Perpetual Refugee and the Unmaking of the Global World: The Migrant Narrative Beyond Postcolonialism

Perpetual Refugee and the Unmaking of the Global World: the Migrant Narrative Beyond Postcolonialism situates itself at the intersection of postcolonial/Anglophone literature and globalization studies, and examines written and visual texts that address the inbetween spaces and perpetuated stasis of refugee communities. My study reconsiders the recent movement towards describing territoriality in terms of a binary lexicon of nation and post-nation by interpolating the theoretical intervention of the extranation: a space that exists outside global networks and which often serves as a holding zone for stateless refugees. I examine extranational space as both a space of geography and literacy: a material locale as well as a strategy towards conceptualizing the narrative exile that marks refugee literature. This project investigates a broad geographical spectrum of Anglophone literature in order to trace the effects of migrancy, citizenship, and dispossession on refugees in transit. Whether within the sovereign national geography or the excised extranational space, refugee communities are perpetually marked by alterity and denied a trajectory of national integration.;The study begins within the national space of Ireland in the work of Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, which it complicates with a consideration of Palestinian refugee territory that straddles both inside and outside as exemplified in the comic books by Joe Sacco. The project then moves into the extranational spaces of detention centers, refugee camps and international waters in the works by Zanzibari novelist Abduirazak Gurnah and Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, concluding with alternative forms of literacy/space available to the refugee and from which he cannot be excised as represented in poetry by Scottish-Pakistani Imtiaz Dharker, an installation piece by Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal, and Rea Tajiri's experimental film on American internment camps and memory.