Migration and Media: Introduction

Since its emergence as a discipline in the mid-twentieth century, scholars of media studies have identified human mobility as a historical phenomenon motivated and shaped by communication media. Building on their work, essays in this section explore the relationships between media and migration in literature and film in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries. How do different genres of literature (novel, poetry, comics) and film enable the representation and analysis of media and migration in specific historical situations? All the essays in this section identify a supplementary form of mediation within their objects, in each case connected to the realm of the aesthetic, which resist the determining impacts of technologized capitalist and government media.