Normal View Dyslexic View
Commentary
A refugee history perspective
Abstract
This article draws upon ongoing research in refugee history and specifically a close examination of confidential individual case files in the archives of the UNHCR to explore aspects of the cultural representation of refugees in different sites of population displacement in the modern world. Reflections by Roland Barthes and Abdulrazak Gurnah FBA provide the starting point to consider visual culture and cultural representation in efforts to assist refugees, such as the UN campaign for World Refugee Year in 1959–1960. No less significant have been the efforts by refugees themselves to make themselves heard in relation to the international refugee regime. The article ends with a plea for scholars and refugees to engage in the co-production of knowledge about population displacement and its consequences. (This article is published in the thematic collection `The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
refugeesrefugee historycultural representationvisual cultureUNHCRrefugee regimeRoland BarthesAbdulrazak GurnahWorld Refugee Yearco-production In his 2001 novel By The Sea, Nobel-Prize-winning author and Fellow of the British Academy Abdulrazak Gurnah has one of his protagonists say of a fellow refugee, ‘You’re just a condition, without even a story.’ The assumptions around the ‘condition’ of refugees lead in several directions, including the observations made by refugees and non-refugees about the status, the behaviour and even the physical appearance of displaced persons. Gurnah’s text put me in mind of the profound and still pertinent observation by the French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes in his evisceration of the 1955 Italian documentary film, The Lost Continent (Continente Perduto):
If we are concerned with fishermen, it is not at all the type of fishing which is shown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalised, a romantic essence of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping and praying at home. The same applies to refugees, a long procession of which is shown at the beginning, coming down a mountain: to identify them is of course unnecessary: they are eternal essences of refugees, which it is in the nature of the East to produce.
In his collection of essays, Mythologies, Barthes had a great deal more to say that I find resonant: for example in his 1955 essay on the French Guide Bleu he demolished its portrayal of Franco’s Spain for its brief and one-sided reference to the civil war that managed to efface the repression of Republicans and ignore their mass exodus across the Pyrenees, preferring instead to mention their anti-clericalism and destruction of church property. Nevertheless, Barthes left it to his readers to fill in the gaps.
On re-reading Barthes I was struck by his comments about the ‘nature of the East’. Again, he did not elaborate. My view is that in drawing attention to the ‘procession’ of refugees, he had in mind the impact of wars of national liberation in Vietnam and in Algeria during the 1950s, not to mention other sites of political and social upheaval, and the associated cultural representations of brutality, persecution, dispossession, and mass displacement, in which ‘women weeping and praying’ came to the fore. I shall come back to this.
What is clear, however, is that his observations—some seven decades later—continue to speak to the recurrent representation of refugees in the media, such that they are essentialised and made into ‘recognisable’ victims who constitute a ‘problem’. Cultural anthropologist Liisa Malkki has made a significant and enduring intervention in respect of such representation. In a much-cited series of publications in the mid-1990s, drawing upon her field work among Burundian refugees in Tanzania, she underlined the tendency of refugees to be portrayed in political and public discourse as de-historicised and de-politicised figures. The humanities therefore provide a powerful means of illuminating, interrogating, and problematising much that passes for the cultural representation of refugees. Scholars of visual culture such as Terence Wright have done a great deal to unpick the images and tropes that circulate and that have a lengthy genealogy in terms of enlisting public support. One need only to pick up a newspaper, to watch news broadcasts, or to read online appeals to grasp how a ‘refugee crisis’ is portrayed in pursuit of charitable objectives—well-intentioned initiatives that tend to underline the ‘eternal essences of refugees’.
To be sure, some initiatives misfire badly and risk trivialising the experience of refugees in pursuit—dare one say—of self-publicity. For my part, I dislike intensely how Ai Weiwei posed for the photographer Rohit Chawla by lying outstretched on a beach in Lesvos in January 2016 to remind his huge number of followers of the fate of two-year old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi1 whose lifeless body was washed up on a Turkish beach a year previously after his family attempted to cross to Greece in a small dinghy. The distressing photographs taken by journalist Nilüfer Demir of Alan’s lifeless body contributed to a belief among European politicians that they should do more to deter people from attempting to leave Turkey, rather than to provide a safe passage for those who wished to do so. Accordingly, the blame for Alan’s death was laid at the door of people smugglers, a trick to disguise the lack of attention to the root causes of forced migration and a device to legitimise further restriction on those claiming asylum. Meanwhile, Ai Weiwei’s re-enactment seemed to me the worst kind of appropriation. His stunt said nothing about the family circumstances and the events that prompted them to seek safety in Europe, about the thousands of other lives lost in the waters of the Mediterranean, or about the deep history of conflict and displacement.
