Introduction
What happens when we shift our attention from the progress of history to the movement of actual people? This is the question we set ourselves in 2017, when we, along with several colleagues at Duke University, convened a humanities lab entitled Representing Migration. The purpose of a humanities lab is to investigate a phenomenon in artistic and literary life from a variety of perspectives. Our lab was invested in studying human migration not only as a demographic, political, or sociological issue but also as a matter of representation; in other words, we explored how literary, cinematic, artistic, and musical representations both reflect and shape the experience of people on the move-as well as the lives of the more settled people they encounter. Furthermore, we considered how familiar representational forms-the novel, say, or the comic book-might look different when understood in the context of the history of human migration.
