What’s in a language? A common language can be seen as a pathway, for it facilitates communication among individuals, as well as the spread and comprehension of ideas. However, a difference in language can also erect barriers that prevent mutual understanding and correspondence.

 

In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah considers what formative power language might have for initiating conversations among people of different cultures. He says that cosmopolitans (in short, “citizens of the world”) think that people of all cultures can find enough similarities or overlaps in their vocabulary of values, whether this is verbal, written, or gestural, to facilitate a mutual understanding or conversation. Through this website, we hope to explore how different literary and other written forms, such as poems, songs, and quotes, can help generate conversations about migration. Even though everyone may not speak the same languages or live in the same cities or countries, we wonder how people can find common vocabularies or points of interest in short pieces of writing by authors from around the world.

 

We are also interested in seeing how global authors can use language to explore how they might inhabit an in-between or “third space.” In The Location of Culture, postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha explains how such a space between fixed places, such as two different countries, allows people to think about cultural differences and meanings that do not assume specific, already established structures (Bhabha 1994: 5). What we are finding in our current selections of short written works is that many transnational migrant authors voice their stories in ways that convey the sense of an ambiguous or alternative space in which they can interrupt dominant grand narratives. Perhaps it is only from this third space that some migrants can explore and articulate their points of view (Kraniauskas 2000: 120).