Teaching Migration in Literature, Film, and Media

Essays on how to teach one of the most important issues of our time

People migrate to seek opportunities, to unite with family, and to escape war, persecution, poverty, and environmental disasters. A phenomenon that has real, lived effects on individuals and communities, migration also carries symbolic, ideological significance. Its depiction in literature, film, and other media powerfully shapes worldviews, identities, attitudes toward migrants, and a political landscape that is both local and global. It is imperative, then, to connect the disciplinary and theoretical tools we have for understanding migration and to put them in conversation with students’ experiences.

Featuring a wide range of classroom approaches, this volume brings together topics that are often taught separately, including tourism, slavery, drug cartels, race, whiteness, settler colonialism, the Arab Spring, assimilation, and disability. Readers are introduced to terminology and legal frameworks and to theories of migration in relation to Black studies, ethnic studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous studies.

This volume also contains discussion of the following texts, films, and other media: Ai Weiwei, Human Flow; Mati Diop, Atlantiques; Wapikoni Mobile; Nuruddin Farah, Links; Uwem Akpan, Luxurious Hearses; J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K; Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island; Orban Wallace, Another News Story; United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the Geneva Convention); Oscar Martínez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail; Antonio Ortuño, La Fila India; Marc Silver, Who Is Dayani Crystal?; Javier Zamora, Unaccompanied; Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions; Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Flee.