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This thesis examines notions of borders, home, belonging and futurity in contexts of forced migration and refugeehood. Situated at the intersection of migration and refugee studies, transnational feminist theory, critical human geography and critical theory, my work takes an interdisciplinary approach to literary narratives, engaging in a close reading/analysis of a selected number of Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi literary works of exile. As articulations that weave the subjective with the social, the symbolic with the actual, literary narratives of displacement and exile constitute an important – and often neglected – source of knowledge that problematises representations of refugees as either victims or humanitarian subjects. They uniquely convey the intricate relationship between the sensorial, the affective and the social that structures journeys of displacement and exile
My research offers a critique of the treatment of exile as a metaphor for transcending fixed conceptions of identity within cultural and postcolonial literary studies. Instead, I engage with exile in its material sense and foreground the exilic lived realities of those who cross physical borders and the affective impact of such crossing on them. My interrogation of borders, home, belonging and futurity within the selected literary works highlights the entanglement of the subjective and the structural, the personal and the political in refugee and exiled subjects’ navigation of the journey of displacement. In this way, my research acknowledges the structural power relations that affect lived experiences of displacement, as well as the agency of refugee subjects in how they challenge and negotiate structures of power. Furthermore, I attend to the spatial and temporal dimensions of exile and refugeehood. Space and time, I argue, are essential to understanding lived experiences of displacement, and to recognising the subjectivity of refugees and their embodied, affective, and psychic negotiation of uprooting and re-grounding.
The thesis contributes to migration and refugee studies through its engagement with literary articulations of exile and displacement. It centres the emotional, embodied, and affective dimensions of migratory journeys through its explorations of themes of borders, home, belonging and futurity. The thesis argues that attending to the entanglement of the sensorial and the structural offers a more nuanced understanding of exiled subjects’ lived realities. |
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