A (i)migração imaginada: exilados mundanos, anjos cosmopolitas e diaspóricos da literatura migrante

Abstract

The thesis approaches the representations of migrations in the literature and the cultural debates around the migratory disseminations in contemporaneity. Are analyzed fictional works, especially those produced from the 1980s, which have in common the theme of characters conditions in transits, exiles, refugees, immigrants, foreigners, intellectuals and diasporic subjects that crossing borders, territories and rewrite nations and cultures. The role of “migrant literature" while potential locus of representation of tensive cultural changes and the circulation deadlocks of differences caused by the contemporary migratory movements are discussed in the paper, that inserts itself in a theoretical debate about the study of "migrant literature", addressing how the fictions inspired by collective and individual displacements represent alternatives of reinvention of cultural identities and questioning the usual forms of belonging. These border intercessors are considered "conceptual-characters", whose heteronyms can be the "critic and intelectual exiles" of Edward W. Said, "the lonely immigrant" of Joseph Conrad, "the angels and demons of migration" of Salman Rushdie, the "cosmopolitan discrepant" of James Clifford, the "poor cosmopolitan", of Silviano Santiago and Tayeb Salih, the "diasporic subject" of Derek Walcott and Stuart Hall, who shares interstitial culture conditions. The theoretical reference exposed in the first chapter also mobilizes philosophers, writers and thinkers who experienced the locus of exile and migration: Edward Said, Erich Auerbach and Theodor W. Adorno. In the following chapters are addressed the novel The Satanic Verses, of the indo-british writer Salman Rushdie, discussing the receptions of the book after the author's death sentence by the fatwa, launched by the then Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and seeking give visibility to the images of nomadisms of their conceptual characters in the metropolis, which remained, for two decades, in the vacuum left by the fatwa's shadow. Next, are analized examples of narrative that dealing with returned immigrants, a recurrent issue in post-colonial literatures, articulating the thought of Todorov in L‟Homme Dépaysé (1999) and Stuart Hall on Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1994). Are analyzed a work of the photographer Sebastião Salgado, the emblematic narrative Time to migrate to North, by the sudanese writer Tayeb Salih and the diasporic poetry on Omeros by Derek Walcott. In the texts that comprise the corpus of this thesis, the images of migrants allow mapping the process of subjects hyphenated by displacements – or the back-and-forth between the local and the global – not just as victims touched by global flows, but as those who suffer and enjoy the consequences of imigritude, actives participants and at the same time foreigners of the societies in which they live. It is argued that the immigrant in fiction and contemporary theories has become a “conceptual character” – the necessary philosophical figure, as Deleuze and Guattari – potentially expresses today's cultural territorializations.