclusively theorized what this means for the application of the postmigrant to different national and cultural contexts. To what extent does the analytical potential of postmigration depend on frameworks established by postcolonial theory – and how might its application shift in contexts where no explicit reverberation with a colonial past can be traced?
In line with the aim of exposing how different historical legacies continue to shape systems of knowledge and representation, we invite papers that address these or related questions:
- What are the implications of the postmigrant paradigm for literary and cultural studies? To what extent is postmigration dependent on, or derived from, postcolonial thought, and where might it constitute an independent analytical paradigm?
- In what ways does a postmigrant perspective make visible and challenge epistemic violence and dominant systems of knowledge that continue to be shaped by (amongst other) colonial legacies?
- What are the potential (methodological) pitfalls of transferring the postmigrant concept to various disciplinary and socio-cultural contexts?
The range of relevant cultural forms and practices includes but is not limited to poetry, porse, drama, theatre, protest performances, dance, opera, film, television, and multimedia or digital artefacts.
Please send an abstract of maximum 500 words (in English and, if applicable, also in the language of your article, i.e. Dutch, French or German) and a list of 5 keywords (in the same (two) language(s)) and a 100-word author bio (in English only) to Janine.Hauthal@vub.be and to aeick@uni-mainz.de by 1 December 2025.
The deadline for full articles will be 1 March 2026. Articles should be between 5,000 and 6,000 words long (references and footnotes included) and can be written in Dutch, English, French or German. JLIC supports textual as well as multi-media formatting. All work submitted to JLIC should reference and be formatted according to its Author Guidelines. Articles may be submitted in Word format. Figures, video and audio files etc. should be saved separately from the text. Potential contributors should bear in mind that a two-stage review process is envisaged for full essays. In the first stage, articles will be reviewed by the guest editors. In the second stage, articles will be double-blind peer-reviewed by at least one external anonymous expert referee.
JLIC considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that:
- the manuscript is your own original work, and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own previously published work.
- the manuscript has been submitted only to the Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings; it is not under consideration or peer review or accepted for publication or in press or published elsewhere.
- the manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, libellous, obscene, fraudulent, or illegal.
- the author has obtained the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in their article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your article for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.
Bibliography
Coste, Marion, and Martina Kopf, eds. Postmigration and Postcolonialism / Postmigration et postcolonialisme: Comparative Perspectives on French- and German-Language Literatures and Music / Perspectives comparées sur les musiques et littératures franco- et germanophones. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025.
Espahangizi, Kijan. Der Migration-Integration-Komplex: Wissenschaft und Politik in einem (Nicht-)
Einwanderungsland, 1960-2010. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2022.
Foroutan, Naika. “Postmigrantische Gesellschaften.” In Einwanderungsgesellschaft Deutschland, edited by Hans Ulrich Brinkmann and Martina Sauer, 227-54. Berlin: Springer, 2016.
———. Postmigrantische Gesellschaft: Ein Versprechen der pluralen Demokratie. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018.
Geiser, Myriam. Der Ort transkultureller Literatur in Deutschland und in Frankreich: Deutsch-türkische und frankomaghrebinische Literatur der Postmigration. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015.
Langhoff, Shermin. “Nachwort.” In Postmigrantische Perspektiven: Ordnungssysteme, Repräsentationen, Kritik, edited by Naika Foroutan et al., 301-10. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018.
Moslund, Sten Pultz, and Anne Ring Petersen. “Introduction: Towards a Postmigrant Frame of Reading.” In Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition, edited by Moritz Schramm et al., 67-74. London: Routledge, 2019.
Petersen, Anne Ring, and Moritz Schramm. “(Post-)Migration in the age of globalisation: new challenges to imagination and representation.” Journal of Aesthetics &Culture, vol. 9, no. 2 (2017): 1–12.
Petersen, Anne Ring. Postmigration, Transculturality and the Transversal Politics of Art. London: Routledge, 2024.
Römhild, Regina. “Postmigrant Europe: Discoveries Beyond Ethnic, National, and Colonial Boundaries.” In Postmigration: Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe, edited by Anna Meera Gaonkar et al., 45-55. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021.
Schramm, Moritz. “Jenseits der binären Logik: Postmigrantische Perspektiven für die Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft.” In Postmigrantische Perspektiven: Ordnungssysteme, Repräsentationen, Kritik, edited by Naika Foroutan et al., 83-94. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018.
———, Sten Pultz Moslund, Anne Ring Petersen, Mads Gebauer, Hanne C. Post, Søren Vitting-Seerup, and Frederik Wiegand, eds. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition. London: Routledge, 2019.
Sharifi, Azadeh. “Multilingualism and Postmigrant Theatre in Germany.” Modern Drama vol. 61, no. 3 (2018): 328-51.
Yildiz, Erol. “Postmigrantische Perspektiven: Aufbruch in eine neue Geschichtlichkeit.” In Nach der Migration: Postmigrantische Perspektiven jenseits der Parallelgesellschaft, edited by Erol Yildiz and Marc Hill, 19-36. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014.
———. “Vom Postkolonialen zum Postmigrantischen: Eine neue Topografie des Möglichen.” In Postkolonialismus und Postmigration, edited by Ömer Alkin and Lena Geuer, 71-99. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022.
———, and Anna Rotter. “Postcolonialism and Postmigration: Re-mapping the Topography of the Possible.” Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture vol. 14, no. 1 (2023): 19-35.