Einleitung

This volume brings together contributions from the international conference "Literatur zwischen Migration und Globalisierung. Formen der Komplexität in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur", which took place in May 2022 at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. It aims to reflect on the literature of migration of the last thirty years and to situate it in the increasingly complex world of our globalised present, crossed by the movements of people and cultures. The reflections of the individual essays take, as point of departure, the common observation that the literature of (post)migration is characterised by careful linguistic research and radical aesthetic experimentation, capable of interrogating our intercultural reality and of restoring a likewise complex image of the world and of society. The contributors that have converged in the present volume focus on examining the issues of complexity and identity, which, in the texts they discuss, are inextricably linked to the narration of spaces, borders, and movements. In the works of Uljana Wolf, Olga Grjasnowa, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Michael Stavarič, Terézia Mora, Emilia Smechowski, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Sasha Marianna Salzmann, the literary language variously becomes a means to explore new possibilities of meaning, to recover what has been erased, to reconstruct the biographical stratifications inscribed in the bodies, to feel at home in a foreign world, to criticise the historical memory of society, to register bilingualisms, conflicts, and ‘in-betweenness’, and hence to narrate the new forms of identity, of hybrid identity, of postidentity, and of gender identity that are formed as a result of first, second, or third generation migrations and in correspondence with precise geographical and human spaces.