Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Border Violence

258 Pages·2021·6.678 MB·English

by  Roger Bromley

STUDIES IN MOBILITIES,
LITERATURE, AND CULTURE
Narratives of
Forced Mobility and
Displacement in
Contemporary
Literature and Culture
Roger Bromley
Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture
Series Editors
Marian Aguiar, Department of English, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Charlotte Mathieson, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Lynne Pearce, English Literature & Creative Writing,
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Thisseriesrepresentsanexcitingnewpublishingopportunityforscholars
working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research.
The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all
kinds – ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the
everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the mate-
rial means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures
that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, post-
colonialism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from
literaryscholarswhodrawuponresearchoriginatinginculturalgeography
and/or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and
culturaltexts,proposalsareequallywelcomefromscholarsworkinginthe
social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theo-
rizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials
of all kinds – i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as
well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms – and projects engaging
with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15385
Roger Bromley
Narratives of Forced
Mobility
and Displacement
in Contemporary
Literature and Culture
Roger Bromley
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, UK
Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture
ISBN 978-3-030-73595-1 ISBN 978-3-030-73596-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73596-8
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This book is dedicated to Anita and our grandchildren, Jonah and Emma,
and to the memory of Virginia (Ginny) Bromley (1936–2021)
Acknowledgments
Atthetimeofthepowerworkers’strikeintheUnitedKingdomin1970,
someone wrote to The Times newspaper, starting the letter with “Sir,
Writing by candlelight …” and I feel that I should start my acknowl-
edgments by saying “Writing in the pandemic …” as this has dominated
mylife,andthoseofmillionsofothersworldwide,throughoutthewhole
period of writing this book.
Ihavebeenresearchingandwritingaboutasylumseekersandrefugees
for some years now but my most valuable experience was in volunteering
with the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum as foodbank
helper,caféassistant,conferenceorganiser,andtrustee.Iwasalsodirector
of the Refugee Week festival for a number of years. This experience gave
meinsightswhichnobooksorinternetsearchescouldhaveprovidedand
manyoftherefugeesbecamefriendsasdidsomeofthepeoplewhohelped
withthefestivalandotheractivities:FaroukAzam,FionaCameron,Chris
Cann,CarolineHennigan,JaneandJohnHenson,SkinderHundal,Peter
Lowenstein, Helen O’Nions, Rob Peutrell, Sooree Pillay, Sr. Philomena
Rooney, and Patricia Stout.
Apart from my volunteering experience, the initial ideas for this book
came when I was invited to give a lecture at the launch of the AHRC
project “Responding to Crisis: Forced Migration and the Humanities in
theTwenty-FirstCentury”atKeeleUniversityinOctober,2016.Ishould
like to thank Mariangela Palladino and Agnes Woolley for involving me
in this project as a member of the Advisory Board. Thanks to Mariangela
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
also for inviting me to give a seminar paper at Keele on one of the topics
in Chapter 5, a month before lockdown.
Withincreasinglyrestrictedaccesstolibraries,muchoftheresearchfor
thisbookhasbeencarriedoutonline.Havingbeenretiredforsomeyears
nowandwithoutanyimmediatecolleagues,Iamthankfulforthesupport
ofthefollowinginassistingwiththedevelopmentofthisbook:Alexandra
D’Onofrio, Eva Giraud, Lindsey Moore, Peter Morey, Annalisa Oboe,
MaggieO’Neill,TeodoraTodorova,PatrickWilliams,HichamYezza and
Robert Young. Special thanks also to the film directors, Fernand Melgar,
andAntonioAugugliaro,KhaledAlNassiry,andGabrieledelGrande,for
graciously allowing me to use images from their films at no cost. Thanks
are also due to Lilia Laura Stankiewicz Gonzalez at the Galeria Peter
Kilchmann, Zurich and to the artist, Adrian Paci for their generosity in
allowing me to use the image in the Introduction.
