Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees

Abstract

Abstract The introduction to this special issue argues that new work on borders and refugees does not simply serve as an urgent response to contemporary politics but requires an unsettling of core conceptions of nation and empire, citizenship and migrancy, and rights and rightlessness. Prioritizing the perspectives of exiles, migrants, and refugees entails new understandings of the relationship between mutating racial formations and international border regimes across past and present landscapes. Reading the refugee necessitates rethinking belonging in order to expand our political imagination beyond anodyne notions of multiculturalism or liminality. Such work undoes American Studies from the inside rather than institutionalizing a distinct sub-field of border studies. Recognizing that the border is everywhere, and is not limited to the construction of a wall or checkpoint, such study strives to undo the exceptionality of the border as a site to link the practices of surveillance, capture, and detention that operate there to similar practices within the domestic sphere. An attempt to grasp US literary history from the vantage of exiles, migrants, and refugees is not timely, but fundamentally belated—impossible to arrive at and long overdue.