Historicising displacement: Bridging academia and refugee agency
London Imperial War Museum’s Refugees season responds to and refutes modern-day crisis narratives surrounding refugees. In particular, and crucially, it historicises displacement beyond reductive media headlines of a ‘summer of migration’ to address global refugee movements across the past century.
Forced to Flee, the principal exhibition, forces the viewer to shift their perspective by asking: ‘would you leave?’ and ‘what would you take?’ Any slight reservation that such rhetorical questions could trivialise the dilemmas and decisions refugees are forced to make quickly faded as, visiting during the autumn half term, I overheard inquisitive children asking their parents these very questions. The exhibition is orientated towards a broad range of audiences, from young families to those with a general interest in the subject, across to researchers seeking inspiration. It is worth acknowledging that the curators faced striking a tough balance between providing a space for refugees to be storytellers and presenting the research of pioneering academics in the field of refugee history. This very tension raises in itself a whole host of questions concerning refugee agency and voice, and the place of academia within these discussions.
Overall, this balance was well navigated. Large screens displayed first-hand testimonies of refugee journeys, from displaced Poles in the aftermath of the Second World War, to Bosnians fleeing during the 1990s. Possessions such as diaries, dresses and toys each telling their own stories of upheaval. Alongside this, academics displayed their enquiries into the past. It is genuinely both impressive and inspiring to see the breadth of research addressing refugee history. In collaboration with the AHRC and ESRC (Arts and Humanities and Economic and Social Research Councils), the exhibition functioned as a showcase of projects currently being funded. Reckoning with Refugeedom and Refugee Hosts particularly stand out as projects that sensitively engage with refugee voices, and so disrupting the dehistoricising universalism of refugees as, in Liisa Malkki’s words, a ‘miserable sea of humanity’. However, basic chronology was skewed at the cost of treating each gallery as a showroom for academic work; it was disorientating to move from a limited section on the Calais ‘Jungle’ to testimonies from the first and second world wars. At the same time, it did appear quite deliberate that past and present examples of refugeedom were placed side by side to create inescapable comparisons revealing how seemingly so little has changed. Though comparative studies can be useful (see our recent posts by Taylor and Frontier), had the exhibition followed a coherent chronology it might have allowed the viewer to draw these conclusions more naturally.
The exhibition ‘explores stories of displacement from the First World War to the present day.’ Addressing ‘100 years of refugee history’, Forced to Flee covers the time period during which the modern sense of ‘the refugee’ as a category was recognised. Yet the exhibition would have benefitted from a clearer justification of its 100-year timeframe, to allow visitors unfamiliar with refugee history to understand how the idea of the refugee was solidified in the early twentieth century through the naissance of the refugee rights regime under the League of Nations, the rise in fortressed borders and the rollout of the passport. The analysis of government policy also felt too restrained; referring to the hostile environment as ‘controversial’ missed an opportunity to examine the historical roots of the criminalisation of asylum.
Forced to Flee is accompanied by Life in a Camp and A Face to Open Doors. The former, produced in cooperation with CNN, offers an immersive video experience of daily life in the Moria camp before its destruction in a fire in September 2020. My initial fear that this would be a gimmick was quashed by the hard-hitting window into the confinement of the camp. The gasp from a fellow viewer: ‘But imagine living their lives!’, left me to ponder the emotional responses visual material is capable of triggering. The latter exhibit carried a more explicit political message: the use of AI technology as future border enforcement sounded the alarm on the increasingly inhumane approach towards governing refuge.
Drawing the heavy conclusion that the past offers little solace, while the future appears frightening, I was pulled back to the cruel and devastating reality of the present when I heard on my way home of the deaths of a young Kurdish family in the Channel.
The header image, taken by the Refugee History editors, shows a photo display at the Forced to Flee exhibition.
This is one of four contributions to our round table on the Forced to Flee exhibition. The introduction, including links to all the contributions, can be found here.
