War, migration, and refugeehood are inextricably linked and the complex nature of all three phenomena offers profound opportunities for representation and misrepresentation. This volume brings together international contributors and practitioners from a wide range of fields, practices, and backgrounds to explore and problematize textual and visual inscriptions of war and migration in the arts, the media, and in academic, public, and political discourses.
The essays in this collection address the academic and political interest in representations of the migrant and the refugee, and examine the constructed nature of categories and concepts such as ‘war,’ ‘refuge(e),’ ‘victim,’ ‘border,’ ‘home,’ ‘non-place,’ and ‘dis/location.’ Contributing authors engage with some of the most pressing questions surrounding war, migration, and refugeehood as well as with the ways in which war and its multifarious effects and repercussions in society are being framed, propagated, glorified, or contested.
This volume initiates an interdisciplinary debate which re-evaluates the relationship between war, migration, and refugeehood and their representations.
Introduction Daniel Rellstab and Christiane Schlote Part I: Depicting Wars, Depicting Refugees 1. Documentary, Memory and the Iraq Syndrome Jeffrey Geiger 2. Strategies of Representation in No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo Melanie Friend 3. Refugees, Gender and Secularism in South Asian Literature and Cinema Kavita Daiya Part II: Language, Wars and Migrants 4. The Threat and Promise of the Shibboleth: Linguistic Representation in Language Analysis in the Determination of Origin (LADO) of Asylum Seekers Tim McNamara 5. Constructing Consumerist Refugees Online Daniel Rellstab Part III: Performing Refugeehood 6. Questions of Performances In Place of War James Thompson 7. Fostering Connectedness Through Narrative Involvement: Intercultural Community Theatre in Contexts of Migration and Refugeehood Danièle Klapproth 8. Dramatizing the Congo: Refugees, Humanitarian Aid Workers and Gender Christiane Schlote Part IV: Tales of War and Displacement 9. Reconfiguring Place and Identity in Roma Tearne’s Narratives of War and Refugeehood Giovanna Buonanno 10. Redefining Narrating for Research on Displacement in Violence Colette Daiute and Patricia Botero Gomez 11. At Home with the Unhomely: Vietnamese and Iraqi Narratives of ‘Resettlement’ Brenda Boyle 12. Pens and Swords: Exploring the Role of Poetry and Creative Writing in Post-Conflict and Displacement Settings Franz Andres Morrissey
Daniel H. Rellstab teaches linguistics, intercultural communication and semiotics at the University of Vaasa, Finland. He authored a study on Charles S. Peirce and wrote on language and identity in multilingual contexts. Recently, he co-edited Dialog und (Inter-)Kulturalität. Theorien, Konzepte, empirische Befunde (with Simon Meier and Gesine L. Schiewer, 2014). Christiane Schlote teaches drama and postcolonial literatures at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is the author of Bridging Cultures: Latino- und asiatisch-amerikanisches in New York (1997) and co-editor of New Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama (with Peter Zenzinger, 2003) and Constructing Media Reality. The New Documentarism (with Eckart Voigts-Virchow, 2008).
