In refugee discourses, though much has been discussed at the levels of humanitarianism, law, geopolitics and sociology, refugee voices and scholarship on them are largely missing. While historian Dan Stone calls for a more active presence of refugees in these studies, instead of taking refugee as 'a pre-existing category' in relation to present-day concerns (103), Nando Sigona elucidates the public confines imposed on refugees in asserting their subjectivities with respect to credibility and social expectation of 'pure' victimhood, echoing Spivak's question on the potency of the subaltern voices. Additionally, the heterogeneity within the refugee subjects, which might lead to the (self-)questioning of the authenticity or representativeness of refugee stories, could inhibit the creative force informed by refugee experiences, in intervening in 'the international order of things' (Malkki). Sharing Didier Eribon's spirit in challenging the hierarchical approaches to studying the past (242), this paper aims to address the aforementioned problematics by showcasing the plurality of refugee reality in The Displaced (2018), an edited collection of 17 short memoirs narrated by refugee writers worldwide. It will first conceptualize the notion of 'refugee authorship' that is re-embodied, postmemorial (Hirsch), and works towards 'a just memory' (Nothing Ever Dies 17), drawing on discussions around 'wounded attachments' (Brown; Maggio) and 'authenticity'. It will then investigate how refugees are negatively affected by state's regulation and quotidian forms of 'symbolic violence' (Bourdieu), while processing the losses and trauma of forced migration. Through examining the ways in which refugee memoirs worldwide intersect, resonate and collaborate with each other, evoking Rothberg's 'multidirectional memory', this paper will demonstrate the immense force of refugee memoirs in 'disturbing' ('Dislocation') and 'moving' (Ahmed) the reader, which could pave the way for a more radical form of 'imagining other people' (Scarry) and real changes to take place.
Works Cited (part of)
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2012.
Nguyen, Viet T. The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. ed., Abrams, 2018.
---. 'Dislocation Is My Location', PMLA, Vol. 133: 2, 2018, pp. 428 - 436.
---. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Harvard University Press, 2016.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford University Press, 2009.
Scarry, Elaine. 'The Difficulty of Imagining Other People', For Love of Country? Edited by Martha Nussbaum, Beacon Press, 1996, pp. 98-110.
Sigona, Nando. 'The Politics of Refugee Voices: Representations, Narratives, and Memories'. The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Stone, Dan. 'Refugees then and now: memory, history and politics in the long twentieth century: an introduction'. Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 52, Nos. 2-3, pp. 103.
