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Histoire Croisée As An Approach To Migrant Writing, Gijsbert Pols

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Although commonly understood as a monolithic entity, scholars have successfully approached the idea of cultural identity in terms of relationship, reference and binary opposition during the last two decades. This approach has consequences for the study of migrant literature. It seems the widely shared idea of ‘cultural transfer’, which implies a linear movement between mutually independent cultural spaces, is obsolete. This article instead proposes the concept of the histoire croisée, developed by Werner and Zimmermann, as a more fruitful model. Following Werner and Zimmermann’s suggestion that any migrant situation can be seen as culturally ‘crossed’, the article discusses two Dutch …