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4003 Baxter-A literature:Layout 1 9/9/13 13:02 Page 111 6 ‘LIKE REFUGEES WHO HAVE COME THROUGH DREADFUL ORDEALS’: THE THEME OF THE ANGLO-IRISH IN DIE RINGE DES SATURN. EINE ENGLISCHE WALLFAHRT Helen Finch INTRODUCTION Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ (1944) sets its action ‘in an oppressed yet stubborn country – Poland, Ireland, the republic of Venice, some South American or Balkan state [. . .] for convenience’s sake; in Ireland, let us also say.’1 The short story deals with a fictional nineteenth-century Irish
48 2 Two tales of my dying neighbours We can all be refugees Nobody is safe Benjamin Zephaniah, n.d. The refugee’s face At the time of writing, sixty-five million people, or 1 per cent of the world’s population, have been displaced from their homes, with an estimated 22.5 million of these identified as ‘refugees’ (McVeigh and Townsend, 17 September 2016). The British Red Cross reported in 2015 that 60 per cent of refugees come from five countries, with Syria (4.2 million) and Afghanistan (2.6 million) topping the list.1 It is a moot point to say that the
the presence of new populations who had come to Lebanon from Syria as refugees. In June 2015, Mabsout began to compile a collection of photographs – mostly taken on streets in Hamra, a mixed neighbourhood with a particularly high refugee presence – that resonated with her focus. 2 Supporting herself financially as a part-time waitress in a restaurant on Hamra Street, Mabsout formed a friendship with a group of Syrian children who sold flowers at night outside the restaurant. Using her camera phone while Mabsout was at work, the children contributed to a body of
, in your substantive interview you were asked to state the numbers one to ten in Kinyarwanda … and also asked for the phrases ‘Good Morning’ and ‘Goodbye’, you wrote your answers down phonetically because you could not write in the language … it has been decided that although written phonetically you did not get all of them correct … Your lack of basic knowledge of the Kinyarwanda language suggests that you are not a genuine national of Rwanda.1 In 2005, a young Rwandan refugee, known in Jan Blommaert’s account of his case as Joseph Mutingira, had his claim for UK
literature that we found, this study engages with texts which explore the kinds of immigrant experience that do not figure in comic songs such as Wood’s. In this book, therefore, we attend closely to writers’ collective exploration of the ways in which the city’s refugees and immigrants have, together, integrated Manchester into the world.2 Close attention to both diasporic and devolved literary cultures can add to our existing understanding of, in Susheila Nasta’s words, ‘the extent to which our visions of the national have been built on migrant and diasporic, colonial
This book is about the relationship between emergencies and the spectator. In the
early twenty-first century, ‘emergencies’ are commonplace in the newsgathering
and political institutions of western industrial democracies. From terrorism to
global warming, the refugee crisis to general elections, the spectator is
bombarded with narratives that seek to suspend the criteria of everyday life in
order to address perpetual ‘exceptional’ threats. I argue that repeated exposure
to these narratives through the apparatuses of contemporary technology creates a
‘precarious spectatorship’, where the spectator’s ability to rationalise
herself, or her relationship with the object of her spectatorship, is
compromised.
In terms of the ways in which emergencies are dramatized for
the spectator, this book focuses primarily on the framing and distribution of
images. Because images are cheap and easy to produce; because they can be
quickly and limitlessly distributed; because they are instantly affective and
because they can be easily overwritten, they have become a pre-eminent tool in
the performance of emergencies. In response to this, the book proposes
theatrical performance as a space in which the relationship between the
spectator and emergencies may be critically examined, and I analyse a range of
contemporary theatrical pieces which challenge the spectator under the aegis of
emergencies.
Orapian parents in a refugee camp and later granted Irish citizenship – is portrayed while visiting her mother in her country of origin, where an oppressive regime imposes the full veil on its female population and forbids women from venturing onto the streets if unaccompanied by men of their family. Marguerite’s aunt, a former dentist who feels responsible for a hospital that is overflowing with hopelessly agonising women, asks her niece to drive a truck full of the dying women from the hospital to the government buildings and leave them there as a protest. She
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
intuitive and affective leaps that define her work. There is an ethic to Bergvall’s refusal of meaning: these lines are honest about the uncomfortable confusion and powerlessness that might be felt by someone attempting to imagine a long-passed historical moment, or someone witnessing the passage of refugees escaping war from the comfort of a prosperous country. The experience of the refugees is evoked but not defined; it is left unknowable and unimaginable. But Drift suggests that the untimeliness of the Middle Ages can speak to and with the untimeliness of the modern
, refugee or even home-born person – will be the inscription of the outsider within a process of homogenisation. Marginalisation becomes the cost and possibility of a resistance to that process. The limits of tolerance within contemporary democracies can be located within the terms set by this process and the way it operates in given contexts. The contemporary problem of the refugee tests the system precisely because the inclusion of refugees may have a transformative effect on the site that absorbs them. Holding to a liberal doctrine of tolerance while at the same time