Dis/Placement: Refugee Narratives and Hospitality in Twenty-First-Century Literary Prose in English

• Autor(a) principal: Marcela de Oliveira e Silva Lemos
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/48394; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2124-9828
• topic: 21st-century literatures in English; Displacement; Refugees; Hospitality; Ficção – História e crítica; Refugiados na literatura; Hospitalidade na literatura; Smith, Zadie. – Embassy of Cambodia – Crítica e interpretação; Hamid, Mohsin, 1971- – Exit west – Crítica e interpretação; Bala, Sharon. – Boat People – Crítica e interpretação; Brand, Dionne, 1953- – What we all long for – Crítica e interpretação

This doctoral dissertation maps the positions and effects of refugee stories in Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long for, Zadie Smith’s 2013 short story “The Embassy of Cambodia,” Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 novel Exit West, and Sharon Bala’s 2018 novel The Boat People. I approach this literary corpus with four main questions: (a) what is the place of the particular narrative or narrative voice of the refugee vis-à-vis non-refugee stories and perspectives within a same work? (b) what effects, if any, does the story of the refugee carry towards other narratives and the literary text as a whole? (c) how are these effects textually achieved? (d) what do the refugee stories and the textual structure analyzed reveal about the treatment of the notion of hospitality in these literary pieces? I first trace a genealogy of the discursive meanings of refugee in regard to the United Nations’ 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and provide a review of the notion of hospitality in its relationship with a philosophy of language. Then, I argue that the refugee stories in What We All Long for, “The Embassy of Cambodia,” Exit West, and The Boat People occupy a parallel, marginal position from which they subvert the authority of a supposedly central narrative that initially houses them. This disruption is textually achieved through narrative strategies that perform a suspension of language, such as interruption, fragmentation, repetition, and omission. I also claim that the place and role of refugee stories in the selected corpus entail a sense of hospitality that approximates Jacques Derrida’s view of a hyperbolical, unconditional welcoming that may actually demand suspension of language. The readings I propose contribute to the formulation of a concluding, although not final, statement about the impact of refugee narratives on naturalized concepts and discourses of nation, borders, and migration. This effect, while revealed by the selected corpus, might indicate a more general tendency in contemporary literature to imagine the refugee as a complex paradigm of contemporary existence without disregarding the materiality of this condition.