“There are no cats in America!” - Szenen der Schiffsüberfahrt in Don Bluths “An American Tail” und Shaun Tans “Ein anderes Land” als Repräsentationen einer liminalen Migrationserfahrung

Abstract

This article focuses on the representation of the ship as an essential part of migration and migration narratives by analyzing the accounts of ship passages in Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival and Don Bluth’s animated film An American Tail. Both depict the ship as a very specific sphere in the migration process, a place of the in-between leading from one country to another and, in that sense, also from one community – or even one existence – to another. By applying the spatial concept of Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, as well as the ethnographic concepts of Arnold Van Gennep’s rites of passage and Victor Turner’s liminality and communitas, to the space of the ship as a social scenario, the article offers a perspective that helps define the specific qualities experienced on board and analyzes representations of migration narratives from a sociocultural and media-analytical perspective.

Keywords

• sea voyage
• migration
• passage
• In-between
• heterotopia
• liminality
• Jewish migration