Asylum speakers
Subtitle: Caribbean refugees and testimonial discourse
By: April Shemak
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Fordham University Press; American Literatures Initiative
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780823233557; 9780823233571
Description: "Offering the first interdisciplinary study of refugees in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States, Asylum Speakers relates current theoretical debates about hospitality and cosmopolitanism to the actual conditions of refugees. In doing so, the author weighs the questions of truth valueassociated with various modes of witnessing to explore the function of testimonial discourse in constructing refugee subjectivity in New World cultural and political formations. By examining literary works by such writers as Edwidge Danticat, Nikl Payen, Kamau Brathwaite, Francisco Goldman, Julia Alvarez, Ivonne Lamazares, and Cecilia Rodr¡guez Milans, theoretical work by Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, as well as human rights documents, government documents, photography, and historical studies, Asylum Speakers constructs a complex picture of New World refugees that expands current discussions of diaspora and migration, demonstrating that the peripheral nature of refugee testimonial narratives requires us to reshape the boundaries of U.S. ethnic and postcolonial studies."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the poetics of hospitality: refugee, migrant, testimony; title: Inter-dictions and limbo citizens: Haitian refugee narratives; title: False witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard photography of Haitian refugees; title: Silent subjectivities: testimony and Haitian labor refugees; title: Corporate containment: refugee seafarers on the seas of transnational labor; title: Crossing the threshold of asylum: Dominican and Cuban (post)refugee narratives; title: Epilogue: diverted testimonies: new world refugees in the twenty-first century.