I want now to return to Barthes and the context in which Barthes wrote his piece. In the late 1950s a group of young Conservatives launched a ‘plan to save the world’s refugees’. They envisaged a campaign to assist and resettle several groups in and beyond Europe: the ‘hard core’ of Displaced Persons (DPs) in camps in Germany and Austria, namely former forced labourers from Eastern Europe who refused to repatriate to their country of origin, by then under communist rule; Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from Palestine in 1948; Chinese refugees in Hong Kong who fled the People’s Republic of China after 1949; and elderly Russian refugees in China who arrived following the Revolution and Civil War in 1917–21. The result was the UN-sponsored World Refugee Year, 1959–1960, which inter alia generated enormous publicity particularly in Western Europe, North America, and Australasia, making use of the mass media to demonstrate the plight of refugees. Cultural production belonged to the core of World Refugee Year. Among other things, supporters created ‘refugee camps’ in Trafalgar Square and at Crystal Palace to advertise the conditions in which refugees were held. The idea of a fake installation was taken up years later, in 2014, when the rich and powerful who gathered in Davos were invited to ‘experience’ life as refugees in a so-called ‘Refugee Run’.2 The crass stunt has had a long shelf-life.
Cultural representation often slips into various modes, either to portray refugees as desperate, beleaguered, and pitiable (and in need of ‘rescue’) or to circulate menacing metaphors of a ‘flood’ or ‘swarm’ threatening the security of the state and host communities. But it is also important to acknowledge that refugees themselves have not been bystanders in cultural production. They have sometimes instrumentalised images of victimhood in order to access resources from non-governmental organisations or to secure protection from inter-governmental organisations and governments. More to the point, they have often connected such victimhood to political projects designed to affirm the right to return (in the case of Palestinian refugees) or to establish the grounds for resettlement in a third country (as happened with DPs). Those programmes and projects made extensive use of cultural production, including musical events and other performances, to maintain a sense of collective consciousness and endeavour, to sustain links with the diaspora, and to keep refugees in the public eye.
In making themselves heard in various forums and in various modes, refugees have regularly demonstrated an awareness of the prevailing refugee regime, governed by agreed principles and a legal framework. They have correspondingly directed energy to ensure that their rights under international law are respected. Scholars are aware of and have shown how refugees have engaged with international organisations, with governments, and with non-governmental organisations in pursuit of protection and rights. This is evident from their letters and petitions to international organisations, such as the League of Nations between the wars and to the International Refugee Organisation (1946–50) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) established in 1950 and still the mainstay of the international refugee regime. Men and women, including but not only elite refugee lawyers and political leaders, have located themselves in a broader history of persecution and loss. One thinks here of the claims advanced by Armenian refugees who reminded their interlocutors of historic persecution in the Ottoman Empire culminating in the 1915 genocide, or of refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Hutu refugees in Burundi, who articulated an acute historical understanding (a mythico-history, as Malkki termed it) of their longstanding marginalisation and persecution, which they maintained could best be overcome by establishing an ethnonational state of their own. Other refugees have compared their experiences with refugees elsewhere whom they thought received relatively favourable treatment: during the late 1950s, for example, refugees sometimes drew attention to the attention devoted to Hungarian refugees following the 1956 uprising, asking why similar resources were not devoted to themselves and to others.
Did refugees and can refugees form part of civic endeavour or are they doomed to be bystanders in terms of representation and political engagement? One answer is that refugees, asylum seekers, and stateless persons have often affirmed the right to become full citizens, in response to state-led projects that sustained their subordination: this became clear, for example, in political discourse and protest in post-Partition India where so-called ‘national refugees’ protested their continued marginalisation. There is plenty of evidence elsewhere that has disclosed refugees’ resentment at being resettled without being consulted about the terms of their resettlement, let alone being fully included in civil society.
On the other hand, it is also worth pointing out some of the ways in which refugees have envisaged a world beyond the nation-state. My current research drawing upon the extensive individual case files in UNHCR Records and Archives, Geneva, discloses instances in which petitioners renounced their nationality and became stateless, as in the case of an African-American who drew attention to the discrimination he faced on a daily basis. Some refugees disdained the view that the ‘solution’ to their predicament lay in being incorporated in a host state. Janos S., a 63-year-old Hungarian refugee seaman, wrote to the High Commissioner in 1953 on behalf of his fellow refugees:
I propose [that] their sufferences [be brought] to an end by letting them cooperate in building up a ‘State’ of their own in the form of a ‘Reservation’ following the noble example of the USA where by Constitution there was given a place to the Indians under the Sun. I have many practical ideas for solving this question of the Refugees.
Bizarre it may have been, but his proposal indicates that not all refugees embraced the idea of citizenship on the state’s terms.
Finally, I want to consider how to advance the case for the civic importance of the arts and humanities whilst keeping one’s eyes firmly on the perspectives and knowledge of refugees. Exiled intellectuals have of course made an immense contribution to the arts and humanities in the UK and elsewhere. But I’d like instead to end with some remarks about the potential co-production of knowledge between refugees and scholars. There are several intriguing and valuable instances of contemporary co-production. To take just one example, the Norwegian scholar of refugee law, Maja Janmyr, and the Syrian-Canadian writer and artist Yazan al-Saadi have co-authored a graphic novel on Sudanese refugees in Lebanon, entitled Cardboard Camp, in an English and an Arabic edition.3 Among other things, it highlights the complicated relationship between refugees and UNHCR and the power relations that operate at an international and local level. Cardboard Camp does more than highlight the vulnerability of refugees; it also points to their insistence on rights and the obligation of host states to protect recognised refugees.
