Project: In-between Identities: generation 1.5 in Moroccan immigrants’ literature in Spain

2023-11-01 – 2027-10-31

Abstract

In recent years, migration has become one of the defining features and preoccupations of European societies and a prominent literary theme. During the 1970s and 1980s, Spain experienced a wave of Moroccan migration that peaked at the beginning of the 1990s. Representations of Moroccan immigrants in Spanish media and literature have tended to be negative, shaped by a long history of tension between the two countries going back to al-Andalus, the Spanish-Moroccan War and the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. Recent years, however, have seen the emergence of a group of Moroccan immigrant writers who offer a more nuanced portrait of the figure of the immigrant and of the experience of migration. Most of these writers belong to what sociologists call generation 1.5, the generation that experienced the migration process as children accompanying their parents. This project examines how these authors represent generation 1.5 in their works and more specifically how they negotiate their multilingual environment, how they appropriate genres and oral traditions of both countries and how they depict the intergenerational dynamics of migration as well as its impact on subject formation. This interdisciplinary research, moreover, seeks to probe the relevance of the sociological concept of generation 1.5 to the field of literary studies.