The essays in this volume explore a range of creative responses to the many faces of refugee and migrant experiences in the 21st century, focusing on the power of art to bring into view both the quotidian experiences and the interior lives of people forced to migrate or blocked from moving to a future homeland. In the course of these chapters, we have attempted to draw a rough outline of the ways the personal lives and historical destinies of people swept up in the great migrations of the 21st century have been represented in film, art, and media. The book serves, we hope, as a cognitive bridge to a deeper awareness of the experiences of refugees and migrants. We have focused on a small temporal slice of this vast human drama—now extending to over a billion people—looking mainly at works created in the 21st century, with a few from the late 20th century. The analytic perceptions that have emerged in this study constitute an important contribution, but they are only a small sample of the intellectual work that might be done. It is our hope that this volume will stimulate further research on this urgent topic.

As varied as they are, the separate chapters of the book cohere along certain lines, forming rough constellations of themes and emphases. In Part One, for example, the analyses foreground the challenge to representation posed by mass refugee and migrant experiences, a challenge that is explicitly set forth in Dudley Andrew's opening essay. The chapters included in Part One engage with the work of a number of artists who employ innovative modes of audiovisual media to capture the experiences of nomadism, displacement, and enforced stasis that characterize migrant lives. Analysing films made by refugee collectives, works that employ sonic elements as a form of cartophony, films that are made with a thermographic camera that records the body heat generated by refugees at sea, in camps, and in transit across distant landscapes, and media composed as virtual reality immersions in the space-time of the refugee experience, the writers contributing to Part One focus, for the most part, on new technologies and novel approaches to sound and image.