Refugee Subject Research Articles

Suspicion and the Economy of Trust among Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon

My ethnography of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (2005–2010) points to a strong disposition towards suspicion associated with refugeeness. This, in turn, highlights politico-moral economies of trust, indexed by honour, that become what I call boundary-maintenance disciplinary practices. The dynamics of suspicion and trust, propelled by social crisis and uprooting, shape all groups, from their social support systems and marriages to collective political, ethnic and religious allegiances. Uprooting tends to be associated with displacement of the subject's social order, bringing about an intensified sense of intra-group bonds and a concomitant suspicion towards those outside this group. This, in turn, heightens a necessity on the part of refugee subjects to reflect and shape networks of trust, expressed in a moral idiom, even when decisions are known to be political. This article analyses some of the dynamic between suspicion and trust in conditions of social crisis and refugeeness.

Oceanic Corpo-Graphies, Refugee Bodies and the Making and Unmaking of Waters

This essay considers the challenges that the gendered and raced transnational subaltern refugee subject poses to the order of ‘the liberal state’ and ‘the liberal subject’, and argues that the latter are bound up in complex ways with entrenched understandings of the ocean as elementally distinct from land. This distinction, constituted by the freedom of the sea-going individualist liberal subject, invariably raced as white and gendered as male, to range across the waves in search of new worlds to conquer, is one that is continually reproduced both in popular culture's contemporary sea romances, and in the spatial and legal demarcations of the nation and its limits. In the diverse forms of traffic flowing from south to north, the historical oceanic mobility of this unfettered liberal subject (always shadowed and weighted down by its invisible freight of non-white bodies) now meets the transversal movements of the contemporary transnational subaltern as complex subject. Through the narratives of two refugees to Australia, the article traces the possibilities of an embodied refugee poetics for inscribing new geographies across the global borderlands.

Detention, Displacement and Dissent in Recent Australian Life Writing

Narratives of persecution, imprisonment, displacement and exile have been a fundamental aspect of Australian literature: from the convict narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to writing by refugees and migrants to Australia following World War II, to the narratives of those displaced by more recent conflicts. This paper will focus on two texts published in Australia in the past few years which deal with experiences of persecution and displacement from Afghanistan. Mahboba's Promise (2005) and The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif (2008) are texts that have to some extent bypassed the quarantining that Gillian Whitlock has argued works to locate potentially disruptive discourse at a safe distance from mainstream consumption. The publications discussed here demonstrate that refugee narratives can negotiate their way into the public sphere and public consciousness. In this process, however, representations of dissent almost necessarily give way to conciliation and integration as former refugee subjects attempt to realign their lives in terms that will provide the best outcomes for themselves, their families and their communities.

Confronting ecological futures: global environmental crises in contemporary survival quests for young adults

This paper examines representations of societal concern in the futuristic ecological disaster fi ctions of three British authors: Julie Bertagna (Exodus; Zenith), Jan Mark (Riding Tycho; Voyager) and Marcus Sedgwick (Floodland). The depicted refugee journeys in these futuristic worlds speak into a growing global disquiet that surrounds current historic events. Environmental crises that ground the emergent world orders of depicted future societies set the scene in each coming of age frame: each survival quest embeds social and cultural issues recognisable to contemporary audiences in futuristic representations of changed world orders, limited resources, and isolated communities. Authors resist the mythic frame of a traditional quest journey − a call to journey, the engagement with growth through a road of trials and then celebrations in a return to home territory: their conclusions offer limited resolutions, the struggle to survive entrenched as a linear path. Because authors link depictions of the refugee subject with environmental degradation, apocalyptic scenarios that signify the devastating consequences of global environmental crises provide an ecocritical platform from which each author situates a discourse of protest. Interrogating contemporary political positions of ambiguity and denial their novels profi le social justice issues experienced by refugee populations in contemporary society.Keywords: Bertagna; Mark Sedgwick; ecocriticism; refugees; postdisaster fi ction; displacement; transformative utopianism.

Massacre at No Gun Ri?: American Military Policy Toward Civilian Refugees during the Korean War

Although we often refer to Korea as the forgotten war, news paper headlines in the last ten years have forced Americans to remember a painful chapter of Korean War history. The stories, most recently published in August 2008, have focused on the killing by American troops of hundreds, if not thousands, of South Korean civilians suspected of being North Korean infiltrators and spies. Most notably, an intense controversy has arisen over an alleged massacre of South Korean refugees by mem bers of the 2nd Battalion of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment (ist Cavalry Division, 8th Army) in late July 1950 at a village called No Gun Ri (1). Just as the documents on the My Lai Massacre of 1968 can illuminate the military history of the Vietnam War, a 1950 letter from U.S. Ambassador to South Korea John Muccio to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk for Far Eastern Affairs, on the subject of Korean refugees, as well as the excerpt from an oral history of U.S. soldier Don F. Adams can help teachers and students better understand the history of the Ko rean War Traditionally, the Korean War has been portrayed as a conflict between North and South Korea. Each side was allied with super powers, which fought the first hot of the cold war era. Increas

