Refugee and humanitarian histories at Manchester: a celebration of the work of Professor Peter Gatrell
A workshop on 8 October 2021 marked the retirement, and celebrated the work, of Peter Gatrell: a legendary figure in the field of refugee history. As was made clear at this event, many scholars and practitioners regard him as having had, and continuing to have, a pivotal role in developing and advancing the field of research. (He has often featured on this blog, too.) But they also see him as a friend, a generous colleague and patient mentor.
The afternoon’s talks reflected the temporal and geographical breadth that refugee history now encompasses. In the first panel, Anindita Ghosha opened the session by exploring the longue durée history of migration in Northeast India, pointedly remarking that beyond the better-known period of displacement during Partition, migration and (im)mobility had been part of the everyday landscape in the region since the early twentieth century. Particularly striking was the theme of hostile reception shaped by conflict and competition over space, resources and land. It was within this context of ‘host hostility’ that refugees emerge as actors, both individually and collectively. And, Ghosha argued, it is in the archives that we can trace the experience of refugeehood via the medium of letters and petitions.
The second talk, by Lauren Banko, explored the idea of ‘refugee-adjacency’: a conceptual framework she used to illumine the place proximate to, though usually not directly implicated within, refugeedom. Her aim here is to interweave fragments of refugee histories from the archives to piece together a broader picture of refugeedom – a term coined by Peter Gatrell – to denote a ‘matrix involving administrative practices, legal norms, social relations and refugees’ experiences, and how these have been represented in cultural terms’. Refugee-adjacency tackles the issue of those who do not fit the narrow legal definition of a refugee based on the 1951 Convention. Rather, it adopts a more flexible approach that considers the impact of refugeedom on family members and friends, related or connected to people with primary experiences of displacement. Banko elucidated this concept through an example in the Palestinian context: a British Jewish refugee who left Romania for Palestine and whose family died attempting the journey. Such examples work to broaden the scope of refugee history and, crucially, encourage a writing of emotion into scholarly work. It further raises an important methodological question about what to do with the anger, fear, or sadness that we might confront in the archives – and, I would add, at times indifference and detachment.
This maps onto what Gatrell describes as ‘clinical encounters’ between displaced persons and bureaucrats, which involve a degree of restraint on the part of refugees whose interaction with bureaucratised asylum systems is often performative, pre-scripted and pre-determined. (Something that resonates with our recent post from Amy Grant on bureaucratic violence). Alex Dowdall, the third speaker, took up this theme in a paper focusing on refugees in the French Mediterranean in the inter-war years. Russian and Armenian refugees were received in Marseille as ‘guest workers’, with a distinctive emphasis by local and national authorities on their economic ‘value’. Dowdall noted a ‘vibrant letter-writing culture’ from the new arrivals to authorities in Marseille, Paris, and Geneva. Most took a ‘supplicatory’ approach and were cautious to avoid overt criticism of their reception, choosing instead to appeal to the France self-proclaimed tradition as a ‘land of welcome’ (terre d’accueil). Yet we can also find conflicting impulses. Letters to the League of Nations for example, appealed for charity, but also called out the hypocrisy of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’, with skilled workers often filling low paid manual labour positions. Here, refugees were by no means the ‘speechless emissaries’ of humanitarian discourse. One such petitioner, Serge Lewitsky, wrote to the League in 1921 with propositions of a refugee state, while others proposed commissions to keep the French ‘in check’. While these ideas were never more than politely acknowledged by officials in Geneva, Dowdall argued, the very act of writing had a currency of exposure, credibility and voice.
The final speaker, Antoine Burgard, tapped into these methodological and thematic issues. Reflecting on individual casefiles as a source for refugee history, Burgard highlighted the performative nature of these encounters from the ‘innocent child’ to the ‘resilient victim’; traumatised, but not ‘too’ traumatised to be ‘assimilable’. In unearthing refugee voices, historians face not only the need to critically examine what it means to ‘give’ voice, and, as Burgard asks, whether this can be anything but inherently paternalistic, but also with the messiness of movement and journey. We need, therefore, to make space for uncertainty, irrationality and emotion and shift away from a fixation on ordered thought, linear narratives and coherent storytelling virtues. Simultaneously, the researcher, or perhaps more apt in this context, the archival listener, must navigate gatekeeping, misinformation and silences in one’s sources. It is thus a powerful and resonating call to embrace the ‘messiness’ of research and research practises.
To echo Peter’s closing remarks, refugee history is ‘coming of age’, and is no doubt a subject that ‘is going places’. In this light, Refugee History accepts the invitation to keep the conversation going and acknowledges the need to draw further attention and scholarly research towards how refugees understand and represent their circumstances and histories. It is also an invitation to other disciplines: this is a site where history may speak to social and political sciences on issues of co-producing knowledge, and what it means to speak and write ‘with’ as opposed to ‘for’ refugees.
In this spirit, please see our recent call for papers. And, of course, we are continuing to accept submissions in any area of refugee history—please do get in touch at info@refugeehistory.org.
With great thanks to Jo Laycock for organising the event and for the invitation to attend.
The header image is Marc Chagall’s painting ‘War’, and shows figures fleeing a village in flames under the gaze of a giant white goat-like animal.
