Refugee Narratives Research Articles

Where is the child? Refugee narratives in contemporary European popular culture

Abstract Subjected to what has been called a ‘global mobility regime’, refugees will often find that their destination countries have a limited number of pre-cut identities ready for them and allow them little leeway beyond these. In this paper, we will discuss representations of refugees in European popular culture following the so-called 2015 Syrian refugee crisis. We will analyse the narratives in these representations, and how these negotiate both what refugees are and should be, as well as what Europe, and more specifically the EU, is and should be. Through pathos, humour and shock, these works – two pop songs, a concert film, a comic and a cartoon – do not only convey narratives about the plight of refugees, but also work through how Europe experienced the 2015 crisis, and the ensuing, often conflicting, attitudes towards irregular migration that were expressed in European public discourse. We will discuss how this experience can be conceptualised as a ‘boundary experience’ that creates a before and after, as well as the possibility of new forms of identity – a possibility that may be ultimately rejected. As they take up the topic of irregular migration, we find producers of popular culture looking for words, sounds and images to express and address these attitudes, and to remember – or forget – the 2015 refugee crisis.

<i>Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies</i> by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (A Book Review)

Departures is the introductory volume to the interdisciplinary field of Critical Refugee Studies, written by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective and published by the University of California Press. The book works on many levels and can be read in as many ways. Partly a guide, partly a manifesto, the book dutifully performs its pre-set task of introducing the general reader to the field of Critical Refugee Studies, all the while engaging with larger issues and challenges. Its manifold nature is made explicit by the title itself, intended both as an allusion to the action of leaving and to that of deviating from a regular path. Highly readable and sharp-edged, tailor-made for an audience that includes (and transcends) colleges and universities, this text will likely find its way into many class syllabi and reading lists. Located at the crossroads of theory and resistance, advocacy and academia, Departures oozes rage, energy, and optimism, and is unapologetically political.
 The field of Critical Refugee Studies, the authors state in the “Introduction,” is “a way to seize control of image and narrative, by and for refugees, centered in refugee epistemologies and experiences." As a community-engaged critical field, it postulates the necessity of moving past pre-existing humanitarian narratives and frameworks, exposing the underlying threads that tie militarism and migration, power and memory, empire and race. Channeling Somali British and Palestinian poetry, Syrian visual art, and Vietnamese American independent cinematography, the seven contributors call for new methodologies and approaches, as well as for new stories that go beyond the simple “formula of … escape, despair, and rescue” embedded in mainstream refugee narratives. The book's aim is to break that mold, underscoring the “invisible relations of power that broker how we see and consume the refugee subject”; that is to say, to radically twist the ways in which the latter is defined by the law, by the arts, and by the collective conscious. Bold and provocative, Departures will not fail to spark conversations in the coming years.

Refugees Welcome? Illustrative storytelling to challenge apathy towards refugees

The illustrator and storyteller Hayfaa Chalabi writes and draws about what kind of design the Migration Board uses to visualize the asylum process. She tells about her own asylum experience and the roles that refugees are forced into. The work becomes a place for memory and history writing where Chalabi tries to understand how to document a process that is prohibited to be documented by the person undergoing it. How and why is the same emotion, such as fear, expressed and processed differently depending on one’s possibilities or impossibilities? This essay therefore aims to explore the tool of illustrative storytelling to challenge governmental restrictions faced by refugee narratives in Sweden. This exploration is done through the study of stereotypes that stigmatize the refugee’s identity. The figure of the refugee is often shaped by the visual representation one consumes via mass media and the words one hears in political debates and social discourse. Refugees are often portrayed as immigrants and nothing but immigrants, faceless victims on news and often de-named suffering people drowning in some ocean. This portrayal makes the humanity of the refugee invisible. A human who has a face, a name, a past, a story beyond his/her refugee story and most importantly an identity and rights.

Trans migrations: Seeking refuge in “safe haven” Toronto

Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people who make refugee claims in Canada negotiate a complex nexus of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Drawing on insights from TGNC refugees, immigration lawyers, and frontline workers, in this paper we examine the ways the state controls the trans body through the refugee claims process and in the process of integration into life in Canada, while also highlighting trans refugee methods of survival and resistance. What emerges is an understanding of the ways that refugees navigate the tension between gender, sexuality, and homecoming as both intimately felt and geopolitically managed. We convey TGNC refugee narratives to demonstrate how they both confirm and expand upon the existing literature on Canadian LGBTQ+ refugees. TGNC refugees' experiences at the Immigration and Refugee Board confirm insights from existing LGBTQ+ refugee studies. However, TGNC refugees' day‐to‐day lives differ significantly from LGB refugee lives as recounted in the literature. In TGNC refugees' attempts to access gender‐affirming documentation, healthcare, housing, and income, they confront distinct systems of transgender exceptionalism, border imperialism, and racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism that limit their access to basic necessities and impact how they build home both conceptually and materially.

