This volume of collected essays tries to explore the journey of refugees as represented in New Literatures in English. Who are these refugees? What circumstances triggered their movement? At what point in history? Where do they go? How do they cope? What are their dreams? When does the refugees’ silence break into speech and story? How does life assert itself in spite of impending death? Could the death of a refugee be as insignificant as her bare life of exile? Scholars from Europe, Africa, India and Sri Lanka give here a comprehensive picture of the refugee movement across the globe since the Second World War. The refugee narratives highlight the need to extend the logic of protection from persecution to asylum from economic crisis and ecological imbalance, in order to offset the after effects of imperial outreach and industrial expansion.
With a short story by Chika Unigwe by way of a foreword and contributions from Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Helga Ramsey-Kurz, Marta Cariello, Stavros Karayanni, Jean-Marie Soungoua, Federico Fabris, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Annie Cottier, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, G. Sujatha and V. Vinod Kumar.
Helga Ramsey-Kurz is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Innsbruck. She is the author of The Non-Literate Other: Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English.
They have also co-edited Projections of Paradise: Ideal Elsewheres in Postcolonial Migrant Literature.