Refugee Narratives Research Articles

‘Home is just a feeling’: Essentialist and anti-essentialist views on home among Ukrainian war refugees

The notion of home, understood as a distinct and meaningful place is frequently explored in migration studies. It emerges as an especially significant point of reference, though it is often marked by ambiguity and ambivalence, especially in the narratives of war refugees. This article examines how Ukrainian refugees in Poland define and experience home, exploring the evolving meanings of home in the context of displacement and resettlement. We conducted semi-structured interviews with thirteen refugees and forced migrants who left Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion on February 24th, 2022. Using a theoretical framework of essentialist and constructivist (anti-essentialist) notions of place, we identified three major themes in the way refugees perceive home. The first theme highlights attachment to home, where refugees express feelings of security, stability, and rootedness. The second reveals a profound sense of ‘non-home’, where home is lost or unattainable. The third theme explores how refugees attempt to reconcile a fixed sense of home with their experiences of mobility, reshaping home through multiple, meaningful sites. By integrating these theoretical perspectives this study offers a nuanced understanding of how displacement and migration reshape the concept of home for refugees.

Remembering an abandoned city: tracing memories and urban narratives of refugees from famagusta

Sullo sfondo del quadro teorico ricostruito nell'articolo precedente, questo contributo presenta i risultati dello studio empirico sulla città abbandonata di Varosha, nella città di Famagosta (Cipro), osservata attraverso lo sguardo dei rifugiati grecociprioti esiliati durante l'invasione turca del 1974. Utilizzando il metodo delle mappe mentali, attraverso interviste strutturate gli esuli sono stati invitati a disegnare Famagosta ripercorrendo la memoria della loro terra perduta. Le mappe mentali dei rifugiati hanno rivelato profonde intuizioni sulla loro percezione dello spazio e una forte relazione con il luogo. Questo studio arricchisce la nostra comprensione di Famagosta e funge da testimonianza dei legami duraturi tra le comunità esiliate e il loro territorio, sottolineando l'importanza di preservare e comprendere i molteplici strati delle dimensioni spaziali mnemoniche di una città al fine di progettarne un futuro condiviso.

The UK’s Nationality and Borders Bill Policy: Its Impact on Refugees and Asylum Seekers

The United Kingdom (UK) introduced the Nationality and Borders Bill (2021) to address illegal immigration. This article argues that the UK’s historical asylum policies have contributed to marginalising asylum seekers through a process of “othering.” It demonstrates how policy language and symbols, combined with media discourse, frame asylum seekers as security threats. The power dynamics among public officials and humanitarian agencies further legitimise refugees as the “other.” The article suggests a bottom-up approach involving civil society organisations to incorporate refugee voices in challenging dominant narratives and policymaking. By sharing refugee narratives, this article reveals that refugees are conscious of being marginalised and advocate for policy change. This approach not only empowers them but also helps expose existing stereotypes and power imbalances within mainstream immigration policies.

Refugee sousveillance: observation and co-optation in The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives

Narratives are a matter of life and death for refugee subjects in the US. They are managed through a juridico-political process called Refugee Status Determination (RSD). Under the surveillant gaze of RSD, refugee subjects are forced to narrativize their lives using the language of persecution in exchange for state protection. This article contributes to critical refugee studies (CRS) scholarship which challenges the dehumanizing impacts of RSD’s surveillant gaze. Extending Vinh Nguyen’s concept of refugeetude, I develop a framework for refugee sousveillance. I define refugee sousveillance as the co-optation of refugee narratives such that they consciously defy the juridico-political surveillance of RSD towards a creative, open, coalitional future with other refugee subjects and marginalized groups. Refugee sousveillance applies bell hooks’ oppositional gaze (1992) and Browne’s (2015) dark sousveillance to refugeetude. Identifying a noteworthy collection of essays written by a coalition of elite refugee writers, I provide examples of refugee sousveillance as both process and product.

Relationality in Refugee Narratives: Abbas Khider’s Ohrfeige and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Displaced

The following article explores relational perspectives in Ohrfeige, a novel by writer and former Iraqi refugee, Abbas Khider, and the essay collection, The Displaced, edited by the writer and former refugee from Vietnam, Viet Thanh Nguyen. Drawing on Judith Butler’s relational ontology, the article discusses how these narratives critically intervene in today’s climate of anti-immigrant rhetoric and intensified border enforcement as they re-humanize refugees, de-essentialize refugee vulnerability, disentangle vulnerability from passivity, and formulate nonviolent positions of resistance, protest and demand. Particular focus is paid to grotesque figurations of corporeality that demonstrate relational vulnerability and simultaneously function as a powerful mode for mourning and protest.

