Border Politics & Refugee Narratives in Contemporary Literature

Abstract

Echoing Holocaust survivor Rabbi Hugo Gryn’s words, the twentieth century has often been referred to as “the century of the refugee” (qtd. in Kushner, 2006: 1). For the first time in human history, governments and international organisations became mobilised around the question of refugeehood, providing a legal framework for the protection of those displaced as a result of the world wars, civil conflicts, the process of decolonisalition and other humanitarian crises (Gatrell, 2013, Kushner, 2006). Far from subsiding, the scale of forced human displacement continues to be a major challenge in the twenty-first century. The conflicts raging in the Middle East, the current Russia-Ukraine war, the ongoing political unrest in the African continent or the humanitarian crises triggered by environmental collapse worldwide have forced thousands of people to flee their homes in the new millennium. Paradoxically, yet sadly unsurprisingly, the global response to this growing scale of refugees and asylum seekers has often translated into enhanced forms of policing and the fortification of national borders, as exemplified by the policies of the Donald Trump administration, the Brexit referendum, or the image of Fortress Europe. In this context, overcelebratory discourses on border poronousness, transnational interaction and transcultural dialogue coexist with the erection of physical walls aimed at reining in unauthorised border crossings. The tragedies unfolding along barbed-wire fences in Europe or in the so-called “Black Mediterranean” are well known, and yet media coverage has often had a silencing effect on the precariousness and vulnerability of those trapped in refugee camps and detention centres, just as it has tended to keep invisible the experiences of many other refugees who cross borders far away from the Global North.

Critical attention to borders and limitrophies – understood not only as geopolitical realities, but also as figurations where otherness and difference are negotiated – mirrors a global anxiety concerning mobility and the duality of borders themselves as both sites of conflict and surveillance, but also of resistance and transformation (Schimanski & Wolfe, 2017; Schimanski & Nyman, 2021). Refugee narratives stand out as integral parts of bordering processes and border-crossings, foregrounding the need to negotiate borders in the public sphere and accommodate new forms of belonging and becoming. Against this backdrop, Border Politics & Refugee Narratives in Contemporary Literature intends to explore how contemporary literature has been responding, both ethically and aesthetically, to the refugee phenomenon. “Refugee literature” – a category with increasing currency in scholarly writing and one that this issue invites to interrogate – has proliferated in recent years as exemplified by titles such as Abu Bakr Kahal’s African Titanics (2014), Gulwali Passarlay’s The Lightless Sky (2015), Mohsin Hamid’s Exist West (2017), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees (2017), Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeper of Aleppo (2019), Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) or the stories collected in multiple anthologies such as Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes’s Breach (2016), Meike Ziervogel’s project of Shatila Stories (2018) or the four volumes of the Refugee Tales project (2016, 2017, 2019, 2021). Refugee narratives are concerned with border-crossing experiences and, as some of the above texts illustrate, they also tend to be narratives of genre-crossing. Fiction and life writing, aesthetic and social action, individual and collective forms of production all mingle in complex and creative ways in much refugee literature, raising intriguing questions as regards the ethics of representation and even the aestheticisation of the refugee experience.