White shores of longing: ‘Impossible subjects’ and the frontiers of citizenship

Abstract

This essay begins with an incident that occurred in 2001, the arrival of a group of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka who arrived off the coast of Coral Bay, Western Australia. It follows these castaway figures through a sequence of discursive histories and representational contexts, situating their stories against practices of embodied citizenship at the intersection of law, land (as territorialized geo-body) and nation, in the United Kingdom, Sri Lanka and Australia, the sites of different, but deeply entwined, dramas of citizenship.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Edward Mendelson, literary executor and editor of W.H. Auden's works, for responding so promptly to my query about the original publication of ‘Refugee Blues’.