Visa Stories

Book excerpt: Visa Stories: Experiences between Law and Migration is an interdisciplinary volume that addresses recent public controversies on migration in the UK and Europe. In this context, it aims to recover the voice of migrants by proposing a new, non-conventional form of literary writing: the visa narrative genre. This is a versatile and dialogic form which moves beyond strictly academic modes of migration talk and aims to re-introduce a human, experiential dimension in the representation of people on the move. Indeed, the visa narratives collected in this volume provide a unique example of testimonies and memories of migrants from different geographical locations and social positions, from the student to the refugee. In its political and poetic aspects, this collective volume is a useful tool for understanding the complexity of migration today and the way in which national and international regulations are applied in different regions of the world. Whereas our era is commonly portrayed as one of increased globalisation and freedom of movement, visa narratives offer a closer insight into the experience of people trying to cross borders, and reveal a substantially different reality of immobility, distrust and misunderstanding.