Introduction: Border Politics and Refugee Narratives in Contemporary Literature

Refugeehood—whether triggered by religious intolerance, ethnic strife, political repression, war, or environmental factors—has been a constant throughout human history, but it was not until the twentieth century that refugees were endowed with legal status on an international level [...]

Das literarische Schaffen Manfred Winklers – Werkübersicht, Genese und Textpraktiken

Abstract Though awarded the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literature in 1999, the multifaceted Manfred Winkler (1922–2014), encompassing roles as a German and Hebrew poet, survivor-writer, translator, painter, and sculptor, has only recently garnered sustained scholarly attention. This delayed recognition can be attributed, in part, to Winkler’s lifelong commitment to traversing geographical, national, ideological, and linguistic boundaries throughout his extensive career. It is only in the wake of a burgeoning interest in the life narratives of German-language refugees and immigrants to Israel, alongside their transcultural literary contributions, that the cultural and historical significance of Winkler’s poetry has come to light. This article delves into Winkler’s literary corpus and its inception, drawing upon the latest insights and research findings obtained through the author’s archival and editorial work since 2014. It provides an overview of the predominant themes, writing practices, and tendencies within the works of this multilingual author and (self-)translator. Winkler, through his poignant portrayal of the traumas of war and the memories of the Holocaust and the Jewish-Arab conflict – with a sense of grief rather than from a position of judgment – delineates the fault lines and pivotal moments of nearly the entire 20th century.

North Korean Refugee Narratives and the Representation of Christianity in the Work of Korean-American Writers Helie Lee and Krys Lee.

North Korean Refugee Narratives and the Representation of Christianity in the Work of Korean-American Writers Helie Lee and Krys Lee.

Positing Women Volunteers as Planetary Humanists Amid Refugee Crisis: A Literary Perspective

The role of women is critical to both addressing the refugee crisis and promoting a planetary humanist perspective. By recognizing and valuing the contributions of women, we can work towards more equitable and sustainable solutions to global challenges. The paper attempts to explore the role of women as ‘volunteers’ who play a crucial role in supporting and assisting the refugees in Nadia Hashmi’s novel “when the moon is low” (2015). A lot of research has been carried out on women refugees in terms of trials and tribulations that they face in their migration journey including how their experiences as refugees are different from those of males taking into account factors such as race, ethnicity, religion, class, and sexuality, but no significant work has been done on the non-refugee women who volunteer themselves, both formally and informally, to support and assist the refugees on ground level. Such a concept presents a positive step towards a planetary humanist approach. Thus, the study proposes that it is paramount to consider the role of non-refugee women as volunteers in moving towards an all-inclusive planetary approach. To accomplish this, this paper aims to build a synapse between the notions of planetary humanism, refugee crisis, and volunteerism as presented by numerous theorists on the relevant areas such as Gilroy (2002), Phipps (2019), Lahusen, and Grasso (2018). Moreover, most of the work on volunteerism comprises field work based on quantitative analysis. This study however, applies this idea to the refugee narrative.

FROM SOCIAL TIES TO SPATIAL BELONGING: RETHINKING HOME IN REFUGEE STUDIES WITH A FOCUS ON DEEP HALDAR’S BLOOD ISLAND

The forced displacement of millions due to war, persecution, and environmental disasters presents a significant challenge to the international community. Refugee Studies, a field dedicated to understanding the experiences of refugees, has traditionally focused on social interaction and integration. However, this emphasis overlooks the profound impact displacement has on refugees' sense of place and home. This article argues that a more nuanced understanding of the refugee experience requires incorporating insights from spatial theory and the concept of "home tactics."The article begins by examining the limitations of the dominant social interactionist paradigm in Refugee Studies. It critiques the "nomadic subjectivity" model, which views refugees as essentially mobile, and the policy-oriented use of "place rootedness" as a tool for resettlement. Drawing on the work of Catherine Broome, the article proposes a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between refugees and place. This includes acknowledging the strategic use of place claims for political purposes while recognizing the genuine emotional attachment refugees have to their lost homes.The concept of "home tactics," developed by Mariano Ortega, offers a valuable framework for understanding how refugees navigate displacement. Home tactics refer to the everyday actions and practices refugees undertake to create a sense of familiarity and belonging in their new environments. The article explores how home tactics transcend economic and political strategies, reflecting deeply personal and emotional connections to land and space.The book "Blood Island" by Deep Haldar serves as a powerful case study for examining home tactics in action. The article analyzes how displaced Bengalis in Dandakaranya recreate a sense of home through rituals like the "Posto Mela" harvest festival. These performative acts connect them to their past and the land they lost. Furthermore, the article explores the embodied dimensions of home and belonging, highlighting the profound sensory connection refugees maintain with their lost homelands.The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of studying refugee narratives to gain deeper insights into their experiences. By analyzing narratives, we can move beyond theoretical frameworks and understand how refugees themselves perceive displacement, place, and home. Incorporating these insights into refugee policy and practice is crucial for developing ethical and sustainable responses to the ongoing global refugee crisis.

