Encampment as Colonization: Theorizing the Representation of Refugee Spaces

Abstract

Encampment as Colonization:Theorizing the Representation of Refugee Spaces Nasia Anam (bio) In the 2010s, we entered a new era of global migration, marked by the movement of peoples across the earth in numbers unprecedented in recent history. As of June 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that "70.8 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 25.9 million refugees" (UNHCR). Perhaps more disturbingly, during this time we also saw the condition of being a refugee transform from a state of migration and mobility to one of detention and stagnation. The extremity of forced mass migration and detention across the world indicates that we have approached a new epoch of globalization, one very different from the neoliberal celebration of dissolving borders, free trade, and cosmopolitan travel at the turn of the millennium.1 The mid-twentieth century created the juridical category of the "refugee," a figure, as Hannah Arendt famously argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is rendered eminently moveable, or more precisely, excisable. The plight of the twenty-first century refugee is distinct in that the process of minoritization and excision is compounded by the interruption of the very possibility of movement. A dejected population, when jettisoned from one place, may now find that they have no other place to move to for refuge. In the past decade, the asylum-granting nations of Europe and the United States have met the possibility of refugee populations settling within their borders with ever greater measures of resistance, [End Page 405] backed by the rise of far-right political parties running on anti-immigrant platforms. The solution, more often than not, has been to place refugee populations into temporary, ad-hoc spaces of habitation which nonetheless begin to take on qualities of permanent settlements. As philosopher Serena Parekh asserts, "Western states and the international community have come to rely on camps as the primary way of handling large numbers of displaced people. If you are a refugee in the 21st century seeking aid from the international community, you are likely to spend your life in a refugee camp or a similar space of containment, rather than being resettled, receiving asylum, being repatriated, or being integrated in your host country" (3). Regularly denied entry into more stable nation-states and granted no guarantee of safety upon returning home, the spatial and temporal condition of the refugee has quite literally become purgatorial. Would-be host states catalyze this state of limbo by "placing people in camps, dependent on aid, for protracted periods of time so that they do not pose problems for neighboring states or have the ability to claim asylum in the West"—a practice Parekh refers to as "warehousing" (4). In these spaces, liminality and transition are essentially rendered into conditions of permanence for refugee populations. In turn, this progression from temporariness into permanence is perceived as a threat by the hegemonic nation-state, despite the state itself creating the conditions for interminable detention and encampment. In this essay, I examine literary and theatrical representations of the spaces where movement for refugees seeking asylum is stalled, and where otherwise temporary waystations start to function as full-fledged settlements. Recent fiction and stage performance depicting global migration portrays the condition more and more refugees face today: obstructed circulation, thwarted flow, stagnation, redirection, and encampment. I consider three texts, all written in the latter half of the 2010s, which illustrate the ways in which contemporary spaces of liminality and temporariness such as the tent city and migrant encampment pose an outsize threat to European notions of sovereignty and citizenship: Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson's play, "The Jungle," which was first staged at the Young Vic theater in London during 2017 and later in New York in 2018; Jenny Erpenbeck's novel, Go, Went, Gone, first published in 2015 in German as Gehen, Ging, Gegangen; and Mohsin Hamid's novel, Exit West, published [End Page 406] in 2017. In these works, the tent city and encampment are portrayed as spaces where the migrant is denied the capacity to move—a space of stuckness in which access to mobility is entirely decoupled from...