Abstract
Refugees can be formed as “subjects” as they navigate forced displacement in countries that are not their own. In particular, everyday life as the politicized Other, and as humanitarianism’s depoliticized beneficiary, can constitute them as political subjects. Understanding these produced subjects and subjectivities leads us to conceive of forced displacement – or “refugeedom” – as a human condition or experience of political (sub)alterity, within which inhere distinctive subjectivations and subjectivities. Drawing on fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, we use young Syrian and Iraqi refugees’ experiences with everyday racism, violent bullying and racialized discrimination as heuristic lenses with which to see displacement’s political subjects and subjectivities. We argue that the young refugees emerge as both political and moral subjects through core and defining struggles within – and against – these politicizing constraints. We interpret their struggles as ambivalently and dynamically situated within humanitarianism’s and racism’s subjections and subjectivities. Yet we also found that occasionally the young refugees could eclipse these produced subjectivities to claim repoliticized subjecthoods distinct from those of humanitarianism and outside displacement’s normal politics. We interpret these in Rancièrian terms as “political subjectivation.” ing our findings, we offer a simple theoretical architecture of refugeedom’s subjectivations, subjects, and subjectivities as comprising humanitarianism’s rights-bearing or juridical subject; the vulnerable and resilient, innocent and suffering subject; and the Othered or racialized subject, formed through the exclusions of displacement’s politicized spaces. But we also conceive refugeedom as a space of values, and so the ground on which moral meaning and significance attach to agency and subjectivity.
Highlights
Refugees can be formed as “subjects” as they navigate forced displacement in countries that are not their own
This recognition invites us to move away from seeing displacement as a descriptive category or process, toward conceiving it in a more explicitly political and analytical frame – “refugeedom.” Our objective is to find an interpretive route for retheorizing forced displacement as a human condition and experience of political alterity, within which inhere distinctive subjectivations, subjects and subjectivities
We put the framing questions like this: What does it mean to live one’s life structurally situated in a relationship of politicalalterity and constraint? What might the constitution of political subjecthoods within these conditions and experiences look and feel like? And how might these inform a theorization of refugeedom as a distinctive human condition of political alterity?
Summary
Will there come the day in which I live a free woman?” In this poignantly observed telling of her first experiences of making her own way in Beirut, a Syrian refugee allows us to see both the ordinariness of everyday racism and what navigating it demands. As she makes sense of her experiences, she gives meaning to the racializations by situating them within the wider political struggles and ethical commitments in which she finds herself. Positioning forced displacement as in this way inextricable from the political is to reconceptualize its subjectivities as bearing greater resemblance to those of the postcolonial subaltern than to those theorized as inhering in a depoliticized “bare life.”. “Without salt!”; “Sometimes we act, but with caution”; and “In my heart, there’s something like a fire – it burns.” Our interpretation of their navigations concludes by proposing a theorization of refugeedom which contains a deeper repoliticization of “the refugee subject.”
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