“My Life Has Ended”: Exploring the Refugee Protection Process and How it Affects Future Orientation in Refugees

Much of refugee protection focuses on the legal aspects within the international refugee protection regime, which arguably results in less attention being paid to the more practical aspects to the realisation of that protection including the processes the refugees have to undergo as well as its impacts. As a cornerstone of the international refugee protection regime, non-refoulement (the forcible return of people to countries where they face persecution) is also a jus cogens (peremptory norm from which no derogation is permitted) principle. While crucial in and of itself, a meaningful protection regime should ideally result in further non-violation of refugees’ human rights including the prevention of refugees being revictimised, particularly when undergoing processes intended in securing their protection. Through refugee narratives, this article takes us on a journey in exploring some of the ways in which the protection regime may contribute to harming refugees. Further, based on refugee testimonies, this article sheds light on the probable impacts to refugees’ future orientation, an outcome of having undergone the protection processes as they take the perilous journey from flight to resettlement. More critically, this article aims to open the discussion further with a view to improve protection outcomes and prevent revictimisation of the refugees themselves as they navigate these various processes.

Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City: New Canadian Refugee Narratives and the Borders of the Socio-Political Community

This paper examines Philip Huynh’s short story collection The Forbidden Purple City in relation to its engagement with the nativity–territory–citizenship triad on which Western socio-political communities found the principles of affiliation of their members. First, the Canadian reaffirmation of a discourse of national benevolence is contextualised to later draw on how the collection is nurtured by boundary-crossing ethics that interrogates any sequential relation between past and present, Vietnam and Canada, which usually structures refugee narratives. It is argued then that disruptive and productive time/space interconnections delegitimate any simplistic representations of easily assimilated grateful refugees, fracturing the convenient narration of Canada as a benefactor concerned with old and new international humanitarian causes. The newness of Huynh’s stories relies on their mobilisation of the discourse of state citizenship through exceptional migrancy and its disruptive border nature. In contrast to premises of birth and geographical territory, which lose ground as backbones of any affiliation, citizenship appears incomplete and processual. The stories use the precarious performativity of collective homogeneity expected of a former settler colony, like Canada, to launch agency and resistance to state homogenisation, and de-institutionalise the refugee subject to critically intervene sovereignty and political subjectivity. Finally, the stories evince that Canada’s social spectrum is ideal to explore the threshold opened by the adjacency of sameness and otherness embodied by Huynh’s protagonists. Their condition as diasporic refugee subjects augments the transformative potential of new refugee narratives, in which literal and metaphorical polymorphous borders unveil the bases of the contemporary Canadian socio-political community.

Denial from the other side: Experiences of racism as narrated by South Sudanese refugees in Australia

This paper discusses experiences of everyday racism as narrated by South Sudanese refugee-background informants living in Australia. The paper draws on accounts of verbal and physical attacks reported during a sociolinguistic interview about the refugee experience and adaptation to the Australian lifestyle. The study contributes to the exploration of features of refugee narratives, using the socio-interactional approach to narrative analysis. Selected stories about racism are explored using positioning theory, paying attention to the discursive strategies narrators use to position themselves in the interactional world of the interview setting as well as the story-world. Their narratives demonstrate that despite the harsh experiences of everyday racism, they position themselves as resilient and strong individuals. They do this by drawing on their refugee history and making references to harder times. However, the stories also reveal their mitigation strategies to soften the accounts and either downplay or deny racism. However, by sharing their stories and making explicit evaluative statements about social injustice, they mobilise their agency to make their story heard.

