Introduction. The aesthetics of migration: Reversals of marginality and the socio-political translation turn

Translation has imposed itself with determination as a condition for intercultural and linguistic exchanges among human beings living in distant parts of the globe for millennia. Not only has it contributed to the understanding of sociocultural structures, political systems, and technological and digital processes, but it has also encouraged our knowledge of the world – strengthening our awareness of marginalities, liminalities and otherness, and, certainly, widening our interlinguistic and intercultural, as well as translinguistic and transcultural horizons. This volume ranges across disciplines and subjects in translation studies, critical migration and border studies, the visual and performing arts within aesthetic discourse, and also investigates collaborative research within and across these areas. Refugee and Migration Studies, and Border Studies, have grown as a concern of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s, and have increasingly spread in combination with cutting edge approaches to translation as a tool for the (re)narration of marginal stories revealing hidden truths. Languages and cultures of diversity (Folaron, 2015; Sturge, 2007; Hermans, 2012) have emerged within and across popular culture and contemporary popular cultural forms (Holland, 2009; Díaz Cintas, 2009), ranging from films and documentaries, music and TV programmes, advertising, news texts and photos to specifically artistic experiences in the visual arts, such as in museums, installations and exhibitions, video and street art, and in the performing arts, such as theatrical performances and storytelling. Artistic constructions have turned to be multimodal mass-mediated forms of cultural production and consumption that permeate our social lives, while being the expression of cultural and social trends. Popular genres, audiovisual, multimodal and web-texts operating across a variety of platforms and spaces have been conceptualised as forms of creative interpretation, adaptation, de- and recontextualization, transcreation, transculturation or localization (Rike 2013) within and across mainstream modes and cultures (Sturge, 2006, 2007; Seago, 2014; Serrell, 1996). These new forms of representation that, we claim, are rooted in popular culture and are located within the dynamics of popular culture, reflect diversity, especially in multilingual and multicultural settings, where cultural contacts engender perception and engagement with difference and diversity, addressing contentious issues in often controversial language and visual representation. Recent research has highlighted the function of aesthetic discourse as a way of translating marginal voices and engaging the centre and the periphery through art, and has also attracted everyday citizens as never before. Of particular interest has been not the narration of why marginal realities exist or how immigration has taken place, but the representation of marginality in aesthetic forms in terms of how words and texts, images and visuals, within artistic platforms, are used in order to give shape and voice to marginal stories (Stein and Stamselberg, 2014). This testifies to the fact that Europe is witnessing cultural innovation and undergoing developments, whose outcomes “will certainly bear the mark of the cultural heritage of millions of immigrants coming from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America” (Bond, Bonsaver and Faloppa, 2015: 2). European culture has recently faced the challenge of how to welcome different cultures from African and Asian countries and to promote transcultural growth and linguistic resources. The central concerns of this special issue on Translating the Margin are the relationship between marginality and migration, and the role of translation as a political tool within aesthetic discourse. In doing so, it makes the argument that if, on the one hand, the spaces and experiences of marginality provide a different lens through which it is possible to understand citizenship, on the other hand, the arts can contribute to reversing dominant representations of migration, and also showing the reasons why migrant communities have grown in spaces that have turned to be marginal spaces. Although migrants have learned how to construct their new lives by putting together cultural and linguistic elements belonging to both worlds (the homeland and host country), the liminal spaces they occupy as an imposed condition make them marginalised, not simply from a geo-physical perspective (which involves language and culture distance), but also in relation to economic and social factors. However, the other speaking from the border and the increase of migration have led to a flourish of narratives and artistic explorations of migrant experiences as never before.