Contemporary Asylum Narratives marks a transition from traditional modes of diasporic belonging to the need for identifications that encompass the statelessness of refugees and asylum seekers. This book explores representations of asylum seekers and refugees in twenty-first century literature, film and theatre.

Contemporary Asylum Narratives marks a transition from traditional modes of diasporic belonging to the need for identifications that encompass the statelessness of refugees and asylum seekers. This book explores representations of asylum seekers and refugees in twenty-first century literature, film and theatre.

Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Border Violence focuses on the evidence of the effects of displacement as seen in narratives—cinematic, photographic, and literary—produced by, with, or about refugees and migrants. The book explores refugee journeys, asylum-seeking, trafficking, and deportation as well as territorial displacement, the architecture of occupation and settlement, and border separation and violence. The large-scale movement of people from the global South to the global North is explored through the perspectives of the new mobilities paradigm, including the fact that, for many of the displaced, waiting and immobility is a common part of their experience. Through critical analysis drawing on cultural studies and literary studies, Roger Bromley generates an alternative “map” of texts for understanding displacement in terms of affect, subjectivity, and dehumanization with the overall aim of opening up new dialogues in the face of the current stream of anti-refugee rhetoric.

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representationPlaces refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities researchBrings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politicsThe refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness. Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

This Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. Analyzing novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography, the individual chapters counter dominant representations of refugees as voiceless victims. Addressing key characteristics and thematics of refugee narratives, this Handbook examines how refugee cultural productions are shaped by and in turn shape socio-political landscapes. It will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners committed to engaging refugee narratives in the contemporary moment. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

La Castañeda Insane Asylum is the first inside view of the workings of La Castañeda General Insane Asylum--a public mental health institution founded in Mexico City in 1910 only months before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. It links life within the asylum's walls to the radical transformations brought about as Mexico entered the Revolution's armed phase and then endured under succeeding modernizing regimes. Author Cristina Rivera Garza brings the history of La Castañeda asylum to life as inmates, doctors, relatives, and others engage in dialogues on insanity. They discuss faith, sex, poverty, loss, resentment, envy, love, and politics. Doctors translated what they heard into the emerging language of psychiatry, while inmates conveyed their personal experiences and private histories through expressions of mental suffering. The language of pain--physical and spiritual, mild to excruciating--allowed patients to detail the sources and consequences of their misfortune. Available now for the first time in English, this edition contains updated sources and features a note by the translator, Laura Kanost.