Migration and Modernities ― The State of Being Stateless, 1750-1850

This collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the murky spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. These essays together traverse the globe, revealing the experiences - real or imagined - of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.

JoEllen DeLucia is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Women and Gender Studies at Central Michigan University.
Juliet Shields is Associate Professor at the University of Washington, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature.