Writing back to Brexit: Refugees, transcultural intertextuality, and the colonial archive

ABSTRACT

This article deals with the role of transcultural intertextuality in writing refugees and Brexit, arguing that refracting the colonial archive has served contemporary accounts of refugee migration to interpret current scenarios, revise lingering colonial imaginaries, and forge new bonds of solidarity. It draws on recent work in transcultural memory studies to explore how emergent bodies of refugee writing have remembered and actualized canonical works by engaging and adding to their relational mnemohistories. A multilateral account of the transcultural travel of memories, including of literary texts, relational mnemohistory allows one to rethink the constellation of source-text and actualization in intertextuality theory. While by no means reducible to writing back to Brexit and the canon, recent literature of the Calais “Jungle” migrant camp, such as the play The Jungle (2017), as well as works like the multi-volume Refugee Tales, performs important cultural work, retrieving historical entanglements and envisioning a much-needed relationality for the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Transcultural intertextuality
• mnemohistory
• refugees
• canon
• relationality
• Brexit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In his article “Top Ten Refugees’ Stories”, Kingsley (2016b) selects The Aeneid and the Gospel of Matthew as numbers one and two respectively, a choice not unlike many other “best books” lists compiled on this topic.

2. See Wally (2018) and Wiemann (2018) on the trend of politicizing Brexit literature.

3. In a broad understanding, I include not only writers like Kipling in the colonial archive, but also western classics that were central to the colonial curriculum and continue to be drawn on as interpretive models, such as Chaucer and The Odyssey.

4. I follow Claire Gallien (2018) and others in arguing for a “new encompassing category” (723) of “refugee”. Even where I refer to refugees only, I include (undocumented) migrants to accommodate “eco-refugees and environmental factors in the displacement of persons” (723).

5. For the “writing back” paradigm, see, for example, Brydon and Tiffin (1993) and Thieme (2001).

6. On this reorientation of memory studies, see also Michael Rothberg’s (2009) concept of multidirectional memory.

7. For the scope of refugee literature see, inter alia, the articles in Sandten (2017), Gallien (2018) and Gilmour and Chambers (2018).

8. This discursive violence manifested itself in actual harassment and violence suffered by the camp’s residents, as previous articles on the Calais “Jungle” have pointed out. While I focus on tropological and intertextual interventions, see Rosello (2016), Koegler (2017), and Sanyal (2017) for more immediate forms of resistance on the ground, including new forms of urbanism and home-making.

9. Analysing rewritings of Kipling in Calais (and other references to the colonial archive) in terms of relational mnemohistory can be compared to Edward Said’s (1993) practice of “contrapuntal reading”: “contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded” (79).

10. See my discussion of Refugee Tales and new diasporic traditions of world literature (Rupp 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan Rupp

Jan Rupp is an adjunct professor at Heidelberg University and has served as visiting professor at Goethe University Frankfurt, the University of Giessen, and Heidelberg University. He is the author of Genre and Cultural Memory in Black British Literature (2010) and a second monograph on representations of ritual in modernist Pageant Fictions (2016). His research interests include the contemporary novel, cultural memory studies, narrative criticism, and (neo-)Victorianism. He has recently worked on the intersection between world literature and environmental memory in literatures of the global south.