Migrations and Modernities: the State of Being Stateless, 1750-1850

This collection recovers a literary history of migration that, arguably, no scholar could achieve alone. Migrants have existed in the murky spaces between nations, regions, or ethnicities. Instead of organizing itself in relation to these categories, this collection brings together essays that traverse the globe, revealing the experiences—real or imagined—of eighteenth and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. These essays explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences. These frameworks were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative. Key Features • offers a comparative framework for understanding the modern history of migration and the aesthetics of mobility. • foregrounds interdisciplinary debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship • demonstrates how mobility unsettles the national, cultural, racialized, and gendered frames we often use to organize literary and historical study. • brings together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the emergence of modernity • emphasizes the globalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries