The archive, time and the body in refugee writing in Arabic and English

Thesis

This thesis contributes to the ‘new field in literary studies’ (Potter and Stonebridge 2014:1) denominated ‘Refugee Writing.’ Inter alia, this burgeoning field critiques the typology of suffering which has often marred writings about refugees (Farrier 2011), whilst also acknowledging the challenges of perceiving such literatures as a means of eliciting a ‘literary humanitarian’ impulse amongst its readers (Rickel 2018:97). Through centralising the agency of refugees, as responders to their own lives and those of others, and through exploring complex configurations of ‘refugee-refugee relationality’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015), I argue that the selected texts push against the assumption that the main form of tension (and thus of resolution) is framed around refugee-citizen relations. By centralising refugees’ own archival practices, their roles as time-makers, and refugees’ potential to engender ‘a different writing of embodiment’ (Ahmed 1998:64), I posit that the texts under study – Ghassan Kanafani’s Rijāl fī al Shams (Men in the Sun) (1962), Salim Barakat’s Hiyāj al-Iwazz (Rampaging Geese) (2010), Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea ([2001] 2002) and Claire Bayley’s The Container (2007) – destabilise traditional frames of reference which position the citizen as the quintessential observer of and responder to displacement. In particular, by identifying and examining the processes of writing and reading that emerge within the selected texts, I seek to advance a shift in contemporary literary studies by positing the significance of complementing an analysis of ‘refugee writing’ with the concomitant process of ‘refugee reading.’ In addition to intervening in discourses concerning refugees, refugee literature and refugee studies, my thesis equally offers a wider contribution to key debates concerning the politics of knowledge production; intimate archiving processes contra traditional historiographies and archives; and the agency of minoritized individuals and communities in contexts of structural inequality and violence.

Authors: Qasmiyeh, YM

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-qxywzeqqy
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: archive; Ghassan Kanafani; postcolonial literatures; time and temporality; refugee body; refugee studies; Salim Barakat; Claire Bayley; literatures of the South; decolonial theory; production of knowledge; Rampaging Geese; refugee literature; The Container; comparative literature; refugee writing; By the Sea; Men in the Sun; counter-archive; Abdulrazak Gurnah; containment; refugee reading; body and embodiment
• Subjects: Postcolonial criticism; Exiles' writings, Arabic; Afghan refugees; Exiles' writings, African (English); Kurdish refugees; Exiles in literature; Plurality of worlds in literature; Kurds in literature; world literature; Refugees; Literature; Comparative literature; decolonial theory; Syrian refugees; Comparative literature--Western and Arabic; Authors, Palestinian Arab; Zanzibari refugees; Refugees, Palestinian Arab; Somali refugees; Immigrants' writings, Arabic