The Placing of Displaced Lives: Refugee Narratives

Brant, Clare; Heinrich, Tobias; Soeting, Monica

doi:10.1080/08989575.2017.1339996

Cited by 5 publications

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“…What narrative forms besides stories can communicate experience and restore subjectivity? 32 It is doubtful whether these questions are best answered by ascribing fiction greater counter-discursive potential than life writing. For Brant, Heinrich, and Soeting, the transformative power of narrating refugees' experiences resides elsewhere: in the constitution of an intrinsically dialogical process, an exchange in which the recipient of the story does not remain a passive consumer but in which they participate as active respondents -much in the way Ali Smith envisages the exchange of stories between refugees and non-refugees.…”

Section: Critical Voicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale

Ramsey-Kurz

2023

EJLW

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This article draws on the results of a life writing initiative, ARENA (Archive of Refugee Encounter Narratives), developed at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. It involves students of English collaborating with refugees over periods of three months to write down the latter’s stories. Like other storytelling ventures spawned by the perceived European refugee crisis of 2015, ARENA aims to enable a better understanding of the situation of refugees in Europe than the dominant asylum discourse allows. To this end, students arrange regular encounters with participating refugees and encourage them to tell whatever they consider to be their stories. The texts the students craft from these exchanges capture not only the refugees’ stories but also their own experience of hearing them. I will examine the embodied act of narration thus recorded in the ARENA corpus and contest critical claims that, too indebted to the rigid veracity standards defining official refugee testimonials, refugee life writing is unable to augment new ways of thinking about refugee experience and forced migration at large. My argument is that such criticism does not apply where the dialogic nature of live telling is consciously experienced and given due expression in the life writing it eventually becomes.

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Section: Critical Voicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale

Ramsey-Kurz

2023

EJLW

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Restaging the Colonial Encounter: Far-Right Narratives of Europe and African Migrant Responses

Bromley

2021

Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture

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Precarity in Transit: Travellers by Helon Habila

Ramsey-Kurz¹

2020

Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa

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This article offers a reading of Helon Habila's latest novel Travellers, which was inspired by the onset of the so-called European refugee crisis in 2013. The essay pays special attention to the embodied act of narration and its exploitation by Habila as a mode of cultivating a compassionate understanding of forcibly displaced persons and their often precarious lives in prolonged transit. The analysis follows Butler's idea of narrative as a mode, on the one hand, of humanising lives violently erased, as they all too often are in the event of involuntary migration, and, on the other, of restoring to "the ethically conscious" world their "capacity to mourn", where it has been undermined by the systematic denial of human suffering by the nation state and dominant asylum discourse. Theoretical as this approach may appear at first glance, the essay's goal is to demonstrate that, for Habila's protagonist, learning to listen to other people's stories properly and compassionately means to distance himself from the abstract projections of refugee subjecthood he himself endorses as the cosmopolitan intellectual he represents at the outset.

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The Placing of Displaced Lives: Refugee Narratives

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale

A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale

Restaging the Colonial Encounter: Far-Right Narratives of Europe and African Migrant Responses

Precarity in Transit: Travellers by Helon Habila

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