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

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

Jopi Nyman. Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing

There has been a growing need in migrant studies in recent years for new approaches to the plight of forcibly displaced persons. Typically concerned with human mobility, postcolonial critique has helped meet this need through such formidable studies as Postcolonial Asylum (2011) by David Farrier, Contemporary Asylum Narratives (2014) by Agnes Woolley, or Performing Noncitizenship (2015) by Emma Cox. All three advance powerful critiques of the nation state which, despite repeated assertions of..

Looking Behind Grand Façades: The Ambiguous Visibility of Urban Wealth in The Unknown Terrorist, Saturday, and The White Tiger

FThe raison d’être of cities is, and always has been, the accumulation of capital. Even so, scholarship on literary renderings of the urban has focussed primarily on poverty and thus contributed to a somewhat one-sided perception of the social inequalities shaping today’s cities. For the sake of a more balanced reading of such inequalities, this essay first reviews work on urban wealth in other fields, before probing into the “fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and affluence” (Baudrillard 25) purportedly characterising modern cities. It argues that conspicuousness is only one aspect of urban wealth, which in actual fact is subject to a neoliberal politics of subterfuge ensuring that capital concentrations are always spectacle and well-screened privilege at once. Drawing on Andrea Brighenti’s theorisation of (in)visibility as a social category, I explore how this politics plays out in the dramatic encounters of urban rich and poor orchestrated in the novels Saturday (2005) by Ian McEwan, The Unknown Terrorist (2006) by Richard Flanagan, and The White Tiger (2008) by Aravind Adiga. In doing so, I show how three otherwise radically dissimilar texts advance very similar ways of seeing urban wealth that a reading focussed solely on disadvantage and abjection cannot reveal

Unsettling Oceania

Unsettling Oceania takes the pulse of the contemporary literature of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, 250 years after Captain Cook’s first voyage led to encounter and Western colonisation. The eleven articles gathered here reflect the ideological current of “decolonisation” in the white settler societies considered, and the will to deconstruct our understanding of modernity, in particular by foregrounding Indigenous perspectives and epistemologies. The essays adopt a dual ethical and aesthetic dimension to examine a literature that unsettles and decentres the established Western perspective on Oceania. The issue includes discussions of the evolution of the forms of belonging to the nation, the redefinition of Indigeneity, the impact of the Asia-Pacific context, the concern for the environment in times of climate change, and political and military decolonisation