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UID:271-604@www.hu-berlin.de
CLASS: PUBLIC
SUMMARY:“Bona Fides: Racial Worldmaking in Refugee Literature”
DESCRIPTION: The modern condition of “refugeeness” has been inextricabl
 y bound up with global ideas of race and racial difference. The question o
 f race has always been a thorny one when it comes to the procedural defini
 tions and administration of refugees. The twentieth-century formulation of
  the refugee emerged alongside dramatic but incomplete shifts in ideas abo
 ut race and the dismantling of imperial worlds, built upon racializing ass
 umptions that cast colonized peoples as beyond the pale of the humanity th
 at international human rights law means to secure. According to the 1951 U
 N Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “membership” in a rac
 e that finds itself persecuted qualifies one for refugee status, and there
  is of course nothing about one’s racial identity that would prima facie
  and categorically disqualify one from petitioning for such status accordi
 ng to the Convention. Nevertheless, the construction of the refugee remain
 s entangled in global racial imaginaries of the human and the sub- or inhu
 man, and of innocence, criminality, and terror, even as humanitarian law a
 nd discourse seeks to distance itself from the history of past racial thin
 king and its shaping of present-day geopolitical realities. If the law is 
 ill-equipped to face, much less redress these contradictions, in this talk
 , I consider how refugee literatures have treated racialized refugee regim
 es. Turning to two recent North American novels, Sharon Bala’s The Boat 
 People (2018) and Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021), I argue 
 that this literature heightens the contradictions endemic to a racialized 
 refugee regime as a matter of narrative exigency and racial worldmaking, t
 hereby prompting us to theorize racialized refugeeness otherwise.Crystal P
 arikh is Professor of English at New York University, where she specialize
 s in twentieth-century and contemporary transnational American literature 
 and culture. In addition to numerous essays and articles, Professor Parikh
  has published Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers 
 of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which was the recipient of
  the Association for Asian American Studies Award for Outstanding Achievem
 ent in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Literature. She is also the author
  of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Lite
 rature and Culture (Fordham University Press, 2009), which was awarded the
  Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina/o and Chicana/o
  Literary Studies. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Human R
 ights and Literature (2019), and she co-edited with Daniel Y. Kim, The Cam
 bridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015). She is currently at 
 work on two book projects, Worldly Women, a study of transnational feminis
 t ethics in American literature, and First World Problems, which examines 
 the right to security of person and racial form in Asian American literary
  production. Professor Parikh also currently serves as the Director of the
  Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.More information about W.E.B. Du 
 Bois Lectures
LOCATION:Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
DTSTAMP:20260116T113001Z
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20260113T181500
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20260113T194500
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