Possibilities of resistance and critique of asylum system in contemporary refugee camp narratives

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As of June 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 82.4 million people have been forcibly displaced and among them 26.4 million have been considered as refugees. The figure of the refugee has for long been by and large associated with the experience of flight which is looked upon as a necessary as well as an agential response to the life-threatening conditions back home. But with the intensification of a global culture of surveillance and militarization of borders in the last decade, immobility and detention has become the defining experience of being a refugee. Most representations of refugees residing in refugee camps in its varied manifestations around the world oscillate between the normative binaries of victim-threat in the popular media. Such dehumanizing images makes it necessary to turn towards literary depictions to counter the negative discourses around migration and the figure of the refugee. My thesis aims to explore the possibilities of challenging and even subverting the hegemonizing representations of asylum seekers and refugees in such highly bio/necro-political spaces in contemporary narratives (both fiction and non-fiction). By engaging with the chosen texts from an interdisciplinary perspective, I intend to engage with the spatial politics of such camps by situating them within their specific socio-cultural and colonial as well as neo-colonial contexts.My proposed thesis intends to engage with both fictional, partly fictional as well as non-fictional works from Europe, Australia and the Shatila Refugee Camp of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon where the spatial and temporal aspects of different types of refugee encampments influence the narratives significantly. My primary texts include- Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone (2015), Behrouz Boochani's No Friend But the Mountains (2018), Shatila Stories (published in 2018 and authored by nine Syrian and Palestinian refugees and translated by Nashwa Gowanlock), Voices from the 'Jungle': Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp (authored by people who have stayed in Calais at some point in their lives and published in 2017), Annie Holmes' and Olumide Popoola's Breach (2016) and Refugee Tales (writers collaborated with asylum seekers and detainees to produce four volumes of stories published between 2016-21 about their experiences in England imitating the format of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales). I would also try to gain access to the narratives of refugees available at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre under the University of Manchester. Further, I am interested in participating in the walks organized by The Refugee Tales project in future as it will be an important experience in understand how refugee and asylum seekers perform their narratives as an act of agency to demand a compassionate and sensitive asylum process.