Refugee Worldbuilding in Broken Times: (Re)Creating Self-Location in South(east) Asian Canadian Narratives
Abstract This paper is focused on interpreting the way in which twenty-first-century refugee writing in Canada is currently approached critically and theoretically. It proposes new reading strategies that contest the influence of nation-state powers over literary production deployed with an aesthetics of cosmopolitanism. In particular, this article takes up refugee writing by Kim Thúy and Sharon Bala, respectively, in order to show how its search for a “Good Life” leads to the transformation of the characters’ subjectivity. This transformation responds to an epistemological shift which confronts issues of Western complicity in foreign human rights abuses and poses questions about alternative epistemologies to Eurocentric notions of healing and trauma recovery in the aftermath of mass violence.
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—. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency. Routledge, 2006.
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Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke UP, 2017.
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Rifkind, Candida. “The Migrant Body’s Work.” Canadian Literature, vol. 242, 2021, pp. 125-28.
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Sarkowsky, Katja. “Questions of Recognition? Critical Investigations of Citizenship and Culture in Multicultural Canadian Writing.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, vol. 30, no. 1, 2010, pp. 47-63.
Schimanski, Johan, and Jopi Nyman. Epilogue. Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings, by Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman, Manchester UP, 2021, pp. 242-55.
Thúy, Kim. Em. 2020. Translated by Sheila Fischman, Seven Stories P, 2021.
—. Ru. 2009. Translated by Sheila Fischman, Random House Canada, 2012.
Troeung, Y-Dang. Refugee Lifeworlds. Temple UP, 2022.
—. “Refugee Race-Ability: Bodies, Lands, Worlds.” The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen, Routledge, 2023, pp. 278-90.
—. “Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 2, 2013, pp. 150-166.
“UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr. Accessed 21 Apr. 2022.
van Herk, Aritha. “Trembling Strength: Migrating Vulnerabilities in Fiction by Sharon Bala, Yasmin Ladha, and Denise Chong.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 56, no. 3, 2020, pp. 345-58.
Wah, Fred. Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity; Critical Writings 1984-1999. NeWest P, 2000.
Ahmed, Sara. Complaint! Duke UP, 2021.
—. “Happiness and Queer Politics.” World Picture Journal, 2009, http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_3/Ahmed.html.
—. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010.
Amilhat Szary, Anne-Laure. “Borders: The Topos of/for a Post-Politics of Images?” Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings, edited by Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman, Manchester UP, 2021, pp. 151-67. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fqvkr0.13. Accessed 12 July 2023.
Bala, Sharon. Interview by Michael Enright. CBC, 14 Jan. 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-january-14-2018-1.4471379/debut-novel-about-tamil-asylum-seekers-reveals-canada-s-split-personality-about-refugees-1.4484756. Accessed 3 Apr. 2022.
—. The Boat People. McClelland & Stewart, 2018.
Benhabib, Seyla. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge UP, 2004.
Benito Sánchez, Jesús, and Ana María Manzanas Calvo. Hospitality in American Literature and Culture: Spaces, Bodies, Borders. Routledge, 2016.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke U, 2011.
Bracke, Sarah. “Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience.” Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, Duke UP, 2016, pp. 52-75.
Brambilla, Chiara. “In/visibilities Beyond the Spectacularisation: Young people, Subjectivity and Revolutionary Border Imaginations in the Mediterranean Borderscape.” Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings, edited by Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman, Manchester UP, 2021, pp. 83-104.
Casco-Solís, Sara. “Socio-Ecological Resilience in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People.” World Literature Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2023, pp. 66-76.
Darias-Beautell, Eva. “The Paradox of Hospitality in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People.” Thresholds and Ways Forward in English Studies, edited by Lourdes López Ropero, Sara Prieto García-Cañedo, and José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo, Publicaciones Universidad de Alicante, 2020, pp. 69-77.
