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Space, Borders, and Cognition in Urban Postmigration Literature

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Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism

Part of the book series: Literary Urban Studies ((LIURS))

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Abstract

Borders are central to the urban postmigratory experience in divided cities. How do we use literary texts to make sense of borders, borderings and border experiences? This chapter argues that combining border poetics analysis with a cognitive approach will help us understand this question, pointing to how narratives not only describe urban borders but also act them out by using their own formal borders to involve readers. The chapter takes as its departure point a poem addressing urban spaces by Sarah Zahid, who grew up in Oslo as the child of Pakistani parents. It maps the poem onto the geographical and bordered spaces of Oslo, and these threshold spaces on to the bordered textual space of the poem, with a focus on how border crossings in the world of its speaker-protagonist and in its textual techniques involve various kinds of embodiment, movement, and cognition. It draws not only on 4E cognitive approaches (around Embodiment, Enactment, Extension, and Embeddedness) involving predictive processing, emotion, and kinesic cues, but also cognitive approaches to urban borders in recent work by James W. Scott, building on the psycho-semiotic approach of Luca Tateo and Giuseppina Marsico.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The poem “alle må forlate toget” by Sarah Zahid (2018b) is reproduced in translation by kind permission of the author and the publishers Flamme forlag.

  2. 2.

    “den forenklede / tradisjonelle / grensen” (Zahid 2018b).

  3. 3.

    “kyssa / nøkkelen traff meg / i panna” (Zahid 2018b).

  4. 4.

    “jeg sovna […] / da mannen […] / vekket meg / sa jeg” (Zahid 2018b).

  5. 5.

    “alle må forlate toget” (Zahid 2018b).

  6. 6.

    “overflatehinnen var forstørrelsesglass” (Zahid 2018b).

  7. 7.

    “jeg drømte at jeg / drukna i Akerselva” (Zahid 2018b).

  8. 8.

    Zahid has herself indicated that the collection is autobiographical (Engelsen 2022). Even though this poem is probably more often encountered in the printed rather than the spoken version, I have chosen the term ‘speaker’ as a convenient replacement of the more precise but cumbersome ‘enunciator’, which would also cover ‘narrator’ as well as ‘lyrical I’ (the enunciator of the poem is both).

  9. 9.

    “her tror de på sannheten / den er ikke et mirakel” (Zahid 2018a, 64). The poem “1274 Oslo” by Sarah Zahid is reproduced in translation and in original by kind permission of the author and the publishers Flamme forlag.

  10. 10.

    “du er ganske følsom / til å være fra østkanten” (Zahid 2018a, 53). The poem “du er ganske følsom…” by Sarah Zahid is reproduced in translation and in original by kind permission of the author and the publishers Flamme forlag.

  11. 11.

    “tradisjonelle” (Zahid 2018b).

  12. 12.

    “den forenklede / tradisjonelle / grensen” (Zahid 2018b).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the University of the Greater Region Centre for Border Studies (UniGr-CBS) for giving me the opportunity to work on this during my stay as Visiting Professor of Border Studies in 2021. This research also comes out of work in the workshop “Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing: Contemporary Public Migration Narratives in Europe”, funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the humanities and social sciences (NOS-HS). Thanks are due to audiences at the “Urban (Im)mobilities and Borderland Narratives” (University of Alcalá) and “Border Renaissance” (Saarland University) for their inspiring comments to versions of this paper. I have also received highly useful suggestions from participants in the “Border Reading” reading group and a master course in migration literature, both at the University of Oslo as well as from Karin Kukkonen, who has been so kind as to read through a draft. Thanks also to Liridona Qaka for inspiring conversations about the novels Pakkis and Hør her’a!

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  1. Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Johan Schimanski

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  1. Johan Schimanski
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Correspondence to Johan Schimanski .

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  1. University of Alcalá, Alcalá, Madrid, Spain

    Patricia García

  2. School of Humanities, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Anna-Leena Toivanen

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Schimanski, J. (2024). Space, Borders, and Cognition in Urban Postmigration Literature. In: García, P., Toivanen, AL. (eds) Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42798-5_11

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