Rethinking Refugeehood in Contemporary African Migration Narratives
Due Date: 11-08-2024
African writers and filmmakers have responded to large-scale population upheavals in a variety of ways, including mixing memoir and fantasy, fact and fiction, in order to give voices to a diverse range of African migrants across race, class, gender, sexuality, age and the spectrum between so-called voluntary and forced movements.
This volume will focus on refugee narratives in contemporary African literature, film, television, digital genres, and a range of other popular cultural forms. Individual essays will address African cultural engagements with, and reframings of, African refugeehood, a topic on which there is a relative scarcity of sustained analyses. They will also challenge the unbroken pervasiveness of the trope of “the helpless African refugee” in the Western imagination. Even though the vast majority of African movements are not immediately related to conflicts and war (Pasura and Makina 9), dominant global North public discourse and media representations of Black African migrants continue to be couched in a spectacular language of crisis.
In this volume, we adopt a critical refugee studies approach that “conceptualizes the ‘refugee’ as a critical idea but also as a social actor whose life, when traced, illuminates the interconnection of [slavery,] colonization, war, and global social change” (Espiritu 11). We build on critical refugee studies work in the humanities that seeks to transcend insufficient and limiting politico-legal definitions of political refuge by centering embodied experiences of refugees in ways that “contribute to the shaping of alternative, resistant or emergent conceptions of the refugee” (Cox et al. 8). We are also informed by Vinh Nguyen’s notions of “refugeetude” and “lived refuge,” which reconfigure refuge with a focus on its “affective experiences and social relations” as well as its “social ongoingness” to highlight how “refuge is not a predetermined sociopolitical ‘good,’ but a continual process in which refugees negotiate, revise, and recalibrate what it means to exist in, with, and under refuge” (3). Following this turn to the material, affective, relational, and temporal dimensions of being a refugee, we seek to examine the ways in which these play out within the diverse historico-political and geographical contexts of intra- and intercontinental African refugee narratives across a range of cultural forms. We are interested in how African cultural forms go beyond narrow legal understandings of “the refugee” as enshrined in the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees (limited to Europeans only at the time), the 1967 Protocol, and the OAU’s Refugee Convention of 1969. As such, we seek contributions that explore how contemporary African cultural production, through its engagements with the lived experiences of forced displacement, might bring to the fore alternative epistemologies about refugees. Our interest in refugee narratives also takes the focus away from celebratory readings of the Afropolitan globe-trotter in contemporary African diasporic literature. Instead, it positions histories of slavery, colonialism, indentureship and their afterlives, visible across the globe, at the heart of the study of African migration. Due to the ongoing dominance of Anglophone refugee narratives, we particularly invite contributions on texts in Afrophone and other languages.
We invite essays that engage with aspects of African literary and cultural production and refugeehood. Topics might include the following:
- Forced displacements, refugeehood, and the afterlife of slavery and colonialism
- Decolonial critiques of humanitarian paradigms in African cultural production about refugees
- Genres of refugee writing, theater, film, digital forms
- The aesthetics of refugee texts
- African refugee knowledges about refugeehood
- Afrophone and Europhone refugee texts outside the strictures of the nation-state and juridical-political formulations of refuge
- Everyday lived experiences of refugees, reformulations of “refugeetude” in African cultural producti
- Affective dimensions of refugees’ lived experiences
- Kinetic aspects of refugee mobilities
- Refugee testimony and mediation
- Refugee narratives and queer intimacies
- African refugee childhoods
- Refugee ecologies, climate-induced refugeehood, refugeehood and the capitalocene
Essays should be 7,000–8,500 words, including references, and should follow the MLA Handbook (9th ed.) for in-text citations and works cited. If you are interested in contributing a chapter to this volume, please submit a 500-word proposal/abstract by 8 November 2024, to Joya Uraizee and Rebecca Fasselt. Accepted proposals will be considered for a panel at the African Literature Association Conference in Nairobi in June 2025. Final chapters will be due by 29 August 2025. We intend to publish the volume with Duke University Press or a comparable press. View the full call for papers.
Works Cited
Cox, Emma, et al. Refugee Imaginaries: Research across the Humanities. Edinburgh UP, 2019.
Espiritu, Yến Lê. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. U of California P, 2014.
Nguyen, Vinh. Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. U of California P, 2023.
Pasura, Dominic, and Daniel Makina. “Contemporary African Migration: An Introduction.” Routledge Handbook of African Migration, edited by Makina and Pasura, Routledge, 2023, pp. 1–20.