ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, the term New Anglophone literatures has primarily been utilised to define English texts emerging from a postcolonial context. However, there are numerous other (often bestselling and award-winning) literary texts that contribute to the cosmos of New Anglophone literatures – for instance, those by English-speaking authors from the Balkans who have migrated to Anglophone countries (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand) and thematise migration, especially after the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. The focus in this chapter lies on two texts by authors from former Yugoslavia who have migrated to Anglophone countries, write in English, and significantly contribute to a reconceptionalisation of new Anglophone literatures: Aleksandar Hemon’s short story “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls” (2000) and A. S. Patrić’s novel Black Rock White City (2015). This chapter shows how Anglophone authors from the Balkans create what I call a migrational metamultilingual mode. I argue that this mode can be characterised by a clash of extratextual and textual levels: By being well versed in strategies of multilingualism and presenting contested issues of language and migration to an Anglophone audience, the authors provide a sharp contrast to the characters on the level of the story (who are often authors, too) who have to negotiate language confusion, voicelessness, and silence as migrants in the contact zone between cultures.
