Intertextuality and an Ethics of Coexistence

I’m happy to share a new publication: a commentary included in Academia and Cultural Production in Sweden: Postmigrant Trajectories, Alliances, and Negotiations, edited by Maja Povrzanović Frykman, Eleonora Narvselius and Cristine Sarrimo.

My text responds to Johanna Sellman’s chapter, “Moth Journeys and Butterfly Effects: Longing and Postmigrant Intertextuality in Johannes Anyuru’s De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar.” Sellman proposes a “postmigrant intertextual reading practice” as a way into the novel’s layered explorations of longing and belonging. I take up that proposition by asking a question that particularly interested me while reading her essay: can the act of linking distant texts, languages and histories itself become a way of practising an ethics of coexistence?

The commentary gave me the opportunity to think about intertextuality not simply as a literary device or a network of references, but as a practice of relation: a way of allowing apparently distant histories, voices and forms of experience to coexist without collapsing their differences. The volume as a whole brings together work from ethnology, migration studies and literary studies to examine trajectories through Swedish academia and cultural production, as well as questions of recognition, belonging, professional alliances and cultural exchange. The book is open access.