Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020

Palestinians share a history of exile oriented towards the loss and reclamation of a homeland, often expressed through a shared visual lexicon and mythos. In the context of refugee camps, however, local visual culture and everyday practices demonstrate how Palestinian lives are also grounded in local stories and experiences. How do Palestinian refugees deploy everyday practices to create their home spaces? What can these practices reveal about refugees’ myriad belongings? And, in thinking about these practices, what can be said about how a feeling of home can be articulated in exile, which is at its heart the forced removal/dislocation from home? This article uses a comparative ethnographic analysis of two Palestinian camps in Lebanon to challenge overarching narratives of ‘Palestinianness’ by calling attention to the rich multiplicity of Palestinian refugee identities. In focusing the analysis on everyday practices – specifically street art and walking – by which residents make and experience home in the camps, the article grapples with the seeming contradictions between ‘home’ and ‘exile’ that colour the experiences of not only Palestinians, but also refugees and asylum seekers in other circumstances of protracted uncertainty, as they attempt to migrate and make home in new countries.

This article analyses images of the refugee in the novel Travellers (2019) by Helon Habila and examines their connection to dignity and personal history. Travellers captures the complex and intricate situations of refugees and migrants in Europe, providing insights about urgent social issues such as inequality, racism and discrimination. The novel also raises questions relating to human rights discourses and how they connect with personal history. While Travellers does not explicitly deal with the refugee crisis in 2015, during which about 1 million people sought asylum in Europe, it does address the situation of thousands of people trying to enter Europe for a variety of reasons and in different contexts. The theoretical framework is partly built around the concept of postmigration which attempts to go beyond seeing the migrant as the perpetual other and to advocate views of migration as an inherent part of society. The analysis focuses on instances of uncertainty and lack of unity, on migration as a separating, dividing experience, but also examines to what extent Travellers manifests and reinvents the postmigrant condition with its focus towards the future and seeing society itself as postmigrant, particularly through its depictions of dignity.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States and Mexico in March 2020, both the pandemic itself and the measures taken to contain its spread produced potentially devastating effects on the lives of migrants in Tijuana. Qualitative data from interviews with eight Honduran migrants sheltering in place in Tijuana reveal the fragility of the city’s network of migrant service providers in the context of a border closed to non-essential movement, and ensuing repercussions for the migrants that they serve. However, beyond questions of access to basic necessities such as food, shelter and health services; protection from criminal violence; or complications to legal processes and visa status, the data provided by these eight migrants offer insights regarding migrant autonomy: aside from the undeniable frustration evoked by the pandemic and the measures taken to control it, migrants also exhibit a persistence and inventiveness seen in their willingness to wait, their resolve to maintain their projects of migration, a shift in their attention from the future to the present, their general resourcefulness in problem solving, and a hidden agenda of humour that functions as a subtle form of resistance. Together our observations show that in spite of appearing to be trapped, with hopes thwarted, migrants continue to be social agents, and continue to represent a wilful social force in Tijuana.

Matt Huynh’s The Boat (2015), an interactive digital adaptation of Nam Le’s short story of the same name (2008), follows the story of a young Vietnamese boat migrant to explore the dilemma of belonging in migrant and refugee flight. While Le’s text details narratives of refugee flight, Huynh’s multimodal rendition translates the narrative of boat migration into an interactive, multisensory aesthetic mode that simulates the experience of boat passage on the ocean as well as the online viewer’s sense of a boat approaching national shores. In this article, I develop the concept of kinotextuality, an aesthetics of movement that renders the border generative and creative. I demonstrate that the literary imagination offers a conception of the border not merely as the limited space of the nation but as a space for reimagining the idea of human rights and protection.

Drawing on over a decade of empirical research, this article develops the framework of ‘Transnational Care Constellations’ in order to understand how mothers, children and caregivers are connected across national terrains. This approach takes into account the ways families organize care, economic, health and everyday decisions and focuses on relationships across nations. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to present relevant literature in transnational migration research that has led me to think about care as a central piece that keeps families together; and (2) to show through empirical ethnographic data three cases of families that are organized transnationally. This article also takes into consideration the impacts of a global pandemic in the modes of communication transnational care constellations have used.

