Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representation Places refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities researchBrings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politics 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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction, Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Agnes Woolley Part I. Refugee Genealogies Introduction, Lyndsey Stonebridge Refugees in Modern World History, Peter Gatrell Theories of the Refugee, After Hannah Arendt, Ned Curthoys A Genealogy of Refugee Writing, Arthur Rose Genres of Refugee Writing, Anna Bernard Part II. Asylum Introduction, Agnes Woolley Sexual and Gender-Based Asylum and the Queering of Global Space: Reading Desire, Writing Identity and the Unconventionality of the Law, Sudeep Dasgupta Morality and Law in the Context of Asylum Claims, Anthony Good The Politics of the Empty Gesture: Frameworks of Sanctuary, Theatre and The City, Alison Jeffers Part III. The Border Introduction, Emma Cox Docu/Fiction and the Aesthetics of the Border, Agnes Woolley Crossings, Bodies, Behaviours, Liam Connell The Digital Border: the Media of Refugee Reception during the 2015 Migration ‘Crisis’, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou Part IV. Intra/Extraterritorial Displacement Introduction, Sam Durrant The ‘Dead Road’, Displacement, and the Recovery of Life-in-Common: Narrating the African Conflict Zone, Maureen Moynagh ‘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 ‘A Man Carries His Door’: Affective Displacement and Refugee Poetry, Douglas Robinson Reframing Climate Migration: A Case for Constellational Thinking in the Writing of Teju Cole, Byron Santangelo Part V. The Camp Introduction, Emma Cox Memories and Meanings of Refugee Camps (and more-than-camps), Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh Writing the Camp: Death, Dying and Dialects, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh Reel Refugees: Inside and Outside the Camp, Madelaine Hron Part VI. Sea Crossings Introduction, David Farrier Zoopolitics of Asylum Seeker Marine Deaths and Cultures of Anthropophagy, Joseph Pugliese The Mediterranean Sieve, Spring and Seametery, Hakim Abderrezak ‘Island is no arrival’: Migrants’ Islandment at the Borders of Europe, Mariangela Palladino At Sea: Hope as Survival and Sustenance for Refugees, Parvati Nair Part VII. Digital Territories Introduction, Agnes Woolley Networked narratives: Online Self-Expression from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon, Mary Mitchell Refugee writing, refugee history: Locating the Refugee Archive in the Making of a History of the Syrian War, Dima Saber and Paul Long Digital Biopolitics, Humanitarianism and the Datafication of Refugees, Btihaj Ajana The Messenger: Refugee Testimony and the Search for Adequate Witness, Gillian Whitlock & Rosanne Kennedy Part VIII. Home Introduction, David Farrier Home and Law: Impersonality and Worldlessness in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, Daniel Hartley Autobiography of a Ghost: Home and Haunting in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, Mireille Rosello Homing as Co-creative Work: When Home Becomes a Village, Misha Myers and Mariam Issa Part IX. Open Cities Introduction, Sam Durrant ‘Another Politics of the City’: Urban Practices of Refuge, Advocacy and Activism, Jonathan Darling The Welcome City?, Hannah Lewis and Louise Waite In the City’s Public Spaces: Movements of Witnesses and the Formation of Moral Community, André Grahle Open/Closed Cities: Cosmopolitan Melancholia and the Disavowal of Refugee Life, Sam Durrant

About the Author :
Emma Cox is Reader in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Performing Noncitizenship: Asylum Seekers in Australian Theatre, Film and Activism (Anthem, 2015), Theatre & Migration (Palgrave, 2014), and the edited play collection Staging Asylum (Currency, 2013). Sam Durrant is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning (State University of New York Press, 2004) and co-editor of Essays in Migratory Aesthetics (Rodopi, 2007) and The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (Routledge, 2014). He is currently working on a monograph on animist ecologies in contemporary African literature. David Farrier is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Anthropocene Poetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Postcolonial Asylum, (Liverpool University Press, 2011). Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. Her recent books are Placeless People: Writing, Rights and Refugees (2018) and The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Other titles include: The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (1998) and The Writing of Anxiety (2007). She is currently working on a collaborative project, Refugee Hosts, and finishing a short book, Rights and Writing: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. She is co-editor of Oxford University Press’s Mid-Century Series, and has held visiting positions at Cornell University and the University of Sydney. She is a regular media commentator, and tweets about literature, history, and human rights @lyndseystonebri Agnes Woolley is Lecturer in Transnational Literature and Migration Cultures at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are 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. She is a regular contributor to openDemocracy, reporting on migration issues.