Derrida, Jacques. “Hostipitality.” Acts of Religion, edited and translated by Gil Anidjar, Routledge, 2010, pp. 358-420.
Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby, Stanford UP, 2000.
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Cornell UP, 1999.
Espiritu Gandhi, Evyn Lê, and Vinh Nguyen, editors. The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives. Routledge, 2023.
Foucault, Michael. “Of other spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22-27.
Fraile-Marcos, Ana María. “The Many Faces of Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Narratives.” World Literature Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2023, pp. 2-5.
Freedman, Jane. Gendering the International Asylum and Refugee Debate. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
García Zarranz, Libe. “Borderless (Alien) Nations: Disposable Bodies and Biopolitical Effacement in Min Sook Lee’s Docu-Poem.” Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures, New Comparisons in World Literature, edited by Belén Martín-Lucas and Andrea Ruthven, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 118-32.
Gatrell, Peter. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford UP, 2013.
James, Jennifer. “Frayed Ends: Refugee Memory and Bricolage Practices of Repair in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Kim Thúy’s Ru.” Melus, vol. 41, no. 3, 2016, pp. 42-67.
Llarena-Ascanio, María Jesús. “‘Another Way of Naming Elsewhere’: Transnational and Hemispheric Stories by Some Canadian and Argentinian Authors.” RCEI. Special Issue of Globality, vol. 78, 2019, pp. 55-73.
—. “Bodies Becoming Pain: Unusual Strategies of Dissent in Some Transnational Latin-American Women Writers.” Brumal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2020, pp. 113-34.
Mani, B. Venkat. “Theorizing Unsettlement: Refugee Narratives as Literary Ration Cards.” The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen, Routledge, 2023, pp. 26-38.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Combined Academic Publ, 2003.
Nail, Thomas. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford UP, 2015.
Nguyen, Vinh. “Refugee Gratitude: Narrating Success and Intersubjectivity in Kim Thúy’s Ru.” Canadian Literature, vol. 219, 2013, pp. 17-36.
—. “Refugeetude: When does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee.” Social Text, vol. 37, no. 2, 2019, pp. 109-32.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Beacon P, 1995.
Nyers, Peter. “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 6, 2003, pp. 1069-1093.
—. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency. Routledge, 2006.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp P, 2018.
Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke UP, 2017.
Rancière, J. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Continuum, 2010.
Rifkind, Candida. “The Migrant Body’s Work.” Canadian Literature, vol. 242, 2021, pp. 125-28.
Romero-Ruíz, María Isabel, and Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, editors. Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance. A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Sarkowsky, Katja. “Questions of Recognition? Critical Investigations of Citizenship and Culture in Multicultural Canadian Writing.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, vol. 30, no. 1, 2010, pp. 47-63.
Schimanski, Johan, and Jopi Nyman. Epilogue. Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings, by Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman, Manchester UP, 2021, pp. 242-55.
Thúy, Kim. Em. 2020. Translated by Sheila Fischman, Seven Stories P, 2021.
—. Ru. 2009. Translated by Sheila Fischman, Random House Canada, 2012.
Troeung, Y-Dang. Refugee Lifeworlds. Temple UP, 2022.
—. “Refugee Race-Ability: Bodies, Lands, Worlds.” The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen, Routledge, 2023, pp. 278-90.
—. “Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 2, 2013, pp. 150-166.
“UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr. Accessed 21 Apr. 2022.
van Herk, Aritha. “Trembling Strength: Migrating Vulnerabilities in Fiction by Sharon Bala, Yasmin Ladha, and Denise Chong.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 56, no. 3, 2020, pp. 345-58.
Wah, Fred. Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity; Critical Writings 1984-1999. NeWest P, 2000.
Llarena Ascanio, M. J. (2024). Refugee Worldbuilding in Broken Times: (Re)Creating Self-Location in South(east) Asian Canadian Narratives. Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 13, 69–85. https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v13i69-85
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