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Collaborative Authorship and Postmigration in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Novel Montecore

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Abstract

Montecore. En unik tiger (2006) stages its own making through the joint authorship of Kadir, a friend of Abbas’, and Jonas, a young writer and Abbas’ son. Their collaboration aims at a novel about Abbas, who migrated from Tunisia to Sweden, now a missing person. The interpretation of his life proves to be a conflicting ground for the co-authors because of their generational differences. This article proposes an analysis of Montecore building upon the notion of collaborative or multiple authorship (Stillinger 1991; Love 2002), and upon the discussion in Scandinavia and in Germany on contemporary migration and postmigration literature. Through a metafictional collaborative authorship – a so far neglected dimension in the study of Montecore – Jonas Hassen Khemiri depicts a young author’s ambivalent feelings towards his father and his story. Abbas has vanished from the family, but his special gift to Jonas, through Kadir’s mediation, deals with a linguistic talent that defies the rules of Swedish, showing the power of language to invent, and to imagine a different and less oppressive order.

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Published Online: 2021-10-12
Published in Print: 2021-10-31

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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