Forum: Movement in the Americas; Introduction: Fugitivity, Futurity, and a Moving Pedagogy

Abstract

"Six scholars from Brazil, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United States have contributed essays to this conversation tracing movement as an underlying theme in the literatures of the Americas that can be revealed by comparative readings. We focus our analyses on auto/biographical narratives and constructions of the self in relation to historic and contemporary movements, whether forced or chosen. The multivoiced format extends and reflects transnational discourses on life writing and generates an assessment of the role of movement in auto/biographical literatures of the Western Hemisphere.
For us, “movement” refers not only to people on the move, to the biopolitical mass mobilization and management of populations in distinct and interrelated phenomena including migration, diaspora, slavery, dispossession, incarceration, and border fortification. It also points to the singular, smaller-scale, sometimes almost imperceptible actions and traces of bodies, texts, images, and sounds “in motion"... to the circulation and remediation of life texts across borders and through zones of cultural and political power and disempowerment...; and to the possibilities of concerted collective action and solidarity that are motivated by dreams of social and political transformation."