The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives

Description

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. 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