Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities

The refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness.

Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

Notes on Contributors

Introduction — Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Agnes Woolley

PART I. REFUGEE GENEALOGIES

IntroductionLyndsey Stonebridge

1. Refugees in Modern World HistoryPeter Gatrell

2. Theories of the Refugee, After Hannah ArendtNed Curthoys

3. A Genealogy of Refugee WritingArthur Rose

4. Genres of Refugee WritingAnna Bernard

PART II. ASYLUM

IntroductionAgnes Woolley

5. Sexual and Gender-Based Asylum and the Queering of Global Space: Reading Desire, Writing Identity and the Unconventionality of the LawSudeep Dasgupta

6. Morality and Law in the Context of Asylum ClaimsAnthony Good

7. The Politics of the Empty Gesture: Frameworks of Sanctuary, Theatre and The CityAlison Jeffers

PART III. THE BORDER

Introduction — Emma Cox

8. Docu/Fiction and the Aesthetics of the BorderAgnes Woolley

9. Crossings, Bodies, BehavioursLiam Connell

10. The Digital Border: the Media of Refugee Reception during the 2015 Migration ‘Crisis’Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou

PART IV. INTRA/EXTRATERRITORIAL DISPLACEMENT

IntroductionSam Durrant

11. The ‘Dead Road’, Displacement, and the Recovery of Life-in-Common: Narrating the African Conflict ZoneMaureen Moynagh

12. ‘What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?’: Memoir and the Aporia of Refuge in Hisham Matar’s The Return Norbert Bugeja

13. ‘A Man carries his door’: Affective Displacement and Refugee PoetryDouglas Robinson

14. Reframing Climate Migration: A Case for Constellational Thinking in the Writing of Teju ColeByron Santangelo

PART V. THE CAMP

IntroductionEmma Cox

15. Memories and Meanings of Refugee Camps (and more-than-camps)Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

16. Writing the Camp: Death, Dying and DialectsYousif M. Qasmiyeh

17. Reel Refugees: Inside and Outside the CampMadelaine Hron

PART VI. SEA CROSSINGS

IntroductionDavid Farrier

18. Zoopolitics of Asylum Seeker Marine Deaths and Cultures of AnthropophagyJoseph Pugliese

19. The Mediterranean Sieve, Spring and SeameteryHakim Abderrezak

20. ‘Island is no arrival’: Migrants’ Islandment at the Borders of EuropeMariangela Palladino

21. At Sea: Hope as Survival and Sustenance for Refugees Parvati Nair

PART VII. DIGITAL TERRITORIES

Introduction Agnes Woolley

22. Networked Narratives: Online Self-Expression from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in LebanonMary Mitchell

23. Refugee writing, Refugee History: Locating the Refugee Archive in the Making of a History of the Syrian WarDima Saber and Paul Long

24. Digital Biopolitics, Humanitarianism and the Datafication of RefugeesBtihaj Ajana

25. The Messenger: Refugee Testimony and the Search for Adequate WitnessGillian Whitlock & Rosanne Kennedy

PART VIII. HOME

IntroductionDavid Farrier

26. Home and Law: Impersonality and Worldlessness in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen Daniel Hartley

27. Autobiography of a Ghost: Home and Haunting in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The RefugeesMireille Rosello

28. Homing as Co-creative Work: When Home Becomes a VillageMisha Myers and Mariam Issa

PART IX. OPEN CITIES

IntroductionSam Durrant

29. ‘Another politics of the city’: Urban Practices of Refuge, Advocacy and ActivismJonathan Darling

30. The Welcome City?Hannah Lewis and Louise Waite

31. In the City’s Public Spaces: Movements of Witnesses and the Formation of Moral CommunityAndré Grahle

32. Open/Closed Cities: Cosmopolitan Melancholia and the Disavowal of Refugee Life Sam Durrant

Index

Emma Cox is Head of Drama, Theatre & Dance Department of Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research examines cross-cultural intersections of migration, memory and place in performance and visual culture. She is the author Performing Noncitizenship (2015), Theatre & Migration (2014), and editor of the play collection Staging Asylum (2013). She is the contributing editor of Performance and Migration (2021), a video and publishing collaboration between Digital Theatre+ and Routledge, featuring content by scholars and artists. Her current work concerns cultural and performance histories associated with biological and digital human remains.

Source: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/persons/emma-cox

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Sam Durrant is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds. He is broadly interested in the relationships between literature, memory, race and community, particularly as they pertain to the fields of postcolonial studies and critical theory. He began his career focusing on the problems involved in memorialising the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. These problems are the central concern of his first monograph Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison (State University of New York Press, 2004).  Since then, he has continued to work on memory and trauma in postcolonial contexts.

Source: https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/42/dr-sam-durrant

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David Farrier is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His current research is in literary responses to environmental change and the Anthropocene. He is especially interested in the way contemporary poetry responds to or can be read in light of deep time and the difficulty of imagining environmental futures; and in the problem of defining an Anthropocene poetics. His previous work looked at the relationship between asylum/refugee discourse and postcolonial studies. His most recent book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (4th Estate / Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St Aubyn award for non-fiction in 2017 and will be translated into seven languages. He has written for Aeon and The Atlantic.

Source: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/david-farrier

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Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. Her work focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, political theory, and history, Human Rights, and Refugee Studies, drawing on the interdisciplinary connections between literature, history, politics, law, and social policy. Her early work was concerned with the effects of modern violence on the mind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (1998) and The Writing of Anxiety (2007). Her more recent writing has focussed on the creative history of responses to that violence in two awarding-winning books: The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2014, and Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize 2018.  In 2020 she published a collection of essays, Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights (2020), which drew on her journalism and work with two major interdisciplinary research projects Refugee Hosts and Rights4Time.

Source: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/english/stonebridge-lyndsey

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Agnes Woolley is Lecturer in Transnational Literature and Migration Cultures at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses in contemporary and postcolonial literature, theatre and film, with a focus on concepts of migration and diaspora. She is the author of Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published extensively on asylum, refugee arts, climate change and contemporary literature. Her current research examines the interrelationship between contemporary screen cultures and geopolitical refugee discourses in the forthcoming book Moving Images: Refugees in Contemporary Screen Culture (Bloomsbury, 2022). She is a regular contributor to openDemocracy, reporting on migration issues and works with grassroots refugee organisations in London.

Source: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/9170272/agnes-woolley

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