1st Edition
Writing in Times of Displacement The Existential and Other Discourses
This book presents diverse, composite, non-exclusive and non-hierarchical perspectives on displacement of people as represented in literature. It examines the experiences of migration as a result of wars, natural disasters, religious strife, loss of livelihoods and shifts in local and global economies and the vulnerabilities they expose.
Bringing together scholarly insights into literature about displacement and migration from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the book interrogates the development frames of Western modernity and situates displacement within the discourse of disenfranchisement of citizens by nation-states. It explores the experiences, memories and expressions of displacement in literature and how literary works critique ethical and moral responsibilities of states and communities that often do not account for the loss which displacement causes to the health, education, career, or relationships of displaced people.
The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, philosophy, migration and diaspora studies, development studies, African studies and Asian studies.
Introduction Part I: Displacement: Philosophy, History, Experience 1 Disaster’s Offspring: Catastrophe, Narrative, and Society 2 A Philosophy of Displacement: The Ethics of a Passer-by 3 America in the Contemporary Postcolonial African Imagination: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around your Neck 4 Nativising Colonial Ghosts in the Postcolony: A Composite Perspective on Displacement 5 Asking the Right Kind of Questions: Seeing India through the Eyes of Slavoj Žižek 6 The Philosophy of Displacement: Re-reading Hannah Arendt in NRC Times Part II: The Literary Politics and Phenomenology of Displacement and Belonging 7 Seyla Benhabib’s "The right to have rights" 8 The Library of the Migrants: Dissemination of Books as Dissemination of the Self? (or, "How to Motivate Books to Wander") Bianca Boteva-Richter Part III: Writing Displacement 9 Writing in Times of Displacement: Towards Transformation 10 Voices Beyond Borders: Exile and Refugee Poetry and Performance 11 Poetics of Displacement and a New Vocation of Dwelling: The Ethics, Aesthetics and Responsibility of Home and the World 12 Visa Politics and the Paradox of the Transnational in Chimamanda Ngozi Adecie’s Americanah 13 Writing Displacement: Memory, Violence and their Ancillaries in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: The True Story of a child Soldier Part IV: Locating Displacement 14 Discourses of Displacement ‘Development’, Resource Conflict and Political Opportunism in Odisha
Biography
Mbuh Tennu Mbuh is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, The University of Bamenda, Cameroon.
Meera Chakravorty is Research Faculty in the Department of Cultural Studies, Jain University, Bangalore, India.
John Clammer is Professor of Sociology in the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Haryana, India.
