Refugee Imaginaries

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.

• Introduction, Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Agnes WoolleyPart I. Refugee GenealogiesIntroduction, Lyndsey StonebridgeRefugees in Modern World History, Peter GatrellTheories of the Refugee, After Hannah Arendt, Ned CurthoysA Genealogy of Refugee Writing, Arthur RoseGenres of Refugee Writing, Anna BernardPart II. Asylum Introduction, Agnes WoolleySexual and Gender-Based Asylum and the Queering of Global Space: Reading Desire, Writing Identity and the Unconventionality of the Law, Sudeep DasguptaMorality and Law in the Context of Asylum Claims, Anthony GoodThe Politics of the Empty Gesture: Frameworks of Sanctuary, Theatre and The City, Alison JeffersPart III. The BorderIntroduction, Emma CoxDocu/Fiction and the Aesthetics of the Border, Agnes WoolleyCrossings, Bodies, Behaviours, Liam ConnellThe Digital Border: the Media of Refugee Reception during the 2015 Migration ‘Crisis’, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria GeorgiouPart IV. Intra/Extraterritorial DisplacementIntroduction, Sam DurrantThe ‘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 RobinsonReframing Climate Migration: A Case for Constellational Thinking in the Writing of Teju Cole, Byron SantangeloPart V. The CampIntroduction, Emma CoxMemories and Meanings of Refugee Camps (and more-than-camps), Elena Fiddian-QasmiyehWriting the Camp: Death, Dying and Dialects, Yousif M. QasmiyehReel Refugees: Inside and Outside the Camp, Madelaine HronPart VI. Sea CrossingsIntroduction, David FarrierZoopolitics of Asylum Seeker Marine Deaths and Cultures of Anthropophagy, Joseph PuglieseThe Mediterranean Sieve, Spring and Seametery, Hakim Abderrezak‘Island is no arrival’: Migrants’ Islandment at the Borders of Europe, Mariangela PalladinoAt Sea: Hope as Survival and Sustenance for Refugees, Parvati NairPart VII. Digital TerritoriesIntroduction, Agnes WoolleyNetworked narratives: Online Self-Expression from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon, Mary MitchellRefugee writing, refugee history: Locating the Refugee Archive in the Making of a History of the Syrian War, Dima Saber and Paul LongDigital Biopolitics, Humanitarianism and the Datafication of Refugees, Btihaj AjanaThe Messenger: Refugee Testimony and the Search for Adequate Witness, Gillian Whitlock & Rosanne KennedyPart VIII. HomeIntroduction, David FarrierHome and Law: Impersonality and Worldlessness in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, Daniel HartleyAutobiography of a Ghost: Home and Haunting in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, Mireille RoselloHoming as Co-creative Work: When Home Becomes a Village, Misha Myers and Mariam IssaPart IX. Open CitiesIntroduction, Sam Durrant‘Another Politics of the City’: Urban Practices of Refuge, Advocacy and Activism, Jonathan DarlingThe Welcome City?, Hannah Lewis and Louise WaiteIn the City’s Public Spaces: Movements of Witnesses and the Formation of Moral Community, André GrahleOpen/Closed Cities: Cosmopolitan Melancholia and the Disavowal of Refugee Life, Sam Durrant