Thammasat University students who are interested in literature, history, sociology, political science, economics, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.
The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61216
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of refugee experience.
As the publisher’s website explains,
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.
As the book’s introduction notes,
The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives explores these narratives and their significance to understanding the social conditions, cultural politics, and personal experiences of refugee migration. This collection is guided by the dual question: who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative? To address this question, we offer an interdisciplinary study, drawing from the humanities and social sciences, that radically expands its two key terms of engagement—refugees and narratives—to encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects and a variety of storytelling modalities. The chapters in this volume explore the different ways refugees are imbricated with narrative or how they are understood and produced through narrative, whether it be legal, journalistic, artistic, literary, or personal. In response to dominant media and state narratives about refugees that depict them as passive victims of decontextualized violence or demand first-person testimonials of their trauma, we turn to a larger range of narrative productions to elucidate the complexities of refugee flight and resettlement. The chapters in this volume analyze novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography written by, alongside, or in conversation with refugee cultural producers…In examining and expanding “refugee” and “narrative,” we point to the historical and contemporary richness of refugee cultural productions that range in content, tone, form, and modality. In the current moment, specifically, there is a proliferation of narratives on and about refugees. No doubt, this is partly a response to the massive number of refugees and displaced persons around the world, the highest since World War II. The chapters in this collection attend to the many unfolding refugee migrations in the present, as well as past displacements and those yet to come. They also point to the porousness of legal and generic categories—how strict boundaries, borders, and definitions do not hold up under analysis. Refugee narratives is, in essence, a formation that resists definitive categorization, engaging categories in order to complicate and push their parameters. The chapters included in this volume ask readers to (re)consider the inherited conventions and assumptions regarding how refugees are narrated and the master narratives that exist about them. Doing so is a matter of aesthetic education, ethical contemplation, and political commitment. This collection highlights the need for what writer and critic Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “narrative plenitude,” a diverse, differing, and often-conflicting wellspring of narratives on and about refugees. An “economy of narrative plenitude” allows for narratives that move beyond refugee victimhood or innocence, that comprehend refugees as diverse and complex, eluding attempts to reduce them to stereotypes and well-worn conventions. It facilitates an understanding of refugee narratives as a series of interconnected snapshots as opposed to a singular discourse. The mixed and varied contents of this Handbook-as-refugee-suitcase demonstrate the various journeys that refugees have traveled, bearing witness to the fact that they too are undeniably part of the global community, are human beings affected by and affecting the world, rather than rightless, pitiful victims, abstracted from place and time… A Handbook on refugee narratives firstly warrants a discussion of the perennial question: Who is a refugee? According to Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, the figure of the modern refugee emerged during the interwar years in Europe, when the consolidation of the nation-state structure led to the mass increase in stateless peoples who were excluded from narrow definitions of the nation and thus denied state-granted citizenship rights.10 This mass refugee crisis—in which inalienable human rights ceased to exist as such—culminated in the Holocaust, one consequence of which was the violent expulsion of Jewish, Romani, and communist subjects, among others, from the body politic. In the wake of the devastation of World War II, the newly established United Nations, founded in 1945, ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention, which sought to legally delineate who constitutes a refugee and codify internationally recognized refugee rights. In particular, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defined a refugee as “someone who has been forced to flee his or her country” due to “a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.” The 1951 Convention and the subsequent 1967 Protocol, which crucially expanded the geographical and temporal limits of the Convention, outline how refugees should be treated, stressing the core principle of non-refoulement, which protects a refugee from being returned to “a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.” Moreover, attempts have been made in subsequent decades to become more inclusive of the grounds for persecution. In recent years, for example, the UNHCR has moved to recognize the asylum claims of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals who face fear of persecution due to sexual orientation or gender identity, though the application has been uneven across national lines. What this oft-cited legal genealogy of the emergence of the modern refugee elides, however, are other stories and experiences of forced displacement.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)