Forcing displacement: The postcolonial interventions of refugee literature and arts

ABSTRACT

In Postcolonial Asylum, David Farrier explains why refugee experiences have been considered as a “scandal” for postcolonial studies, but also how they have become central to the field, insofar as they reflect the violence and unevenness of the current world order. If geography, political philosophy and law have analysed current “refugee crises”, the literature and arts produced by or about forcefully displaced people have remained understudied. This article affirms that postcolonial theory, precisely because of its situation at the crossroads between social sciences and humanities, offers a unique platform from where to study refugee literature and arts. It also argues that its enduring impact lies in its extraterritoriality, i.e. its capacity to interrogate dominant literary histories defined along national borders, frustrate unilingual visions of national languages and individual conceptions of authorship, and inspire seminal “turbulence” in artistic, critical, and academic practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee literature
• forced displacement
• postcolonial theory
• testimonial imperative
• regimes of visibility
• national/extraterritorial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See De Genova and Tazzioli (2016), and the New Keywords Collective readings of the terms “crisis”, “migrant crisis/refugee crisis”, and “numbers”. The research programme “Babels” (Babels 2017a, 2017b, 2017c) consists of studies published in the Bibliothèque des Frontières series edited by Michel Agier and Stefan Le Couran aiming to dissect current border regimes in Europe and the Mediterranean and foregrounding migrant voices and experiences.

2. The concept of the “zone of non-being” is borrowed from the decolonial critic Grosfoguel (2011, 2016) who coupled Franz Fanon’s use of it with Boaventura De Sousa Santos’s concept of the “abysmal line” (quoted in Gordon 2005, 2007). On problems with Agamben’s ([1998] 2017b) concept of “bare life” because it denies access to any form of agency, see Bailey (2009).

3. In the context of Sangatte, a report analysed the representation of refugees in British media and found the language to be abusive, stereotypical, relying heavily on politicians as their main sources of information, and quoting unverified and wrong figures. See Article 19 et al. (2003).

4. Migrants trying to reach Europe die every day and European border controls have led to the deaths of hundreds of African migrants in the Sahara Desert or in left-to-drift rubber boats. Shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea are reported daily. With the erection of walls between Greece and Turkey in 2012, and razor-wire fences, the smuggling rings offering passage to the Aegean Sea increased in number. Political parties, especially the far right, have used the refugee “crisis” to inflame populism and nationalism, and sometimes racist agendas, especially in Poland, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, and Austria (see Babels 2017c; Carr 2015; Fassin and Windels 2016).

5. In September 2017, a new law was examined before the French National Assembly to legalise and multiply the number of identity checkpoints based on facial discrimination (contrôle au faciès). See map of checkpoints published by La Cimade: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1eedzr_OSCU0aM38pH6BQ_z8P0Wg&ll=48.61186608667483%2C2.2797028285156102&z=5. See also their open letter (Cimade 2017) for a withdrawal of the bill: État d’urgencepermanent. Contrôle au faciés partout. The law was passed on October 30, 2017.

6. Médecins Sans Frontières announced in June 2016 that it would refuse European institutional donations after the EU decision in March to pay Turkey humanitarian aid if it agreed to contain migration flows towards Europe (Duparc 2016).

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Claire Gallien

Claire Gallien teaches in the English Department at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 and is affiliated to the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). She has published L’Orient anglais (2011) and edited a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies on contemporary Anglo-Arab literatures in English and in translation. Her current book project is From Corpus to Canon: Eastern Literary Traditions and Orientalist Reconfigurations in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain and she is co-editing A Critical Muse: The World Imaginaries of Islam. Her research interests are in the critical study of orientalist discourse, postcolonial, comparative and world literatures and theories, as well as in translation studies and decolonial practices.