How to Tell the History of Cultural Change Through Migration: A Post-migrant Field Theoretical Approach

Abstract

AbstractHow can we tell the history of cultural change through migration? This chapter presents a new theoretical and methodological approach, which I developed in response to this question by combining Bourdieu’s field theory with a post-migrant perspective. While my focus is on literary fields, the approach may also serve as an inspiration for exploring similar changes in other fields, including not only the arts but also politics and the economy. Bourdieu’s literary field theory allows us to understand authors and their works as part of a societal process of change. In that respect, it is ideal to grasp how literary fields have changed in response to immigration. Yet, due to his methodological nationalism, Bourdieu ignores nationalisation as a process that implied the drawing of boundaries towards immigrants and their descendants in literary fields on four levels: language, literary traditions, literary themes and the right to state support. These mechanisms of exclusion have become naturalised in nationalised literary fields to such an extent that they were long also accepted by immigrants and their descendants. Only when they began to fight exclusion in and through their literary works did immigrants and their descendants become accepted as authors in literary fields.