Feminism at the Borders: Migration and Representation

This chapter explores the role that literary texts can play in articulating a feminist approach to one of the twenty-first century’s most crucial and pressing issues: migration. Against the backdrop of significant hostility towards migration in popular, media, and governmental discourses in many locations around the world, the chapter investigates the way border crossings are depicted in Valeria Luiselli’s non-fiction book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, and in two prose poems: Warsan Shire’s ‘Conversations about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ and Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Five Measures of Expatriation’. It shows how the complex, rich, inventive use of language in the three texts works to emphasise the connections between state borders and other forms of social differentiation and oppression, including racialisation and women’s experiences of sexual violence. In this way, the texts represent the injustices and violence of contemporary bordering regimes, while also making a feminist case for the importance and necessity of migration and border crossing.