Love stands at the heart of the stories of migrants, refugees and exiles. The weight of love lost, found, embittered, and celebrated is woven through the stories told by those who cross borders and oceans and those who greet them on the shores. Although often buried under the legal, economic and historical analyses, experts are quick to seize on the affective language of migration as a means of humanizing or dehumanizing migrants within broader political debates. Twenty-first century newspapers, like their nineteenth-century counterparts, are filled with images of women left wailing on the shores, children huddled under their mother’s arms, men leading their families to safety providing visual commentary to the historical and contemporary discussions of the costs and benefits of migration. Yet, there has been little historical analysis of how gender norms enmeshed in the emotional landscapes of migration inform personal and political understandings of migration. In this collection we are seeking work that examines the ways in which the meanings of love gender migration processes, patterns of assimilation, public policy, and law.

We are calling for papers for an anthology that explores how affective languages gender mobility shaping individual and collective understandings of the process of migration in the intimate world of kin and community, the contours of the nation state and the global language used to categorize people on the move. We are seeking articles that explore:

1. How the centrality of love, with its attendant constellation of emotions (loss, grief, guilt, nostalgia, hate, euphoria, and joy) define individual experiences of mobility in relation to self, family, and nation.

2. How the theoretical, sentimental and political meanings of love came to articulate the disruptive nature of mobility, and how migration made visible the ways in which notions of a political, “love of country,” are entwined in notions of conjugal, familial love.

3. How the gendered language of love that came to imbue certain migrants and categories of migrants as more worthy and deserving, privileging some and casting out others.

We are seeking submissions exploring these themes from the 19th century to the present. We envision a wide geographical scope including Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Please send us a brief description of your proposed contribution (500-700 words) by November 1, 2015