Making Migrant Voices Heard through Literature: How Collaboration is Changing the Cultural Field

Project Information

COLLAB

Grant agreement ID: 101076847

DOI

10.3030/101076847

EC signature date 16 December 2022

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 497 620,00

EU contribution

€ 1 497 620,00

Coordinated by

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COLLAB (Making Migrant Voices Heard through Literature: How Collaboration is Changing the Cultural Field)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This project studies collaborative practices of making literature in contexts of migration and displacement. It aims to analyze 1) the social practices and relations that take place when writing is no longer understood as a solitary activity, 2) the textual effects and expanded notions of authorship emerging from multilingual, collaborative and transnational literary production and 3) the circulation mechanisms used to publish transnational narratives and create new forms of cultural agency. The project consists of three lines of research that explore how transnational collaboration changes the cultural field and creates spaces for literary participation for authors with multiple belongings, while also attending to the asymmetries, limitations and tensions that go hand in hand with such processes. The first line of research uses ethnographic methods to study small-scale literary initiatives in European cities that foreground migration and run creative writing workshops to facilitate social encounters and cross-cultural dialogue. The second line of research focuses on the genre of the anthology and on co-authored texts to analyze how stories of migration and displacement are mediated, paying particular attention to narrative, thematic and formal patterns and potential power dynamics linked to the context of production and multiple authorship. The third research strand looks at how independent presses make use of the sharing economy and the digital medium to promote marginalized writers, contribute to more plurality in the publishing industry and foster more direct interactions with the publics. Through this multifaceted approach, the project follows the trajectories of literary texts from the ground up and valorizes forms of creative work that are often overlooked in academic scholarship.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In order to study the social practices surrounding collaborative writing in contexts of migration, we have conducted ethnographic fieldwork at selected sites from six European cities, doing participant observation at various literary events and writing workshops. We conducted interviews with writers, workshop participants, cultural workers and staff at civil society organizations to understand their motivations and experiences engaging in literary production and the role that writing with others plays in shaping their sense of belonging. We have gained clear insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of collaborative, bottom-up literary production. When the texts emerging from these events are available, we have also conducted close readings, focusing on the role of multilingualism, place and migration. This ethnographic approach to literary production was at the core of the international conference “Polyphony and Silence: Counter-hegemonic Writing Practices, Migration, and Multilingualism”, which we organized in May 2025. A special issue emerging from the conference is currently in preparation.

Textual analysis has also been a key component of the subjproject concerned with transnational authorship and the poetics of collaboration. For the study of the genre of the anthology, we have put together a corpus of 13 anthologies across several postcolonial locations that emerge from situations of displacement either by choice or force. These texts are examples of collaborative alliances and practices of community-building that and enable us to analyze curation and literary remediation within displaced communities from a comparative perspective. Apart from the anthology, we have also analyzed a linguistically varied sample of collaborative texts written in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Dutch. These include works co-authored by authors with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, often refugee authors and Western (professional) writers, as well as single-authored texts that emerge from encounters with displaced or exiled authors and retell their experiences. The focus of the analysis has been on the different kinds of asymmetries (age, gender, legal status, linguistic fluency, geographical location, cultural capital) embedded in the production and their textual effects. The international conference “Authorship in a Global and Transnational Context”, which we organized in May 2024, highlighted the importance of expanding notions of authorship beyond national and linguistic singularity. An edited volume on the same topic is currently in preparation.

For the study of the collaborative circulation of literary texts, especially narratives of migration, we have built a database of small publishers in the Anglophone and Hispanophone market committed to cultural change, focusing on their funding models, digital presence and editorial policies. We have also analyzed digital epitexts and textual material of a broad sample of their publications and gathered other sources (interviews, public statements) that offer new insights into the social engagements of contemporary small presses. The analysis of these materials, alongside with the interviews that we will conduct with selected practitioners, enable us to understand the role of small-scale publishing in democratizing and diversifying literary culture. The workshop “The Politics of Small Scales. Digital, Economic, Social, and Aesthetic Transformations of Contemporary Presses”, which will take place in May 2026, will explore these questions from a cross-cultural perspective.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Transnational collaboration and bottom-up literary production in contexts of migration remain a largely unexplored topic. The COLLAB project provides the first systematic study of this phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. It highlights the role of small-scale projects and civil society organizations, which fall outside the traditional scope of literary studies, in dynamizing the cultural field. The ethnographic study of the social practices of collaborative writing constitutes another important methodological and theoretical innovation for literary studies, as it goes beyond the discipline’s focus on close reading and matters of representation and demonstrates the role of literature in the formation of transnational communities and solidarities. COLLAB also expands traditional definitions of authorship based on individual and national singularity by shedding light on the multilingual and transnational networks through which literature is made. By studying how the conditions of production translate in textual effects, the project enriches contextual approaches to literary texts that have typically privileged macro-scales of analysis linked to national categories. Finally, COLLAB contributes to the fields of publishing studies and the sociology of literature through its focus on independent publishers, whose international orientation, political commitments on a local and global level and uses of the digital medium challenge the opposition between large-scale conglomerate publishing and small-scale initiatives.

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