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44 - Asylum Papers

from Part IX - The Worldly and the Planetary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

By
Gillian Whitlock
Edited by
Debjani Ganguly
Debjani Ganguly
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

This chapter considers what happens to the cartography of ‘world literature’ in times of mass migration and indefinite detention. It focuses on contemporary literature by and about refugees and asylum seekers, using the distinction between emic (written from the perspective of the subject) and etic (written from the perspective of the observer) narratives. It turns to representations of refugees in ‘hospitable’ narratives, such as graphic narrative and contemporary novels, and questions the ethics of recognition in humanitarian storytelling. In a case study of Behrouz Boochani’s autobiographical novel No Friend But the Mountains, a paperless text ‘thumbed’ by a Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker on a smartphone in Farsi at the remote detention centre on Manus Island, PNG, and translated by a transnational authorial assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, it considers how new technologies now transform the possibilities for a literature from the camps in the borderlands where refugees and asylum seekers are detained.

Keywords

oceansterraqueous transregionalismliterary flowsIndian OceanAtlantic Ocean
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of World Literature , pp. 867 - 891
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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