Vietnamese refugee journeys and the fallacy of certainty

Vietnamese diasporic refugee narratives critically engage images of helicopter rescues and crowded boats that saturate American-mediated memories of war’s aftermath. From a critical refugee studies perspective, Yến Lê Espiritu links war to displacement through these images to define the United States as a ‘militarized refuge’. For Mimi Nguyen, arrival initiates a ‘gift of freedom’ that names the indebtedness of the refugee to the state. In their critical engagements, arrival initiates debt for militarized refugees. To further their work, I problematize the celebration of arrival with what I call the fallacy of certainty. To dismantle the certainty of arrival, I examine expressions of what Vinh Nguyen calls ‘refugeetude’ in depictions of refugee journeys by Ocean Vuong, G. B. Tran, Nam Le and Matt Huynh. Employing Espiritu’s method of ‘critical juxtapositioning’, I engage Édouard Glissant’s relationality of the abyss and the opacity of the open boat to contextualize forced migration narratives within a longue durée of imperialism that Aníbal Quijano calls coloniality. Ending with Long Bui’s discussion of a postmemory generation of Vietnamese diasporic artists and writers’ use of performativity, I show how they forward critical refugee studies when they imaginatively return to the journey, articulating relationalities that cross oceans and temporalities.

A Creative Approach to Knowledge Translation: The Use of Short Animated Film to Share Stories of Refugees and Mental Health.

This study used animated film to translate narratives of refugees and mental health into accessible material aimed at enhancing empathy and understanding. It focuses on the use of short animated films in series one and two of the Woven Threads catalogue. Series one shared moments of hope in a refugee’s journey, whilst series two focused on people living with mental health challenges. This research was designed to understand the responses to viewing for people who watch these animations. A mixed-method design was used via an online Qualtrics platform that asked respondents to view two short animated films, one from the refugee series and one from the mental health series. 364 members of the general public viewed and responded to the refugee film and 275 responded to the mental health film. The platform collected both quantitative and qualitative data. Survey responses indicated that the majority of viewers found the films challenged public misconceptions about refugees and individuals with mental health challenges and left them with a feeling of hopefulness. Qualitative narratives were organised into one superordinate theme: the power of film as a knowledge translation strategy, with four subthemes: (i) changing perceptions and inspiring empathy, (ii) enhancing literacy, (iii) highlighting the power of storytelling, and (iv) encouraging hope and a sense of belonging. The use of short animated film as a knowledge translation strategy can enhance our understanding, promote deep reflection, increase empathy and has the potential to lead to social change.

The Inclusions and Occlusions of Expanded Refugee Narratives

In this article, Wazhmah Osman and Karen Redrobe consider the storytelling conventions of the award-winning animated documentary Flee (2021) in light of the long history (in mainstream and popular media, as well as in academia) of marginalized peoples not being able to tell their own stories and of subaltern groups being positioned as the subjects of films in which white filmmakers and researchers drive the narrative. They consider the hierarchies of power involved with giving and taking voice and question whose perspective the film privileges, and to what effect. Their conversation is rooted in a working collaboration to think cross-culturally about media, gender, sexuality, and different types of violence.

Vocal Labor in Edwidge Danticat and Wyclef Jean’s Refugee Narratives

Abstract This article examines how Edwidge Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying (2007) and Wyclef Jean’s musical album The Carnival (1997) stage Haitian refugees’ encounters with US law. Both artists experiment with what I term “vocal labor,” a set of aesthetic strategies that denaturalize the human voice in order to decouple its facile elision with individuality and intelligibility. I argue that Danticat and Wyclef destabilize their own positions as articulate spokespeople to expose the legal and extralegal mechanisms that solicit refugees’ voices only to disarticulate and disavow them. In doing so, I demonstrate how Black performance reveals and responds to the sensorial dimensions of state-sanctioned violence.

Social Work Interventions: A Socio-Ecological Analysis of Climate Change and Conflict Refugees in the Sahel

The UN Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, has stated that climate change will disproportionally impact the displaced as it becomes more unpredictable, intense, frequent, and dangerous (Gaynor, 2020). The UNHCR reported that in 2019, weather-related hazards resulted in almost 25 million displacements in 140 countries. This paper will examine the effects of climate change and ensuing conflict on refugees in the Sahel Region of Africa. This paper will first look at the effects from a social-ecological systems perspective, analyzing the interrelating contexts. This paper will then examine the harmful effects of climate change and ensuing conflict on humans, other species, and the environment. This paper will follow this examination with an analysis of which actors benefit from the systems that initiate these detrimental effects, and how they can be held accountable. The general media narratives of refugees will be examined, establishing barriers for humanitarian aid and public support to reach those in need. Then, this paper will examine three leverage points through which the profession of social work and other helping professions could intervene to address the problem, followed by the identification of one specifically poignant leverage point from the three – community organizing, providing a blueprint to effectively address the harmful effects climate change and conflict are having on refugees in the Sahel.

