Migration and Labour Working Group – Roundtable 4: ‘Body’

The body is constantly in motion and change (Spinoza, Deleuze, Massumi); the body is in itself a border between the individual and the environment. The body can be also conceptualized as porous and dynamic, affecting and being affected by other bodies and objects in the world through movement and touch.

The aim of this roundtable is to explore new modes of conceptualizing the body in relation to migration and labour through its representations within these contexts in literature and art. We are also interested in the effects that literature and art can provoke in the bodies of readers, viewers, listeners and performers and the possibility of a non-verbal communication of the experience of labour and migration.

Some of the questions we aim to explore in ‘BODY’ include but are not limited to:

• Are the concepts of migration and labour related to the body as affective?
• How do the emotions and sensations that migrants experience affect their definition of labour and migration?
• Can the emotions and sensations that migrant workers writers experience on a bodily level affect their literary production in terms of both content and form?
• Are there specific artistic devices used in the representation of the body in migration and labour contexts?
• Are there connections in the representations of migrant bodies or bodies at work and representations of gendered bodies? (sex work, labour as in giving birth)