The political and social implications of the refugee crisis have positioned refugee studies as a crucial discipline to understand politics in contemporary times. This article aims to contribute to the discipline by exploring the example of a community of Muslim Afghan refugees in Lajpat Nagar, Delhi, India, and studying their ‘refugee experience’ through the theoretical concept of ‘boundaries’ as developed by noted American sociologist Richard Alba. The article studies the various aspects of the segregation of the refugee community by focusing on the different constituents of the boundary separating them from the citizens. The article initially discusses legal boundaries, that is the legal marginalization of refugees in general and Muslim refugees in particular by the Indian state. Through the perceptual boundary, which involves the negative perception held among citizens towards the refugee community and vice versa, social distance between the citizens and the refugee community is widened. The spatial boundary, which is the de facto ghettoization of the refugee community to a certain geographical space, forces the citizens and refugee communities to maintain minimal contact with each other. Through the linguistic boundary, further conditions leading to reduced social contact are created. In the presence of so many intersectional boundaries, this article showcases how the boundaries are sometimes blurred, and how aspects such as food or commerce can help the process of boundary breaching. The study of boundaries, their formation, effect and permeability also throws light onto other important aspects of the lives of members of the refugee community – their perception regarding mainstream Indians, their daily problems and challenges, aspirations and demands.

This article reads comparatively Valeria Luiselli’s essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and her novel Lost Children Archive in the context of critical debates about the uses of archival documents in contemporary literature and in relation to archival theory (Foucault, Derrida, Farge). Both texts draw on a wealth of archival materials to explore the causes of mass migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States since 2014, and especially the plight of refugee children who disappear in the desert, in detention centres, and through deportation. I argue that these texts use the archive as a compositional method to confront restricted representations of Mexican and Central American migration with a plethora of documents that propose a historical and transnational perspective. The proliferation of archives stands in for missing evidence and foregrounds multiple points of view on the refugee children, compelling readers to imagine their migrant journeys more vividly.

This article explores Kurdish–Iranian writer–filmmaker–activist Behrouz Boochani’s work, at the centre of which philosophical and aesthetic questions concerning displacement and defamiliarization fuel a rethinking of the tropes, practices and policies that mark the parameters of sanctuary, thus allowing its re-imagining from an environmentally informed, transcultural decolonial perspective. The article addresses the genre-crossing interdisciplinary framework of ‘horrific surrealism’, in Boochani’s book No Friend But the Mountains and his film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time as well as other publications that together gesture towards re-conceptualizing sanctuary both on the basis of its historical associations and in visionary anticipation of its urgent renewal. The critical location of Boochani’s work in new conceptual islands off the mainland of thought enables a visible, embodied voicing that goes beyond haunting the oppressor in the struggle for more-than-human rights by proposing sanctuary in terms of relational, indigenously formed imaginaries of resistance disrupting the thanato-political, speciesist border-industrial complex.

Do affluence and skilfulness render a returnee immune to reintegration challenges? Beyond psychosocial support, would a wealthy returnee need any other form of assistance for a sustainable reintegration? Drawing upon theoretical ideas from the field of return migration, this study considers reintegration as a key issue for all returnees, irrespective of financial status, class or skilfulness, the failure of which is a disastrous end. This end explains the tragedy of Things Fall Apart, which is also reinvestigated here, and it is argued that the novel is simultaneously tragic and comic. The focus is on the possible failure of reintegration of a financially stable returnee. For this study, although tragedy inheres in whom one is, tragedy in the novel under consideration is attributive to the failed reintegration of the tragic character, despite his affluence, status or skills.

Amplified worldwide fragility and growing mobility have contributed to increased forced migration towards Europe. However, Europe’s present focus on border protection has furthered the ‘migrant crisis’ which is very much a crisis of response. News about the ‘migrant crisis’ continues to dominate political discourse in Europe and elsewhere. The discussions typically focus on Europe’s supposed solutions in the form of increased border security, new political agreements, and various forms of humanitarian aid. This article reviews four literary texts about Europe’s responses to forced migration and proposes that the literary treatment of various cultural artefacts employed in these texts critiques Europe’s current restrictionism. Two speeches by Navid Kermani, ‘Towards Europe’ and ‘On the sixty-fifth Anniversary of the Promulgation of the German Constitution’ and two novels by Maxi Obexer, Wenn gefährliche Hunde lachen (‘When dangerous dogs laugh’) and Europas längster Sommer (‘Europe’s longest summer’) make reference to several phenomenal objects and also to gestures. In and of themselves, these cultural artefacts such as beds, blankets, buses, lipsticks, T-shirts, shoes, and even the gestures of kneeling and bowing, may not possess anything disruptive. However, there is an unruly quality about them that puts a spotlight on the precarity of survival migrants who cannot access the European asylum process.

Review of: Refugees in America: Stories of Courage, Resilience, and Hope in Their Own Words, Lee T. Bycel (2019)

New Brunswick, Camden, Newark, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 216 pp.,

ISBN: 978-1-97880-621-4, h/bk, £23.28

Review of: Irish Transatlantics 1980–2015, Ide B. O’Carroll (2019)

Cork: Attic Press, 324 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78205-252-4, p/bk, £13.50