1,720,985 research outputs found
'Something blurred in her': imagining hospitality in Graham Swift's <i>The Light of Day</i>
No full textThis article explores the complex position of Kristina, a refugee, in Graham Swift's 2003 novel The Light of Day. She has been overlooked in criticism of the novel, which has tended to focus on the narrator George. I argue that Kristina, in her role as both proximal and distant to the text, allows us to ask pressing questions about the nature of hospitality in relation to the contingent and unstable position of asylum seekers and refugees within British national space. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on hospitality, I argue that the novel's self-conscious mode of narrative expression both situates and problematises the imagination as a potential space of accommodation for asylum narratives
Topographies of exclusion: refugees, Windrush, and the politics of space in recent British film
No full textThrough an analysis of recent film and moving image work documenting the Hostile Environment, this essay challenges the distinction often drawn between postcolonial migrants and refugees, arguing that Britain's punitive immigration and asylum policy broadens what it means to be made stateless. With particular reference to the Windrush docudrama Sitting in Limbo (2020) and Remi Weekes' asylum horror His House (2020), this essay explores how a series of recent documentaries, docudramas and fiction films have successfully spatialised the hostile environment; that is, how they have exposed the topography of exclusion and containment that determines migrant subjectivities in contemporary Britain. By setting the Windrush Scandal in the larger context of migrant representation, the aim is to expose the continuities between migrant groups in their historical relationship to the nation state. The representational politics of space in recent film work offers a keen insight into these entangled histories
John-Michael Rivera, Undocuments
No full textReview of Rivera, John-Michael 2021, Undocuments, University of Arizona Press, Tucso
Narrating the asylum 'story': between literary and legal storytelling
No full textIn 2014 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reported that the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had exceeded 50 million for the first time since the Second World War. The entanglement of literary and legal technologies in the asylum decision-making process as it operates today in legal, advocacy and creative circles excludes asylum seekers from incorporation as rights-bearing individuals if they do not conform to a particular narrative of persecution. In a moment of anxiety over “the meaning and scope of citizenship” comparable to that of the postwar period – and facing a refugee crisis of a similar scale – an investigation of the means by which asylum protection is constituted by and enacted through narrative forms is long overdue. This essay analyses the procedural characteristics of the asylum decision-making process, which produces what I call the “asylum story”: an idealized version of refugeehood on which the civic incorporation of the asylum seeker depends and which circulates in a narrative economy that sets the terms for the enunciation of refugee experience. It considers how the notion of a discoverable truth has inflected literary engagements with asylum, which are beset by the same anxieties around veracity and authenticity endemic to the legal process of decision-making on asylum, and ends with an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “The American Embassy” from her 2009 collection The Thing Around Your Neck. I argue that the story exposes the narrative instabilities of the asylum determination process, highlighting the ways in which those international institutions designed to protect human rights continue to be deeply implicated in regimes of truth which regulate upon whom they may be conferred
Strangers in a strange land
No full textBen Sharrock’s Limbo is a tragicomic portrait of a group of asylum seekers passing time on a remote Scottish island. As it arrives in UK cinemas, Agnes Woolley examines a growing body of films over the past two decades that have sought to reframe our understanding of the refugee experience
Travelling Archetypes: Mary Jacobus, On Belonging and Not Belonging: Translation, Migration, Displacement. Princeton University Press, 2021, £22 hardback, 248 pp. ISBN: 9780691212388.
No full textContemporary asylum narratives: representing refugees in the Twenty-First Century
No full textBook synopsis: Contemporary Asylum Narratives marks a transition from traditional modes of diasporic belonging to the need for identifications that encompass the statelessness of refugees and asylum seekers. This book explores representations of asylum seekers and refugees in twenty-first century literature, film and theatre
“There's a Storm Coming!”:Reading the Threat of Climate Change in Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter
Full text linkThis essay identifies an imaginative impasse in relation to our cultural understanding of the climate change threat, and argues that narrative fiction is well-placed to explore the historically situated experiences of, and vulnerability to, a changing environment. In dramatising what Mike Hulme describes as the “psychological dissonance” engendered by the environmental crisis, Jeff Nichols’s 2011 film Take Shelter suggests alternative ways of knowing our environment to the empirical modes within which contemporary discourses of climate change operate. The tension between metaphor and materiality in the film presents a challenge to the rationalist discourses that have shaped humanity’s relationship to nature historically
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