Introductory Topics in Literature
Topic: RESTRICTED TO UNIVERSITY HONORS PROGRAM STUDENTS ONLY. TOPIC: Refugee Literature
Class Information
Instructor: Roy, Parama
Time: MWF 1:10-2:00
GE Areas: Writing Experience
Description
It's a big problem! We don't know anything about them. We don?t know where they come from, who they are. There's no documentation. We have our incompetent government people letting 'em in by the thousands, and who knows, who knows, maybe it's ISIS.?
Donald J. Trump, 25 April 2016
I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officer, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.
--Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), written in the aftermath of World War Two, the philosopher Hannah Arendt spoke of statelessness as ?the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history.? Since then, the numbers of refugees or the stateless has grown exponentially, as wars, genocide, persecution, organized crime, ecological disasters, and other factors have driven tens of millions of people from their homes and across national boundaries. By the UN?s reckoning, there are about 68.5 million refugees or displaced people worldwide at the present moment. Of these only an infinitesimally small percentage have been approved for resettlement in other countries, as newly revitalized forms of nationalism, xenophobia, and religious antipathy cast refugees as unwelcome and threatening, and describing them as criminals, terrorists, parasites, and civilizationally unassimilable. These idioms of nationalism and xenophobia have captured the popular imagination in many parts of the world, including the US, the UK, Hungary, Denmark, Australia, Myanmar, India, and Italy.
In this course we will examine refugee experiences from several parts of the world. We will do this by studying a wide range of writing, including long and short fiction, graphic journalism, documentary accounts, photographs, and essays, by and about refugees and stateless people from the post World War II period. We will focus on the following questions, among others: statelessness, citizenship and the nation-state; law, sovereignty, and the security state; human rights; hospitality; and cosmopolitanism and assimilation.
Grading
Weekly posts to discussion forums on Canvas (20%); one 4-5 page paper (25%); one 6-7 page paper (30%); and one take-home final (25%).
Texts
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia
Palestine, Joe Sacco
What is the What, Dave Eggers
Amnesty, Aravind Adiga
Kate Evans, Threads from the Refugee Crisis