Julya Rabinowich's Transnational Poetics: Staging Border-Crossings in Theater and Fiction

This article explores how contemporary Austrian writer Julya Rabinowich engages literary genres to foreground experiences and consequences of migration and, thereby, encourages a critical dialogue about social justice and human rights across borders. Focusing on her novels and as well as three of her dramatic works debuting between 2009 and 2014, I elucidate how Rabinowich uses narrative and theatrical representation in this era of unprecedented mass migration as a powerful antidote to the prevalent "toxic narrative" (Swing) that equates migrants with catastrophic natural disasters and a threat to the economic stability of the West. The article considers how Rabinowich's transnational fiction and her integration of "other" traumas resulting from persecution and flight provide a complex transnational lens through which to challenge and reconfigure dominant discourses of migration. It also considers Rabinowich's contribution to the process of transnational memory-making and its implications regarding collective identity construction in this transnational era.