title: Techfugees
title: Neoliberal Technological Erasure Of the Refugee Figure in Anglophone Narratives
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: AlAmmouri, Bayan
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2024

description: This study focuses on the figure of the techfugee—the technologically
 precarious twenty-first century refugee in a globalized market space—in
 anglophone narratives, both fictional and nonfictional, written during the
 past decade. While current theoretical conversations within the field of
 refugee studies often focus on identity dysmorphia, spatial and temporal
 movements of the displaced, and/or the socioeconomic adversities that
 refugees undergo and sometimes, arguably, cause, I will scrutinize what I
 call the “technological erasure” of the displaced—a biopolitical and
 topographical dispositif that includes refugees through their very
 exclusion. I will rely on Heidegger, Stiegler, and Agamben to showcase the
 human need for technology and then integrate the works of Foucault and
 Wendy Brown on the biopolitics of the homo oeconomicus in the neoliberal
 turn to be able to closely read the representation of the effects of
 technology on the twenty-first century refugee in the narrative form. To
 summarize my argument, I contend that technological erasure has three
 forms. First, it denies the displaced figure access to the technological
 tools that enable and define citizenship—which thereby renders refugee
 camps technological “deserts.” Second, it is employed against the refugee
 figure when they become embedded and captured within technology like
 cellphones, computer screens, and drones which causes a kind of social or
 physical death by data. Finally and most importantly, I argue the first
 two forms of erasure produce a third one, what I call refugees’
 self-erasure which is analyzed as the sole form of resistance to state
 technological erasure that refugees rely on when they shed technology to
 prevent trackability. Moreover, the anglophone narratives this thesis will
 re-read, are approached as case studies that critique technological
 erasure through the representation of the detrimental effects of
 technological precarity, and at the same time they are analyzed as
 literary technological forms that could possibly technologically erase the
 refugee figure. The narratives this dissertation closely analyzes include
 memoirs, novels, graphic narratives, virtual reality experiences, video
 games, and art forms: Aeham Ahmad’s memoir The Pianist from Syria (2019),
 Gulwali Passarlay’s memoir The Lightless Sky (2017), Fatima Bhutto’s
 virtual reality narrative “Flesh and Sand” (2018), UNHCR’s video game
 Against All Odds, some songs and paintings created by refugees, Atef Abu
 Saif’s memoir The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (2015) and his most
 recent memoir Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide (2024), Mohsin Hamid’s
 novel Exit West (2017), Atia Abawi’s novel A Land of Permanent Goodbyes
 (2018), Onjali Q. Raúf’s novel The Boy At the Back of the Class (2018),
 Omar El Akkad’s novel What Strange Paradise (2021), Sharon Bala’s novel
 The Boat People (2018), Fatima Bhutto’s novel The Shadow of the Crescent
 Moon (2015), Omar Mohammad’s graphic memoir When Stars are Scattered
 (2020), Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do (2017), Hamid
 Sulaiman’s graphic novel Freedom Hospital: A Syrian Story (2017), Samya
 Kullab’s graphic novel Escape from Syria (2017), and Pratap Chatterjee and
 Khalil Bendib’s graphic memoir Verax (2017).