Introduction: Literary Anthropology, Migration, and Belonging

What happens when authors thematize movement, migration, or “minority situations,” articulating notions of self, society, and belonging through narratives? The introduction interrogates what concepts including “minor literature,” “minority,” dialogue, hybridization, and historicity mean for the interplay between literature and reality. The assembled chapters use “interface ethnography” and “fieldwork on foot” in the close reading of a broad selection of literary sources and processes of dialogic engagement. The contributions discuss German-speaking Herta Muller’s perpetual minority status in Romania; Bengali-Scottish Bashabi Fraser and the potentiality of poetry; vagrant pastoralism and “heritagization” in Puglia, Italy; the self-representation of Norwegian and European Muslims in the acclaimed novel of Zeshan Shakar; the confident autobiographical narratives of Loveleen Rihel Brenna and the artist collective Queendom in Norway; the notion of the “immigrant” as a permanent guest in Spanish children’s literature; and Slovenian cross-Atlantic roots-searching in Argentina. Storytelling has generative and transformative potentials, and literary anthropology is well equipped to examine the multiple contexts that literature engages.