Abbas Khider's Refugee Narrative Ohrfeige : A System-Critical Intervention in the Continuing Human Rights and Solidarity Crisis

Abstract: This article investigates Abbas Khider's Ohrfeige as a system-critical intervention in the discourse of forced migration and the continuing human rights and solidarity crisis. It focuses on Khider's use of the grotesque to illustrate how, as refugee narrative, Ohrfeige is symptomatically situated within the constraints of a profit-driven world economic system which reduces literature, cultures, and people to commodities, while growing numbers of refugee populations are kept in inhospitable spaces of radicalized exclusion. The grotesque also serves Khider as a distancing technique to highlight the need to assume active responsibility beyond humanitarian compassion to confront the injustices of our time.

Food resignification practices among refugees at the margins of Rome

ABSTRACT The aim of our article is to explore the meaning of food for refugees and volunteers settled in emergency contexts in the city of Rome. We will look at ways in which refugees rephrase their experience with food in its symbolic dimensions expressed in norms, classifications, tastes while living in a context of accidental communities and uncertainty. In this study, we will rely on the observation of food practices of refugees and on the collection of narratives – also through the technique of photo elicitation – of privileged witnesses in urban encampments. Referring to seminal works on the cultural symbolic aspect of food (Mintz 1996; Montanari 2006; Rocillo-Aquino et al. 2021) and to ways of food preparation and consumption in unfamiliar cultural settings , our study will contribute to a better understanding of food systems in the dynamic milieu of forced migration, especially referring to emergency settings and other crisis situations (like the pandemic period). Ethnographic data lead us to consider the following questions: which features characterize food in such contexts of uncertainty? Which practices connected to food are performed and what do the narratives of refugees and volunteers tell us about the sense of food experienced? In brief, how is food re-signified in these emergency contexts?

Building Bridges: Translating Refugee Narratives for Public Audiences with Arts-based Media

ABSTRACT This paper presents ethnographic research from Journey: Bridging Cultures, a UK-based project that worked with school-aged youths with forced migration backgrounds. Between January 2020 and July 2021, participants and facilitators co-produced a multimedia chamber orchestra work about students’ experiences in countries of origin, transit, and destination to present to members of the Oxford community. Through this case study, we explore the translation of refugee narratives into artworks for public audiences, deconstructing the social processes and power negotiations inherent in its crafting and transmission. In conversation with scholarship on arts-based research with refugees, Michel Callon's theory of translation (1984) is mobilised to position translation as both the product and process of multiple mediations. The context of co-productive artistic creation highlights the extent to which marginalised populations shape how their narratives are translated and performed. Such participants may redirect the trajectory of an artistic project through strategies of partial- and non- engagement, but these are balanced against external influences including the parameters of the artistic medium, expectations of imagined audiences, and internalised narratives about what stories to tell.

Perilous Pacific: Thanatic Archive and Vietnamese Refugees

While deadly scenes of air raids and land battles have dominated the historical archive of the war in Vietnam, commonly assumed to last from 1955 to 1975, not much systematic attention has been paid to the thanatic aspects of refugees’ oceanic exodus, which can help revise the temporal and spatial frames of the Asian conflict. As an attempt to address this critical lacuna, this essay examines fatalities at sea in refugee narratives pertaining to what some Americans designate the Vietnam War or what some Vietnamese call the American War. Specifically, through a comparative exegesis of two English short stories by Nam Le and Viet Thanh Nguyen, namely “The Boat” and “Black-Eyed Women,” this essay illustrates how both Vietnamese refugee authors construe the Pacific Ocean as a lethal material space–time traversed by Vietnamese boat people. If Le’s story rhetorically enlivens the ocean in order to accentuate its mortal impacts on refugees during their voyage, Nguyen’s story stylistically revitalizes the ocean as a spectral force that continues to unsettle resettled refugees. Taken together, this essay argues for the centrality of the perilous Pacific in constituting an alternative archive of the Vietnam crisis that recognizes departed and disavowed refugees as historical agents. In so doing, it contends that an oceanic view of the Vietnamese warfare is key to enacting postcolonial critiques of both imperial (American) and national (Vietnamese) regimes of exclusion. By demonstrating how Vietnamese refugee writers thematically and formally animate treacherous oceanic routes of escape, this essay redirects critical attention to the hitherto neglected maritime spaces as conflict spaces. This literary rearticulation of the sea as thanatic history allows us to supplement both aerial and terrestrial modes of knowing the debacle in Vietnam, as it radically expands the temporality and spatiality of the tragic episode in Asian history.

