Introduction: Motherhood, Mobility, Migration in Twenty-First-Century Women’s Writing

Abstract

Despite the centrality of experiences of migration, exile, and displacement in our globalized world, there are surprisingly few literary narratives that tell the stories of mothers who mother on the move, who mother in or through several languages, across linguistic and cultural barriers, or who negotiate non-motherhood in transnational settings. This special issue seeks to right this imbalance by drawing attention to matrifocal and maternal narratives of migration, displacement, exile, expatriation, transnationality, and nomadism since they shed light on ways in which motherhood is negotiated in this relatively new reality. It explores the diversity of literary representations of migrant motherhood in contemporary women’s writing and reflects on the poetics of motherhood and mothering across literature in different cultures and languages. In this way, the special issue contributes to the understanding of motherhood in a contemporary globalized world by shedding light on what often falls outside of the Western discourses of motherhood and mothering, thus offering fresh ways of imagining and living motherhood that is agential, empowered, and relational.