This Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. Analyzing novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography, the individual chapters counter dominant representations of refugees as voiceless victims. Addressing key characteristics and thematics of refugee narratives, this Handbook examines how refugee cultural productions are shaped by and in turn shape socio-political landscapes. It will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners committed to engaging refugee narratives in the contemporary moment.
Author(s): Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Vinh Nguyen
Series: Routledge Literature Handbooks
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 527
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CONTENTS
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: Storytelling
1. Flights of Fancy: Imagination, Audacity, and Refugee Storytelling
2. Theorizing Unsettlement: Refugee Narratives as Literary Ration Cards
3. Refugee Narratives and Humanitarian Form
4. Coming Undone: Displacement, Trauma, and the Crisis of (Narrative) Agency
PART II: Genres and Conventions
5. Refugee Noir
6. Re-orienting the Gaze: Visualizing Refugees in Recent Film
7. Song, Sound, and Refugee Affect in Life of a Flower and Song Lang
8. Refugees to Worker-migrants: Transformations of Cross-Border
Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Novels
PART III: Visuality and Visibility
9. “Through the Lens of a Refugee”: Disrupting Visual Narratives of Displacement
10. Narrativizing Unarrival: Digital Autographics by Asylum Seekers in the Pacific
11. If We Do Not Write Poetry, We Will Die: Afghan Diasporic Social Media Poetry for the Fall of Kabul
12. Connecting the Dots: Refugee Data Narratives
PART IV: Mediation and Positionality
13. Up Close and Personal: Mediated Testimony and Narrative Tropes in Refugee Comics
14. “I Am Myself”: Queer Refugee Narratives
15. Applying RefugeeCrit to Recent Middle Grade/Young Adult Children’s Literature About Refugees
16. Refugee Narrative Pedagogy: A Cultural Refugee Studies Approach
PART V: Border-Crossing
17. Border-crossing, Identity, and Voice in Central American and U.S.-Central American Refugee Narratives
18. The Canadian Fugitive Slave Archive: Contesting the Refugee Narrative
19. To the Editor: Partition Refugee Relief and the Making of the “Pakistani Muslim Citizen” in Punjab
20. Iraq and the Work of the Frame
PART VI: Health and (Dis)Ability
21. The Biopoetics of Health: Caribbean Refugee Narratives
22. Refugee Race-ability: Bodies, Lands, Worlds
23 “Many Hands Lighten the Load”: Health Lessons from San Diego during the Time of COVID-19
PART VII: Care and Kinship
24. Affecting Appeals: Armenian Refugee Narratives in the Archives of Early Humanitarian Discourse
25. Fearless Faces: Motherhood and Gendered Mobility of North Korean Refugees in Jero Yun’s Films
26. Queer Refugee Homemaking: Lesbian and Gay Refugees’ Oral Histories and Photovoice Narratives of Home
27. “Little Knowledges”: Shifting Visions of Childhood, Care, and Technology in the Contemporary Novel of Forced Migration
PART VIII: Land/Water Ecologies
28. Refugee Ecologies: The Elements, Flora, and Fauna in Refugee Narratives
29. Writing, Belonging, Forgetting: Waterscapes in Bangla Dalit Refugee Literature
30. Being Indigenous and Refugee: The Duality of Palestinian and American Indian Narratives
PART IX: Spatiality and Cartographies
31. Alternative Spatial Imaginaries: Refugees’ Counter-Narratives of Settlement and Mobility in Patras
32. Letting Karst Mountains Bloom: Decentering the Secret War in Hmong American Literature and Art
33. Islands of Writers: Tracing an Archipelagic Literature
34. Spatial Empathy in Refugee Video Games
PART X: Temporality and Futurity
35. Songs against Boredom: Youth, Music, and Bosnian Exile
36. On Water, On Land: Sustainability of Refugee Lives in an Era of Ecological Crises
37. The Marshall Islands, Guam, and the Figure of Climate Refuge(e)s
38. Refugee Writing and the Problem of the Future
Index
