Migrants’ Self-Narrations as Cultural Critique: Exploring Political Subjectivities through Asylum Seekers' and Returnees’ Narratives and Literature

This chapter reflects on migrants' narrative starting from two self-published texts, one written in Italian by a Guinean asylum seeker for the Italian audience, and one written initially in Spanish and then translated in English by a Gambian living in Spain for a European and Gambian public. We want to reflect and discuss the representations of migration and migrants' expectations and aspirations as described in the two publications, analyzing how their different intentions and imagined audience shape them. The contribution aims at engaging with migrants' narratives to understand how they stem from specific social and political urgencies. In particular, the chapter will explore how the authors mobilize their experience to talk about undocumented migratory routes, the quest for international protection, the form of hampered mobility and marginalization they endure, and the relational worlds in which they are enmeshed and which they generate in their trajectories. In so doing, we argue that such publications offer a glimpse into the political subjectivities of migrants that need to be taken into account by anthropologists in their endeavor of knowledge production on migration and border regime. Through an in-depth engagement with these forms of self-narration, anthropologists could not only include native voices in their ethnographies but engage seriously on native arguments (Bonilla, 2015), envisioning ethnographic subjects not as sources of unprocessed data but as "knowledge producers in their own rights" (Restrepo and Escobar, 2005: 118) concerning the policies they are subjected to (Davis, 2013). The contribution argues that migrant literature could be considered a form of cultural critique that can offer anthropologists important analytical insights on the institutional and political frameworks producing them as subjects in the public and policy spheres of mobility regimes (Glick Schiller Salazar 2013).