The Fragile Obligation: Gratitude, Discontent, and Dissent with Syrian Refugees in Canada

This article analyzes the emotional lives of Syrian refugee mothers in the first year of their recent resettlement in Canada. Drawing on two waves of interviews with 41 newcomer mothers, we find three main affective themes in their resettlement narratives: gratitude, discontent, and dissent. Together, they capture a reality we term the fragile obligation, which reflects coexisting conditions of migratory indebtedness, disappointment, and critique. Inspired by foundational work in Critical Refugee Studies and Asian American/Ethnic Studies, centering refugee affect holds promise for revising dominant scholarly theories of immigrant integration, assimilation, and belonging from migrants’ perspectives in an era of widespread backlash, especially against Syrian and MENA/Muslim immigrants and refugees. By identifying complex post-migration affective states like the fragile obligation, researchers can help build more effective policies and practices to support Syrians and other forced migrants.

Performing Refugee’s Body and Memory: Poetics of Diaspora in lê thi diem thúy’s Autoperformance

Despite the fact that substantial scholarship in Asian diasporic and refugee narratives has been developed in the post-Cold War era, critical refugee studies related to autoperformance have yet to be examined. Within this context of addressing autoperformance as an aesthetic genre, this paper explores the poetics of Vietnamese refugeehood as mediated in lê thi diem thúy’s ?Red Fiery Summer (1995) and the bodies between us (1996). While the former historicizes the Vietnam War from the diasporic perspective of a refugee, the latter articulates the counter master narratives by performing bodily memories of refugeehood. Informed by Marianne Hirsch’s “post-memory”, the paper demonstrates how body and memory could be inextricably and interdependently rendered as a poetics of diaspora in performance. This paper further argues that autoperforming these two aspects is critical to revisiting the history of the Vietnam War and calling the militarism of the U.S.A. into question.

Introduction

The introduction establishes the question at the heart of this book: How did Korean women and children become critical to the making of US empire in the early Cold War? It begins by situating Korea in the longer trajectory of US empire, which dates back centuries before US occupation of South Korea in 1945. Focusing on how children and intimacy historically played a role in empire building, the chapter describes how during the Korean War family frames were deployed to transform devastation into a tale of salvation, a cultural reconfiguration that enabled America’s reach to the Pacific. Yet Americans who anchored this project soon put internationalism into practice in ways that exceeded government intentions. Initially heralded for their humanitarian efforts, US servicemen, missionaries, and philanthropists transformed a rescue project over there into an immigration problem over here. Pushing to permanently bring Korean women and children into the United States, they were responsible for a return of empire that disrupted existing US gatekeeping policies and the domestic racial status quo. The introduction places the book in conversation with the fields of postcolonial studies, American studies, Asian American studies, critical adoption studies, and critical refugee studies to better understand these transnational processes.

Moving Futures

This essay-review discusses four books that link refugee migration and border politics to ideas of time. It reads Asfa-Wossen Asserate’s African Exodus (2018), Stephanie Li’s Pan-African American Literature (2018), Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures (2018), and Long T. Bui’s Returns of War (2018) as books with distinct objects of analysis, from refugee memory of the US war in Vietnam, to US literary and cultural speculative fictions, to African immigrant writers in the US, to the current so-called African migrant crisis as it affects Europe. It also considers the multiple disciplinary and methodological commitments of these books, as they participate in discussions on migration in such areas as ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, scholarship on literature of African diasporas, economics, history, memory, and human rights. This essay-review considers the gains or limitations of such approaches to the study of migration in contemporary literature and/or culture.

Planning the Ideal Refugee Camp? A Critical Interrogation of Recent Planning Innovations in Jordan and Germany

With the increase of refugee movements since 2014 in Europe and the Near East, the debate of how to plan appropriate shelters and emergency accommodation has gained a new momentum. Established techno-managerial approaches have been criticised as inappropriate and the professional community of planners and architects was increasingly drawn into debates for alternative solutions. This article traces the “innovations” that promise better, more effective, and more humane emergency shelters using the examples of the “Tempohomes” in Berlin as well as the Jordanian refugee camps of Zaatari and Azraq. In both cases, planners were employed to address the ambivalent reality of protracted refugee camps and include “lessons” from failures of earlier solutions. While the article acknowledges the genuine attempt of planners to engage with the more complex needs and expectations of refugees, a careful look at the results of the planning for better camps reveals ambivalent outcomes. As camps acquire a new visual appearance, closer to housing, which mixes shelter design with social spaces and services as essential parts of the camp; these “innovations” bear the danger of paternalistic planning and aestheticisation, camouflaging control under what seems to be well-intended and sensitive planning. The article focuses on refugees’ agency expressed in critical camp studies to interrogate the planning results. While recent critical refugee studies have demanded recognition of refugees as urban actors which should be included in the co-production of the spatial reality of refugee accommodations, new planning approaches tend to result in a shrinking of spaces of self-determination and self-provisioning of refugees.