This UCLA book launch event will celebrate the publication of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives. This Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. Analyzing novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography, the individual chapters counter dominant representations of refugees as voiceless victims. Addressing key characteristics and thematics of refugee narratives, this Handbook examines how refugee cultural productions are shaped by and in turn shape socio-political landscapes.
Co-editors Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (UCLA) and Vinh Nguyen (Renison University College, University of Waterloo) will introduce the volume and then invite short presentations from eight of the volume's thirty-eight chapter authors.
Featured Authors and Chapter Titles:
- Bishupal Limbu, "Refugee Narratives and Humanitarian Form"
- Asha Varadharajan, "Coming Undone: Displacement, Trauma and the Crisis of (Narrative) Agency"
- Regina Marie Mills, "Border-Crossing, Identity, and Voice in Central American and US-Central American Refugee Narratives"
- Veronika Zablotsky, "Affecting Appeals: Armenian Refugee Narratives in the Archives of
Early Humanitarian Discourse"
- Himadri Chatterjee, "Writing, Belonging, Forgetting: Waterscapes in Bangla Dalit Refugee Literature"
- Emily Hue, "On Water, On Land: Sustainability of Refugee Lives in an Era of Ecological Crises"
- Hadji Bakara, "Refugee Writing and the Problem of the Future"
- Erin Goheen Glanville, "Refugee Narrative Pedagogy: A Cultural Refugee Studies Approach"