Unsettling whiteness: the slippage of race and nation in Clara Law's Letters to Ali

This article focuses on Clara Law's Letters to Ali (2004) as a recent example of a refugee-focused documentary film that both complicates and destabilizes the essential and exclusive categories of ‘whiteness’ and ‘otherness’ that have shaped Australian identity politics through recent politics. Centrally, this article will position Letters to Ali as a subversive project in accordance with Homi Bhabha's ideas of unsettling, displacing and disturbing the authority of normative whiteness that pervades our national identity in this climate. Through positioning whiteness as neither fixed nor final due to the ‘incommensurable differences’ it must take into account, this article will discuss both formal and narrative elements of Letters to Ali as working towards destabilizing an essential and static whiteness and, instead, focusing on its ‘marked’ and constructed nature. Critiquing whiteness as an ideal, according to Bhabha, Ghassan Hage and others, this discussion will displace and disrupt its ‘invisibility’ or normativity. In doing so, whiteness will be examined as part of national strategies of dominance and subordination, rather than as an authentic or singular identity, ‘reveal[ing] within the very integuments of “whiteness” the agonistic elements that makes it the unsettled, disturbed form of authority’.Clara Law's position as Asian Australian film-maker in relation to other national others such as ‘Ali’, the refugee subject of the film, will be crucial to this disruption: Law's own story of migration, of resettlement and naturalization is foregrounded in the film's narrative and, as such, she—and partner Eddie Fong—are the national citizens against which the refugee is to be measured in this binary logic. Taking into account these ‘incommensurable differences’ of the white identity, the categories of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’; of Australians and others, are ruptured and the frameworks of national membership are opened up to more liminal, transnational notions of identity and belonging.

Educational provision for refugee youth in Australia: left to chance?

This article investigates how education bureaucracies in Australia use languages of categorization and promote community partnerships to construct and govern the refugee subject. We use a framework of governmentality to analyse education policies and statements emerging from two levels of government — Commonwealth and state. Drawing on web-based materials, policy statements and accounts of parliamentary debates, the article documents the ways in which refugee education continues to be subsumed within broader education policies and programmes concerned with social justice, multiculturalism and English language provision. Such categorizations are premised on an undifferentiated ethnoscape that ignores the significantly different learning needs and sociocultural adjustments faced by refugee students compared with migrants and international students. At the same time, educational programmes of inclusion that are concerned with utilizing community organizations to deliver services and enhance participation, point to the emergence of `government through community partnerships' — a mode of governance increasingly associated with advanced liberal societies.

‘Spying for Hitler’ and ‘Working for Bin Laden’: Comparative Australian Discourses on Refugees

This paper argues that the complexity of recent debates about 'illegal' refugee arrivals in Australia, held since the prominent MV Tampa incident of August 2001, might be better understood by placing them in a comparative historical context. Towards this end, an investigation of previous debates on the subject of Jewish refugees in Australia prior to the Second World War is suggested. Such an exploration reveals a seemingly idiosyncratic 'Australian' slant towards refugees that demonstrates a subtle process of marginalization and exclusion based on notions of 'good' and 'bad' refugees. Such an approach further demonstrates the contradictory attitudes of immigrant societies towards refugees notwithstanding the cultural pluralism supposedly inherent in their outlooks.

Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship

This review of the field of Vietnamese refugee studies in the United States first assesses the social science literature that dominated Vietnamese studies during the 1970s and 1980s, showing how this scholarship produces Vietnamese Americans as the desperate-turned-successful. Then it reviews the current range of Vietnamese American scholarship, foregrounding the promising studies that situate the diversity and vibrancy of Vietnamese lives within a critical global context. The paper concludes by suggesting that we imbue the term "refugee" with social and political critiques that call into question the relationship between war, race, and violence, then and now.

Making the biopolitical subject: Cambodian immigrants, refugee medicine and cultural citizenship in California

Linking the health profession to the normalization of citizenship, scholars influenced by Michel Foucault claim that while biomedicine attends to the health of bodies, it is also constitutive of the social and bureaucratic practices that socialize subjects of the modern welfare state. Yet, we seldom learn about how patients themselves draw the medical gaze, nor how their resistances to biomedical intervention both invite and deflect control. I try to show this by means of clinicians' and Khmer refugees' interpretations of their encounters. This study illustrates that refugee medicine is a mix of good intentions, desire to control diseased and deviant populations, and the exigencies of limited resources which often favor medicalization. Californian clinicians, many of them Asian-Americans, display a deep faith in the efficacy of modern medicine for third world patients so that they can function in the new country. Khmer refugees, in contrast, seek rather specific resources while wishing to elude control over the body and mind that goes with medical care. I argue that the biomedical gaze is not such a diffused hegemonic power but is itself generated by the complex contestation of refugee subjects pursuing their own goals. Clinicians and refugees are equally caught up in webs of power involving control and subterfuge, appropriation and resistance, negotiation and learning that constitute biopolitical lessons of what becoming American may entail for an underprivileged Asian group.