Assembling the refugee anthology

Abstract

ABSTRACTThere has been a sudden proliferation of short story anthologies published in direct response to the refugee ‘crisis’ of 2015 and the US travel ban of 2017. This article focuses on two of these collections (The Displaced and Banthology, both published in 2018) in order to theorize the reasons behind this phenomenon. What makes an anthology better equipped than a single authored piece of writing to respond to such contemporary themes as migration and displacement? I argue that the answer might lie in the precise nature of their heterogeneous form, which allows anthologies to be assembled and reassembled by various stakeholders during their production and reception so that they mean differently in different times and places. My analysis of the anthology as assemblage brings Deleuze and Guattari’s original concept into dialogue with newer notions of queer curation and postcolonial reading in order to conceive of processes of selecting and fitting elements together as deliberate tactics. I pay particular attention to how such processes highlight the agentic role of the reader, allowing them to make their own assemblages from the multiple interrelations that emerge between the anthology’s composite elements, and I show through specific examples from primary texts of how this might be done. Developing this concept of assemblage reading (which is here also transnational by nature) allows me to extend the framework of the refugee anthology to encompass a much wider range of acts of collective creation in my conclusion.