Space, Borders, and Cognition in Urban Postmigration Literature

Borders are central to the urban postmigratory experience in divided cities. How do we use literary texts to make sense of borders, borderings and border experiences? This chapter argues that combining border poetics analysis with a cognitive approach will help us understand this question, pointing to how narratives not only describe urban borders but also act them out by using their own formal borders to involve readers. The chapter takes as its departure point a poem addressing urban spaces by Sarah Zahid, who grew up in Oslo as the child of Pakistani parents. It maps the poem onto the geographical and bordered spaces of Oslo, and these threshold spaces on to the bordered textual space of the poem, with a focus on how border crossings in the world of its speaker-protagonist and in its textual techniques involve various kinds of embodiment, movement, and cognition. It draws not only on 4E cognitive approaches (around Embodiment, Enactment, Extension, and Embeddedness) involving predictive processing, emotion, and kinesic cues, but also cognitive approaches to urban borders in recent work by James W. Scott, building on the psycho-semiotic approach of Luca Tateo and Giuseppina Marsico.