The Migrant Longing for Form: Articulating Aesthetics with Migration, Immigration, and Movement

Aesthetics is intertwined with experiences and processes of migration, immigration, and movement, because it is caught up in the various representational forms and discursive frameworks through which national and diasporic communities understand themselves and each other. Since the 1990s aesthetics has been part of our intellectual conversations about migration, diaspora, and multiculturalism, despite the prominence of scholarship on these issues framed by more sociopolitical questions. This essay rebuts the claim that aesthetics is apolitically autonomous or simply a matter of elite taste by tracing the movement and development of aesthetic thinking through a set of critical texts that articulate aesthetic ideas with the movement and migration of peoples across nations and cultures. The migrant longing for form points toward the movement and migration of aesthetic thought over a critical terrain inasmuch as it marks the imbrication of aesthetics with the lived experiences and cultural representations of migrant and minority communities. This essay invites the reader to engage literary and cultural objects through an aesthetic dimension, to trace the movement of structures of feeling and figurative gestures as they fold and unfold in sentient engagement with thought and judgment.