This book presents diverse, composite, non-exclusive and non-hierarchical perspectives on displacement of people as represented in literature. It examines the experiences of migration as a result of wars, natural disasters, religious strife, loss of livelihoods and shifts in local and global economies and the vulnerabilities they expose.
Bringing together scholarly insights into literature about displacement and migration from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the book interrogates the development frames of Western modernity and situates displacement within the discourse of disenfranchisement of citizens by nation-states. It explores the experiences, memories and expressions of displacement in literature and how literary works critique ethical and moral responsibilities of states and communities that often do not account for the loss which displacement causes to the health, education, career, or relationships of displaced people.
The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, philosophy, migration and diaspora studies, development studies, African studies and Asian studies.
Author(s): Mbuh Tennu Mbuh, Meera Chakravorty, John Clammer
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 284
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Displacement: Philosophy, History, Experience
1 Disaster’s Offspring: Catastrophe, Narrative and Society
2 A Philosophy of Displacement: “Passer-by” Ethics under the Microscope
3 America in the Contemporary Postcolonial African Imagination: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing around Your Neck
4 Nativizing Colonial Ghosts in the Postcolony: A Composite Perspective on Displacement
5 Asking the Right Kind of Questions: Seeing India through the Eyes of Slavoj Žižek
6 The Philosophy of Displacement: Re-reading Hannah Arendt in NRC Times
Part II The Literary Politics and Phenomenology of Displacement and Belonging
7 The New Citizenship: Seyla Benhabib’s “The Right to Have Rights”
8 The Libraries of the Migrants: Dissemination of Books as Dissemination of the Self?
Part III Writing Displacement
9 Writing in Times of Displacement: Towards Transformation
10 Voices beyond Borders: Exile and Refugee Poetry and Performance
11 Interrogating, Confronting and Reconstituting Displacement and a New Politics, Poetics and Spirituality of Dwelling: The Ethics, Aesthetics and Responsibility of Home and the World
12 Disease and the Travel Discourse of Belonging in Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Brother
13 Writing Displacement: Memory, Violence and Their Ancillaries in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: The True Story of a Child Soldier
Part IV Locating Displacement
14 Discourses of Displacement: “Development,” Resource Conflict and Political Opportunism in Odisha
Index
