Nonspecificity in E-Imigrações: the migrant and the hybrid literary materialities

Abstract

This article studies digital literature work E-Imigrações (2021), by Alckmar Luiz dos Santos, Rafael Soares Duarte, and Vinícius Rutes Henning, drawing on notions of post-autonomous art (CANCLINI, 2012) and a proposal of nonspecific art (GARRAMUÑO, 2014), as well as Bauman’s (2017) reflections on migratory processes and Silviano Santiago’s (2000) in-between concept.  It’s argued that, on one hand, the work’s hybrid form — articulating elements of comics, poetry, and game engine/programming in a regime of multimodality — positions it as a nonspecific object at the field level, reflecting the erosion of boundaries between languages and expression modes. On the other hand, from the aesthetic in-between to the sociological in-between, the theme of migration is examined to show how content, form, and systemic location mutually reinforce one another through the idea of displacement and in-betweenness. It’s further shown that the work’s institutional anchoring (critical circulation, ISBN, participation in circuits such as NUPILL/Observatório) evidences its systemic affirmation within literature, even as it operates formal hybridisms. The analysis demonstrates that the work’s unspecificity is not merely an effect, but the materialization of the displaced subject’s fragmented experience, offering a narrative for a world no longer organized by single, unifying stories and contributing to an understanding of the aesthetic and political specificities of digital literature produced in the Global South.