The Boochani effect: Public feelings and the limits of refugee authorship

Abstract

ABSTRACT The mediagenic publicity of the multiple prize-winning Kurdish Iranian author Behrouz Boochani has elevated him to an emblematic status for the struggles of refugees, and his 2018 book, No Friend but the Mountains, into a mega-text. These promotional strategies are marked by the mutation of humanitarian awards into convertible cultural capital in the Australian literary field. This article argues that the dissemination of Boochani’s image is qualified with a surplus of affect – in both registers of affectation and of feeling – in the public domain. What I term the “Boochani effect” mobilizes a large number of actors in the cultural sphere to engage with the burgeoning interest in refugee writing, while emphasizing Boochani’s position as simultaneously an “Australian” and a “refugee”. Boochani’s work and author-persona thus generate a “disciplinary trouble”, a problem of taxonomy that both refracts and resists the limits of the mechanisms of identity-making for the refugee writer.