For the three years from 2015 to 2018 I had the pleasure of being
part of the four universities Postmigration Research team in Denmark
and thank Sten Moslund, Anne-Ring Petersen, and Moritz Schramm for
inviting me to give lectures and take part in conferences in Copenhagen
and Odense. I should also like to thank Carmen Concilio and Pietro
Deandrea for asking me to give lectures at the University of Turin and
to contribute articles to journals which they edit. Another debt is also
owed to Fadwa Kalam Abdelrahman at the faculty of Alsun, Ain Shams
University, Giza, Egypt for her warm hospitality offered when inviting
me to give a keynote lecture at their annual conference where some of
the ideas in Chapter 5 were presented.
As one of the few remaining academics still writing in longhand, I was
fortunate that Amanda Graham was able to do an excellent job in tran-
scribing my scribble into something resembling coherence. As someone
whose IT skills are the historic equivalent of the quill pen, I was similarly
fortunateinhavingPaulPoplawskiasameticulousandpatientcopyeditor
who did an exceptional job in not only transforming my manuscript into
publishable shape but who also made a number of constructive criticisms
which improved the quality of the argument at different points. My son,
Carl,gavehistimeandyearsofpublishingexperienceinNewYorktohelp
curb some of my excesses and keep the analysis in focus. Lynne Pearce,
long-timefriendandserieseditor,mentoredthebookprojectthroughout
and gave prompt, invaluable advice and continuing encouragement. My
editors in New York, Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe, showed great
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
forbearance in waiting for me finally to produce this book after several
delays, and also answered my numerous queries promptly.
The pandemic has made life difficult for all of us, especially during
periods of shielding and I am especially grateful to my daughter,
Catherine,whohashelpedthroughoutandtofriendslikeGillBarber,Kim
O’Neill, Lauren Johnston-Smith and D J Johnston-Smith who ensured
that we were fed and kept sane. My bowls friends, Caroline and Rob
Fairnie, Alasdair Hutcheson, Dougie Hutchinson, Brian Thomson and
Eric Walker helped distract me from the demands of the book at times,
and my acupuncturist and laser therapist, Jill Buchan, kept me fit enough
to keep on typing. On a sad note, my good friend, inveterate peace
campaigner,andarmchairpoliticsandfootballsage,KenFleet,diedfrom
the virus in the early part of the pandemic and will not see the outcome
of some of our discussions. His memory is treasured.
Finally,mydeepestgratitudeisduetoAnitawho,forfifty-fouryearsof
companionship, love and wisdom has, despite her own busy legal career,
always been there for me as reader, guide, and support.
Although substantially rewritten and revised, sections of some chap-
ters have appeared in earlier forms. Part of Chapter 2 was published in
Working and Writing for Tomorrow: Essays in Honour of Itala Vivan,
CCCP, 2008. Versions of the first half of Chapter 3 appeared in “Asylum
Accounts”, Moving Worlds (2012) and The Culture of Migration: Poli-
tics, Aesthetics and Histories, I.B. Tauris, 2015. A section of Chapter 4
was published in Recognizioni: Rivista di Lingua, Letteratura e Culture
Moderne,2016(1).VersionsofpartsofChapter5werepublishedinFrom
the European South, 2018, and Le Simplegadi, 2019.
Praise for NarrativesofForced
MobilityandDisplacementin
ContemporaryLiteratureandCulture
“In his outstanding engagement with the recent literatures of enforced
mobility and displacement, Roger Bromley assembles a significant range
of resistant cultural responses to today’s expanding regimes of check-
pointing, border control, and forced displacement that constitute our
globalcoloniality.Resourcedbyanexceptionalliteracyinculturalstudies,
political theory, postcolonial critique, and decolonial thought, Bromley’s
consistently dazzling analyses formulate vital new ways of thinking which
steadfastly refuse the pernicious demonisation of precarious dwellers and
refugees.”
—John McLeod, Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures,
University of Leeds, UK
“Roger Bromley’s wide-reaching book takes an incisive and theoreti-
cally rigorous look at how cultural practitioners are responding to the
central geopolitical phenomenon of our times. Taking in multiple genres
and geographical contexts, it is an invaluable resource for students and
researchers alike.”
—Agnes Woolley, Lecturer in Transnational Literature and Migration
Cultures, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
xi