Mohsin Hamid’s New Paradigm of Travel via Doorway

Traditional travel narratives prioritize the time between a character’s departure and destination. The very act of travel, whether by automobile, foot, or plane, is often the focus of study for literary scholars of this particular genre. Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 novel Exit West diverges in a curious way from this norm; the characters in Hamid’s acclaimed novel about emigration and refugees features characters who bounce around the world via magical doors, which are themselves hardly discussed in the larger narrative. I propose that through his use of otherworldly doors as the method of travel, Hamid highlights how the danger refugees face does not end when their travel concludes. By minimizing their journey to simply walking through a doorway, he prevents readers from hyper-focusing on refugee travel and directs attention to the struggles that exist beyond the physical trials of migrating. My argument will make use of the theoretical lens of ethnic studies, which reveals power structures in place that influence the lives of marginalized subjects and precarious travelers. By considering the power dynamics at play in Exit West, it is apparent that the non-traditional aspect of Hamid’s travel narrative influences how the novel’s refugee protagonists are perceived. Hamid’s work ignores both the formal expectations for refugee narratives, and offers a new paradigm (via his magical door) to show that lifechanging experiences for refugees exist beyond their physical journey.

Unfairy Tales and Other Refugee Stories: Creating Relations through the Humanitarian Imagination in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread

Contrary to many analyses of refugee narratives that focus on how their subject matter becomes compromised by issues of authority, believability, and expectation, this article explores how refugee novels such as Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread lean into such problems in a way that appeals to the humanitarian imagination. These novels recognize the incomprehensibility of the refugee experience and play upon this reality by intermixing their stories with fairy tale elements. In doing so, the tropes of fairy tales provide these stories with greater narrative flexibility while making the unfamiliar realities of refugees comprehensible through familiar narrative structures. In this article, I interrogate the function and effect of this fusion of genres in Exit West and Gingerbread, examining how this practice both overcomes the narrative obstacles refugees face and reveals the allowances and limitations of the humanitarian imagination amid the current global refugee crisis.

Memory, Trauma and Partition: Reading Sunanda Sikdar’s Dayamoyeer Katha

In recent years the scholastic emphasis on the refugee narratives, which conventionally focused on the loss of lives, homes and resources, is now reimagined as stories of survival and resurrection of people deprived of their homes. Nostalgia for a lost homeland often takes centre stage in refugee narratives. To be physically severed from a space internalised as the safest eternal abode and start afresh is a daunting task. Anchita Ghatak’s translation of Sunanda Sikdar’s Dayamoyeer Katha, A Life Long Ago narrates the life events of Dayamoyee, who chooses to revisit her past, deciding to write about the first ten years of her life in the East Pakistan village of Dighpait following the death of Majamda, a Muslim brotherly figure who sells his cows to come and meet her in India. The return to her childhood’s blissful land unearthed several hidden memories that brought the politics of religion, caste, class, and gender to the forefront. Without paying attention to her aunt’s continuous warnings not to mingle with the Muslim neighbours, Daya found it possible to eat, touch, and have fun with them in her childlike innocence. As the refugees arrive at Dighpait, her aunt remains unwilling to equate them with the native Muslim folk, the ‘bhoomiputra, the “sons of the soil”. Besides the narrator, we also have Snehalata, Daya’s aunt, her foster mother and a child widow. As she narrates how she grieved over the withdrawal of fish and other materialistic pleasures from her daily life rather than her young husband’s demise, we are reminded of the unfair austerity imposed on them in contrast to the elderly widowers who had no restrictions and even remarried occasionally. Characters like Modi bhabi, the woman who lost her mind as her childhood companion Suresh Lahiri left for Hindustan; Mejobhabi, wife of Khalek, who had to be ‘modernised’ to join her husband, now a senior army officer in Pakistan; Sudhirdada, the effeminate male whose murder portrays a show of power in the village, and Gouri, an instance of widow-remarriage needs scholarly attention. The novel further mentions Daya’s mother, the headmistress of a school in Hindustan, and Anita, a leading actress opposite Kishore Kumar, thus representing the educated, empowered women. The very moment of Daya deciding to write about her past is auspicious; it is the moment of finding one’s voice, of illuminating the horrors of the past, and the moment of triumph and healing. Dipesh Chakraborty mentions two aspects of memory: “the sentiment of nostalgia” and the “sense of trauma”, which pervades Dayamoyee’s narrative, but for her, it is equally therapeutic. The proposed paper looks forward to understanding Daya’s notion of her lost motherland and childhood and how the marginalised gender conceptualises home and rootedness. It proposes to analyse the politics of remembering, forgetting and retelling the stories from the point of the female subaltern who consciously buried her past and later chose to speak up, and in the process, portrayed a realistic picture of women during partition.