At a Remove: The Curious State(lessness) of Migrant Mothering in Novels by Shumona Sinha and Nathacha Appanah

Abstract This article orchestrates a critical conversation between novels by contemporary French writers Shumona Sinha and Nathacha Appanah around the question of mothering, space, and migration. Whether mothers by choice, by default, or childless, the outwardly dissimilar women of the novels studied arrive at a shared poetic interrogation of a remove in migrant motherhood, culminating in a curious spectral statelessness. Rethinking this odd form of mothering at a distance, I identify the performance of a dispossession as both perilous and salutary. Finally, I articulate how this ghostly remove is reinscribed in Appanah’s remarks about how Sinha and she—as non-native, non-European writers of French—are disjointedly situated in French literature, which they re-imagine as a contested, stateless space for their literary expression.