Editorial: Migrants and Literature

Abstract

On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the new series of Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology, and also as our 50th issue, we start the year with the thematic issue "Migrants and Literature". In this interdisciplinary thematic issue we wanted to bring together three research fields – anthropology, migrations and literature. Inspired by the present relevance of the intensive migration flows since World War II, we have attempted to make a theoretical contribution by looking at migrations through the prism of literary works interpreted from an anthropological theoretical and methodological perspective. The anthropology of migrations is a long-established field with a significant body of theoretical and empirical research. The relationship between anthropology and literature has intensified since the 1980s, when many anthropologists recognized that literary works of fiction and non-fiction were rich in socio-cultural descriptions and analyses deserving anthropological interpretation. Literature dealing with migrants, their experiences and life stories, comprises numerous works that already form a distinct thematic corpus ranging from autobiographies, anthropological prose and essays to novels, stories and poems. This issue aims, on the one hand, to present a number of writers from Serbia and the former Yugoslavia who have emigrated and, on the other, to provide an anthropological analysis of literary works about migrants from Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, regardless of the time and the reasons of their emigration. By coincidence, all the authors writing for this issue have opted to write about writers and their works from the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.