Rewrite
Rewriting Migrants' Identities across Women's Literature

Overview

Female Migrants’ literature to guide the social cohesion policies

The questions of identity formation and reconstruction are crucial in today’s debate concerning migration, human rights, and gender equality policies in Europe.

The EU- funded Rewrite project will deepen our understanding of the European Pillar of Social Rights and rethink the EU’s integration and social cohesion policies. It will do this by examining migrant literary works produced by women during the last two centuries.

The project will conduct a comparative study on policies of integration and the consequences of deconstructing and reconstructing migrant-women identities.
Exploring self-reflexivity in migrant women writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, the project will identify turning points that are necessary for identity transformation.

Call for Papers [ESP]

701 KB

The project’s timeline will examine the body of migrant, exile, intercultural literature of women writers from the multidimensional analytical lens of the migratory career (as key for the identification of central turning points articulated in women’s heterogeneous biographies and in-between transformation spaces for self-realisation.

The core questions are: Which are the main dominant discourses (systemic) and experiences (individual) about race, class, gender roles, shaping migrant women identities and critical writings, linked to power/oppression relationships? Which are migrant women’s positioning and representations in-between spaces? Might be literature expression of identity construction processes in challenge of dominant writing and opinions? Rethinking identities is relevant for gender equality and social cohesion.

Rewrite aims to bridge the gap between gender-based human mobility and social change via the comparative analysis between the European integration policies and the role and impact on the simultaneous processes of identities de/reconstruction, by:

1. analysing existent emblematic novels from 20th and 21st centuries focused on two main dilemmas: identity and belonging; integration and exclusion;
2. creating a new body of critic women’s writings, “tradition much ignored due to the inferior position of women in male-dominated societies”, related to human mobility.

Rewrite’s aim is to become the bridge between academia, knowledge production by migrant women and life-writing as a psicosocial toll for the social change.

Fields of science

• social sciences, sociology, gender studies, gender equality
• social sciences, political sciences, political policies, public policies
• humanities, languages and literature, literature studies
• social sciences, sociology, demography, human migrations

Focus

Literary production of the 20th and 21st centuries on migration and displacement, exiled, refugee people’s testimonies through the autobiographical and auto-fictional life-writing, memoires and diaries.