Against oblivion : narrating the refugee camps in contemporary literary works in english

My dissertation undertakes a critical assessment of and accounting for what I call “refugee camp literature” as both a cultural commodity and a literary and interdisciplinary genre on its own terms. Taxonomically, the appellation “refugee camp literature” runs the risk of falling in the very homogenizing discourse, that conflates the different accounts of the lives of the refugees, it is countering. Categorizing the selected narratives as a literary genre discloses the elusiveness of such an endeavor because the narratives themselves oscillate between various genres (Humanitarian life writing, testimonies, postcolonial bildungsroman, etc.) and such a genre is, given its political context, rather transgressive. Facing such a risk, a reconceptualization of one’s view of ‘ethical responsibility’ is needed in order to rethink our own subject-position and complicity and to make room for the Other that narrates to exist. Thus, while grouping narratives from and about refugee camps, “refugee camp literature” often dismisses the mainstream allocation of ready-made labels such as “victims,” “disposable subjects” or “speechless emissaries” to the refugees and unveils their political engagement and active participation in (re)shaping their own lives. Furthermore, particular thematic aspects explored in the chapters allow for a provisional use of the term “refugee camp literature.” These thematic affinities include, inter alia, the aspect of “waiting,” when the lives of the refugees seem to freeze in time, present and future. Another defining feature of the “refugee camp literature” is the refugees’ ability to reinvent themselves as the camp becomes “a place of new beginnings” (Simon Turner, 2015, 1). Thus, despite the precarity of life, another thematic similitude, in the refugee camps, the refugee camp dwellers exhibit survival strategies that grant them back the humanity almost stripped from them through systemic dehistorization and depoliticization. Depoliticization, Simon Turner tells us, “creates its own opposite: hyper-politicization,” (Turner, 7) which is another crucial thematic upshot. Accordingly, iv my dissertation aims at participating in the understanding of the ongoing “process by which a section of our common planet is today being put in quarantine” (Michel Agier, 2006:3). My intent is to look at the specific space from which refugee camp literature emerges and how such a liminal space may affect specific forms and strategies of narrating the self. To this aim, my first chapter distinguishes Dave Eggers’ novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) from the humanitarian life writing tradition it has been inscribed into. In this chapter, I study the camp as a geographically demarcated excluded/exceptional space. I try to understand the humanitarian governance of the camp and its political implication. My second chapter studies Elias Khoury’s novel Gate of the Sun (2006) and its cinematic rendition directed by Yousry Nasrallah (2004). Here, I move a step further from the camp as a purely physical limited space to study the camp as space where the dwellers question their existence and resist their confining reality and their acquired ability to infinitely reinvent themselves. The third chapter offers yet another reading of Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For (2005) as it problematizes the systemic differentiation between the figure of the refugee and that of the migrant. Then, it follows the crack in the narrative (the Quy sections) from which the refugee emerges as an excessive figure.

Keyphrases: Refugee camp literature, human rights, waiting, space, time