| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation joins the field of Critical Refugee Studies (CRS) in Canada to examine representations of refugees in contemporary Canadian literature and culture. Drawing on a wide range of literary, filmic, visual and performance texts, I argue that “the refugee” is a pivotal figure in understanding the vexed and intertwined relationship between forced migration and projects of nation-building and statehood. In particular, I consider how these texts, many of them by refugee and immigrant authors, challenge or complicate dominant ideals of Canadian hospitality to reveal the colonial, capitalist and patriarchal dimensions of Canada’s immigration and refugee regimes, and the many forms of exclusion and exploitation refugees and non-citizens routinely experience within, as well as beyond, the borders of this nation. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical framework used in this study, highlighting the ways in which refugee literature and art in Canada can contribute to critically reorient concepts of hospitality and the category of “refugee.” In Chapter 2, I examine Rawi Hage’s novel, Cockroach, and Souvankham Thammavongsa’s short story, “Worms,” in relation to the language of pestilence that pervades immigration discourse. Hage and Thammavongsa use bugs as an extended metaphor for the often denigrated yet ineradicable forms of human life that exist on the peripheries of social and political inclusion, offering productive interpretive ground for exploring the ways refugees, migrants, and non-citizens (or “quasi-citizens”) can negotiate and articulate their identities beyond normative structures of citizenship and belonging. These normative structures include, among other elements, an expectation for refugees to express gratitude to the host nation, often through telling first-person stories that adhere to prescriptive narrative frameworks of refugee trauma and success. Accordingly, in Chapter 3, I consider how Kim Thúy’s semi-autobiographical novel, Ru, and Carmen Aguirre’s memoir, Something Fierce, differentially navigate the difficulties of narrating traumatic histories within limited frameworks of representation, focusing on the importance of storytelling to refugee rights and recognition. In Chapter 4, I further explore the relationship between representation and recognition by analyzing the impulse towards abstraction in Francisco-Fernando Granados’s performance and visual art, while considering the dominant role of images in producing the refugee as an object of spectacle within discourses of humanitarian exceptionalism. In my final chapter, I turn from the abstract to the concrete, considering the ways Tings Chak’s graphic essay, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention, and Sophie Deraspe’s film, Antigone, expose the brutal, though often concealed, realities of Canada’s crimmigration and deportation regimes to advocate for mobility justice and advance the refugee as a figure of potent political and social resistance. This dissertation locates the refugee at the centre of political and social struggles for equality, while exposing the oppressive systems and exploitative structures that continue to force people to the peripheries of belonging, legality, and even humanity. Building upon current mobility and migration scholarship, as well as well-established critiques of Canadian nationalism, humanitarianism, and settler-colonialism, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which refugee writing and art in Canada can intervene into spaces of control and confinement to realize the refugee as an agential, complex and dignified subject. | en_US |