Symbolic Interaction, Power, and War: Narratives of Unaccompanied Young Refugees with War Experiences in Institutional Care in Sweden

This study concerns young people who have experienced war, taken shelter in Sweden, and been placed in institutions. The purpose of the study is to identify and analyze power relations that contribute to the shaping of young people’s identities and repertoires of action via stigmatizations and social comparisons with different reference groups. The study’s empirical material includes qualitatively oriented interviews with six young people from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan who have experienced war, followed by placement in institutional care in Sweden. Analytical findings with the following themes are presented: (1) concrete—physical exercise of power, (2) blackmail as an exercise of power, and (3) anonymous—bureaucratized exercise of power. The study demonstrates that narratives about war, escaping war, and postwar life in Sweden, constructing and reconstructing an image of a series of interactive rituals that are both influenced by and influence the power dynamic between the actors. This relationship, in turn, creates and recreates an interplay among the stigmatizing experiences of the youths, their social comparisons, and definitions of inequality.

Review: The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies, by Alexander Betts

Book Review| April 01 2022 Review: The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies, by Alexander Betts The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies, by Alexander Betts. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2021. 430 pages. $25.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780198870685. Dorian Brown Crosby Dorian Brown Crosby Spelman College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar National Review of Black Politics (2022) 3 (1-2): 57–60. https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.57 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Dorian Brown Crosby; Review: The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies, by Alexander Betts. National Review of Black Politics 1 April 2022; 3 (1-2): 57–60. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.57 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNational Review of Black Politics Search Alexander Betts’s The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies elucidates displaced peoples’ often overlooked economic contributions and agency. Betts accurately notes that the number of globally displaced persons steadily increases. At the same time, policies of resource-rich States continue to reject them. The book’s central argument is “that within this age of displacement, the key to sustainability lies in unlocking the potential contributions of refugees themselves” (viii). Betts’s refugee inclusivity strikes a musical note in the choir of positive refugee narratives. The purpose of the book is to provide practical solutions for refugees as they carve out dignified lives amid challenges such as the economic fallout from the pandemic, rising populism and nationalism, and the decreasing willingness of Western countries to admit displaced persons. To that end, Betts asks, “How can we create sustainable refugee policies that can enable displaced people to live in safety and dignity... You do not currently have access to this content.

“The Possibility of Hope Found in the Voices Wandering around—As a Migrant (Refugee) Narrative, Reading the Bible Overlapping with Wandering Land by Kim Soom.”

“The Possibility of Hope Found in the Voices Wandering around—As a Migrant (Refugee) Narrative, Reading the Bible Overlapping with Wandering Land by Kim Soom.”

Vicarious Impacts of Working with Refugees and Asylum Seekers: An Integrative Review

A majority of people from a refugee background endure cumulative traumatic experiences that are compounded by acculturative distress, which disrupts their systems of safety, support, sense of justice, and identity. Literature highlighting the impacts of consistently bearing witness to traumatic experiences and addressing the multiple needs of refugee survivors of trauma is limited. This integrative review is based on a systematic database and citation search in Scopus, PsycINFO, PTSDpubs and PubMed and identified four interrelated themes, as a sequel to refugee trauma work: Being challenged by refugee narratives, Altered beliefs and attitudes, Benefits or rewards, and Coping strategies. The review highlights that extant literature in the field of refugee trauma does not sufficiently capture unique, experiential complexities in the sector. It identifies the need for additional research with methodological rigor and a comprehensive theoretical framework to capture the varied vicarious impacts of working with refugee survivors of trauma.

“I Am a Refugee in This Land”: Performative Narration, Recollection, and Resilience in Refugee Narratives of West Bengal, India

The article extends the reconstructive agenda of oral history with a view to establishing the idea that it is not merely to reconstruct history but to study the act of recollection as a performative presentation of the narrator’s life story. The performative interview establishes the oral narrative as a “momentous” occasion by following the techniques an individual uses to frame the narrative text. The theoretical arguments are developed by studying the refugee narratives of those displaced by 1947 Bengal Partition. The performative narration interrogates the immediate refugee identity and depicts the refugees as resilient people capable of self-sustaining in adverse situations.

