My most recent book Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators argues that we need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm that prevails within global Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard’s concept of ‘post’ as the ‘future anterior’ (back to the future) the book sets up a concept of post-multiculturalism that goes back to salvage the elements within multiculturalism that have been forgotten in its contemporary denigration (hence the ‘recollections of the future’ in my title). Linking multiculturalism to cosmopolitanism suggests that contrary to earlier emphases, cosmopolitanism in its vernacular, demotic, and non-elitist sense imbues subjects with a sense of being uncomfortable everywhere rather than at home in the world. This critical stance intrinsically questions all notions of ‘home.’ In addition, when we contemplate migrant histories the emphasis most recently has been to root such histories in ‘everyday multiculturalism’ exclusively based on interviews as the only terrain of supposed authenticity. My paper will argue that including the (multilingual) literary and other cultural artifacts produced by migrants are an element missing from such migrant histories. Keynote lecture for Migration Histories Now workshop, 29 November 2019 at the Australian National University. The AMHN would also like to thank the ANU Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies for hosting the workshop and the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU Research School of Humanities & the Arts, The Freilich Project and Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research for generous funding.
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