Migration, Allegories and Dialectical Images in The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Abstract

Literature played a fundamental role in Benjamin’s political thought. His concept of experience in modernity could not be understood without the figures of Baudelaire and Proust. But in this paper it is not about observing Benjaminian categories in the literature that talks about migration phenomena, but about retaking the political character of his concept of allegory, of seeing certain literature as an illumination, in a determined temporality, of an instant of danger capable of provoking a productive and memorable detention. The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a fictional story in images that accounts for the migratory flow that does not stop throughout the world and the allegories that are manifested, anchored to precise and temporary stories. Literature, then, establishes a relation with these times: complex and terrible, forming what Walter Benjamin would call a dialectical image.