Visual Depictions of Refugee Narratives of European and Middle Eastern Non-Governmental Organizations’ Design Strategies

Visual Depictions of Refugee Narratives of European and Middle Eastern Non-Governmental Organizations’ Design Strategies

The Journey to Death: Fictionalizing the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer

This paper explores the fictional representation of the Syrian refugee crisis in Khaled Hosseini's novel Sea Prayer (2018). The novel is considered a refugee narrative, examining the question of home, displacement, and the fateful journeys of the Syrian refugees. The novel depicts the heart-wrenching experiences of the refugee community in war-torn Syrian city Homs before and after the outbreak of the civil war in the country. Evoking the tragic death of Alan Kurdi, Hosseini vividly illustrates the various dimensions of the Syrian refugee crisis, including the outbreak of the civil war in Syria and the eventual birth of refugees, their homelessness/statelessness, perilous journey to escape the persecution, xenophobic attitudes towards them, and post-war trauma. This paper draws on postcolonial refugee narratives, concept of journeys of non-arrival, memory, and trauma studies to elucidate its argument. The contention here is that the current crisis in Syria is also accounted for by analyzing the fictional refugee narratives. The unspeakable trauma is communicated through fiction, and Hosseini’s novel depicts the dangers engulfed and the hope entrusted in the refugees’ journeys.

Telling the Untold Story: Jewish Wartime Refuge in Haiti in Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s Avant que les ombres s’effacent

Abstract Literary narratives of Jewish refugees in the Caribbean uncover a forgotten chapter of wartime history. A key example is Haitian author Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s novel Avant que les ombres s’effacent (2017), which tracks the traumatic dispersion of a Polish Jewish family to Haiti, Cuba, Israel, and the US in the late 1930s. Dalembert interweaves the tale of his Jewish protagonist’s flight to Haiti with portrayals of the Haitian émigré community in Paris and the Haitian concentration camp prisoner Jean-Marcel Nicolas. Blending fact and fiction, the novel highlights the Haitian state’s little-known efforts to aid Holocaust refugees and connects those efforts to the island nation’s own revolutionary history. In this article, I argue that fiction’s unique traits as a medium of cultural memory enable Dalembert to reframe the wartime past from a Haitian perspective. Avant que les ombres s’effacent harnesses the fictional privileges of literary narrative, mediating between the real and the imaginary and combining Jewish and Caribbean memory systems in unexpected and often startling ways. Generating images of the wartime past that transform our perception of it, the novel moves Haiti to the center of the story and in so doing uncovers global dimensions of Jewish experience.

The immediate, the exceptional and the historical: Eritrean migration and research since the 1960s

ABSTRACT This article discusses the historical development and dialectical interconnections between migration from Eritrea and knowledge construction since the 1960s by academics, migrants and the refugee regime. We explore how knowledge about Eritrea is grounded in dynamics of immediacy: the direct experience of persecution and refuge; fieldwork on the ground; and the urgency of responding to refugee claims and crises. Refugee narratives must also demonstrate exceptionality: how does one’s experience reflect individual persecution as well as “objective” country conditions? And yet, refugee narratives and experiences are historically contingent and thick, with the dynamics of persecution often rooted less in the immediate and exceptional, and more in the collective, sedimented past. By illuminating the relationships among the immediate, the exceptional and the historical in refugee migration and research, we show how substantive scholarship can be circumscribed and shaped by political conditions on the ground and by humanitarian imperatives.

Birth of a Squatters’ Colony: Revisiting history through refugee narratives

Squatters’ colonies form essential feature of the social, political, cultural and topographic landscape of West Bengal. ‘Destitution and despair’ of East Bengali Hindu refugees as the ‘impetus behind’ and ‘impervious unity and unanimous struggle’ of refugees as the ‘means for success’ in establishment of these colonies have been part of the official account and popular discourse relating to refugee movement in Bengal. Refugee women’s agency in land grabbing movement and counter-eviction struggle are celebrated as the steps towards shattering the patriarchal demarcation between private and public. Present article offers a micro-sociological study of a squatters’ colony, and based on the narratives of real life experiences of colony-people who lived through the struggle of self-rehabilitation, it tends to highlight the varied nature of needs, perceptions and aspirations of refugees; contest and negotiation of power; conflict and clash between selfish/ egoistic interest and community-centred interest; political battles; and patriarchal exploitation of gender roles that were pervasive in the colony life during those days of self-rehabilitation. It also focuses on how the temptation of generalization in meta-narrative analyses tends to obscure the obvious dynamics of life- cohesion versus conflict, exploitation versus subversion of power-politics within the squatters’ colonies, which micro-level social researches may bring forward and thereby signify the scope for re-writing history.

Vietnamese America: On ‘Good Refugees’, Fake News, and Historical Amnesia

Vietnamese Americans are at a crossroads: the rise of mainstream misinformation and pro-Trump sentiment in their communities is not a historical aberration, yet attempts to explain it draw exclusively upon the good refugee narrative and fail to interrogate the legacy of imperialism and liberalism that all Americans inherit.