Yet there is little in the historiography that indicates co-production. To be sure, refugees from Soviet Russia and from Nazi Germany produced numerous contributions to scholarship across many fields. But it is difficult to think of a sustained body of collaborative work between historians and refugees. There is one possible exception: in 1939 Sir John Hope Simpson published a mammoth and informative book on The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey. It was a contemporary history of displacement, designed to be authoritative and dispassionate, and it missed the perspectives of refugees. It incorporated the research of a handful of predominantly Russian refugee lawyers and others who fled Soviet Russia and settled in neighbouring states from where they supplied information on the number, status, and prospects of mainly Russian and Armenian refugees, namely those who came within the aegis of the League of Nations. But Simpson could not and did not claim that it was a co-production.
A promising avenue is currently being pursued by Katherine Mackinnon at the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the Maryhill Integration Network. A group of refugee, migrant, and local women has worked to create a poem that draws together their multiple experiences of displacement and additionally references their engagement with the history of exile in Scotland, specifically the Highland Clearances.4 As Mackinnon says, their contribution to refugee history was as much about the creative research process and the relationships that emerged as it was about the finished product. Furthermore, the use of oblique and semi-fictionalised accounts provides a means to minimise or avoid the disclosure of intimate and often upsetting personal detail, such as is required in the quest for legal–administrative recognition of one’s refugee status.
There are, indeed, important ethical and practical issues to consider in entertaining the scope for co-production, as a recent co-authored book by Ismail Alkhateeb (a Syrian refugee), Marcia C. Schenck, and Kate Reed on ‘the right to research’ has explained.5 In my own work, I have been bound by strict rules of confidentiality in using and anonymising case files from the UNHCR archives covering the 1950s through to the 1970s that identified named individuals. In dramatising their displacement and bringing refugees closer to the centre of history rather than consign them to the margins, I endeavour not to be complicit in the kind of appropriation that I have mentioned earlier. Ideally, I would like to involve them or their descendants in interpreting the available archival material to fashion a more multifaceted account. But the challenges are considerable and I have not yet found a way to negotiate them.
This is a reminder that thinking about refugees is not enough. We should seek to think with refugees as well. We need to acknowledge multiple actors and encounters and the politics at stake in different contexts. We should take account of the numerous and sometimes divergent voices as well as the different interests at stake in writing refugees into history. And, to return to Barthes, it remains imperative to avoid catching the ‘disease of thinking in essences’ and to avoid a reductive approach to refugees who are encountered in the archive. There is plenty of exciting research in refugee history that avoids these pitfalls and that reinforces the civic importance of the arts and humanities. But there is a lot more to be done.
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is by Salah Darwish on Unsplash.
References
BarthesR. (1957), Mythologies (Paris, Les Lettres nouvelles).
GurnahA. (2001), By The Sea (London, Bloomsbury).
MalkkiL.H. (1995), Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press). https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226190969.001.0001
ReedK. & SchenkM.C. (eds) (2023), The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers (Montreal, McGill–Queen’s University Press). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780228015659
SimpsonS.J.H. (1939), The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
1
His name was initially reported as Aylan.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a34
Published on: 17 September 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 137
Article download count: 17
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Gatrell, P. (2024), ‘A refugee history perspective’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a34 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a34Crossref
Dimensions
Altmetric
Article metrics
View count: 137
Download count: 17
No Data Found
No Data Found
No Data Found
Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
Introduction: Rethinking Gender in Responses to Violent Extremism Sahla Aroussi, Fatuma Ahmed Ali
Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the role of women in the prevention of violent extremism and within extremist networks. Yet research and scholarship in this area remains limited and a deeper engagement with gender and the role of norms around masculinities and femininities in violent extremism is needed. This special issue includes a selection of both timely and relevant articles by academics and practitioners, mostly from the Global South, focusing on gender and violent extremism particularly in the context of East Africa. The articles were presented at the Global Network on Gender and Responding to Violent Extremism (GARVE) online conference in November 2021. GARVE is an international network involving academics, policymakers and practitioners to promote innovative and critical thinking on violent extremism from a gender perspective and facilitate shared learning.
22 June 2023
Returning home: the reintegration dilemmas of female Al-Shabaab defectors in Kenya Fathima Azmiya Badurdeen
Gendered responses to the disengagement and reintegration of female defectors are needed to respond to trends that indicate increasing female radicalisation and growth in the recruitment of women into terrorist networks. The development of successful gender-sensitive amnesty policies and reintegration programmes is crucial, not only to prevent recidivism and re-engagement among female defectors, but also to mitigate the risk of further female radicalisation and recruitment at community level. This article, based on research conducted with female Al-Shabaab defectors in Kenya, explores women’s gendered motives for joining the Al-Shabaab network, their experiences within it and their reasons for quitting in order to inform an evidence-based reintegration process. It identifies the gendered nuances involved in recruitment, disengagement and deradicalisation, and it also considers gender-specific aspects of reintegration, highlighting the need to focus on gendered needs, norms and the expectations of female Al-Shabaab defectors and the communities in which they are reintegrated.
22 June 2023
No Data Found