Postmigrant Literary History

Post-migrant literary history deals with the role of literature in the migration debates that have characterised many European societies for decades. It adopts a post-migrant perspective, i.e., it views migrants and their descendants as part of the society in which they live, without losing sight of social inequality. Writing literary history from this perspective means, first of all, recognising that writers were of central importance for the imagination of homogeneous nations, which led to the exclusion of immigrants and their descendants. At the same time, immigrants and their descendants were able to overcome the borders they were confronted with earlier in literature than in politics. Their resulting recognition as authors in turn enabled them to be recognised as relevant voices in social debates about migration. How does such an approach change the view of Austrian literary history? From the post-war period until the 1980s, literary actors in Austria made a decisive contribution to building an Austrian nation, culture and identity. In the course of this nationalisation process, they installed four mechanisms of exclusion. These concerned the thematic, literary and legal dimensions of literary production in the 1950s. Linguistic exclusion followed in the 1960s. As a consequence, hardly any immigrants were recognised as authors in Austria in the 1970s and 1980s unlike in the late 1940s and 1950s. Since the 1990s, authors have been resisting this marginalisation. Vladimir Vertlib was one of the first to overcome the linguistic boundary that became established in the process of nationalisation. He broke the silence about immigration that prevailed in Austrian society and literature until the 1990s. Dimitré Dinev was able to build on Vertlib`s achievements. He is interested in the many voices that lie behind the silence that Vertlib thematises in his work. Dinev achieved a breakthrough for the topic of immigration in the Austrian literary field. However, in response to his success critics coined the term immigrant literature, which perpetuated the demarcation against Austrian authors. Julya Rabinowich and Anna Kim question such demarcations towards immigrants and their descendants not only in literature, but in principle. They use literary means to call for a distrust of simplistic migration narratives and at the same time push for a differentiation of the topic of immigration in their works. Rabinowich puts women at the centre of her novels, where previously the focus was mainly on men. Anna Kim focuses attention on the special situation of people of colour.