ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a postmigrant theoretical framework for understanding the contemporary political contexts and social conditions engaged with by the artistic and curatorial projects explored in this book. It starts out by discussing the historical question of the periodization of postmigrant societies before it unpacks the concept of postmigration and places it in the wider field of related key concepts: integration, multiculturalism, interculturalism, super-diversity and conviviality. This chapter then moves on to consider the academic genealogies and trajectories of postmigration, emphasizing the importance of the early British discourses emerging in the late 1980s and the German discourses of the twenty-first century as well as foregrounding some of the protagonists of progressive postmigrant thought. This chapter concludes by honing in on the conflict sensitivity inherent to postmigrant thought and how it has been mobilized to critique the racist structures and practices that constitute crucial sources of friction and discrimination in postmigrant societies.
