Introduction: Sociocultural and Literary Debates on Contemporary Migrant Typologies and Migratory Cartographies

Abstract

[Abstract] Back in the 1980s, British-Asian writer Hanif Kureishi asserted that “the immigrant is a kind of modern Everyman, a representative of the movements and aspirations of millions of people” (1981: 4). This assertion – later echoed in Kureishi’s début novel The Buddha of Suburbia: “the immigrant is the Everyman of the twentieth century” (Kureishi, [1990] 2009: 141) – has gained even more currency in recent decades, considering the growing scale of migration and its ongoing diversification in terms of patterns and flows. In our increasingly globalised and globalising world, we live amidst “a turbulence of migration” (Paspastergiadis, 2000), with old and new patterns of migration intersecting in complex and intriguing ways.