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| Publications [#378173] of Corina M Stan
Essays/Articles/Chapters in Books
- Stan, C. "Migration as Palimpsest: Introduction." The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture.
2023. 219-223. [doi]
(last updated on 2024/10/18)
Abstract:
A palimpsest is a parchment or tablet used one or more times after the earlier writing has been erased, although traces may still remain. The Greek palimpsestos, “scraped again,” indexes an economy of scarcity haunted by fragmented remnants of the past. (Imagine reading a text that for a brief moment loses its way and starts speaking in tongues, ventriloquizing the voice of a distant ancestor, or the mysterious idiom of a foreign traveler.) Like geological sedimentation, the palimpsest bears witness to the passage of time, conquest, defeat, and the movement of people. The Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul is a prime example, with its Byzantine architecture, Christian iconographic mosaics, and Islamic calligraphy; yet another, “within touching distance of the Syrian border…the palimpsest of ruins in Baalbek-the Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim ruins” that Teju Cole clambers in with his friends on a trip to Egypt (2021, 67); or the “age-old harbor gossip” in Marseille, a vociferous soundtrack to Anna Seghers’s Transit, a “twaddle that’s existed as long as there’s been a Mediterranean Sea, Phoenician chit-chat, Cretan and Greek gossip and that of the Romans. There was never a shortage of gossips,” the narrator muses, “remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death toward another” (2013, 78). For refugees, the palimpsest speaks of their own existence on the run, the coordinates of which are scraped off again and again-the couple in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West know this well-and written over with cautious hopes for a new life in yet another place, and then another. This rhythm is at work in the vivid portrait (or self-portrait of the migrant?) the painter Max Ferber keeps erasing in Sebald’s The Emigrants; when he finally stops, the face on the canvas seems to have “evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper” (1996, 162). Reading a palimpsest is a hauntology, whose urgent insight is that memory defies the logic of scarcity, groping, rather, for connection: between distant moments in time, places, people.
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