Communication Across Borders: Testimonial Memoir as Literary Journalism for Mobility Justice

ABSTRACT

That literary journalism has the potential to communicate across physical and political borders in the quest for social justice is demonstrated by two recent books of real-time memoir Wang Fang's Wuhan Diary (2020) concerning lockdown at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains (2018) which describes the circumstances of the refugees and asylum seekers imprisoned by the Australian government on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Their texts-written in circumstances where the opportunities for immersive reporting by journalists were unavailable-prompt consideration of the links between (im)mobility justice and literary journalism. They also raise questions about the line between fact and fiction in literary journalism, particularly under the threat of political censorship. And they provoke deliberation on the role literary journalism can play in reporting across closed borders on matters that are intensely local but at the same time of global concern. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.