Feats of Survival: Refugee Writing and the Ethics of Representation

This chapter examines the ethics of reading and interpreting recent refugee texts, arguing that they use a range of discourses to move beyond stereotypes associated with the disenfranchised non citizen and demand new forms of reader engagement. It focuses on the politics of representation when such voices are subject to intervention and mediation by a range of actors such as translators, narrators and editors.
Drawing on Judith Butler’s theories of precarity, and in light of new citizenship practices that argue for more inclusivity and a participatory politics, the chapter evaluates responses to refugee narratives ranging from the critical to the empathetic. It examines Abu Bakr Khaal’s novella, African Titanics (2014 [ 2008]); the ‘retold’ stories of detainees and asylum seekers in Refugee Tales (2016, 2017, 2019) and Behrouz Boochani’s political memoir, No Friend but the Mountains (2018) for their modes of production and narrative strategies such as acts of story telling, textual audiences and readers, co-writers, editorials and authorial comment; it argues that these discourses generate awareness of the systemic inequalities underlining the condition of refugees and asylum seekers, and so create new horizons of reception for works in this genre.