All in Refugees & Representation

Apartheid refugees: literature and exile

In August 1960, the Black writer and musician Dugmore Boetie fled apartheid South Africa and entered Bechuanaland (today Botswana) on foot. Boetie was one of thousands of refugees from apartheid. Unlike most, he returned soon afterwards—and his novel Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost is the only book describing apartheid by a Black writer residing in South Africa in this period.

Not just rescue: rethinking 30 April 1975 and Vietnamese diasporic history

In American imagination, the iconic image of a helicopter on a Saigon rooftop, with a long line of South Vietnamese desperate to escape, has often served as a visual shorthand for the end of the US war in Vietnam and the ensuing refugee ‘crisis’. But the fixation of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 needs to be revised. Most of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled the country did so after 1975: displacement continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The question of whether they would be granted refugee status became more and more precarious over time, and Vietnamese were subjected to a controversial ‘screening’ process. But in camps and in the diaspora, there were countless examples of Vietnamese activism.

A recent history of camps in French migration policy, part 2: Encampment and eviction

The French state skilfully navigates between staged scenes of camps spilling out of control and being brought back to order. Media visibility of camps circulates a message to the French public that immigration is excessive (and migrants are hungry, dirty, and sick)—and to migrants that they are not welcome. But if camps are too prominent they can become sites of solidarity. Camp evictions, meanwhile, are public relations exercises that follow a well-established script: emptying and destruction of the camp under the gaze of the media, promise that residents will be accommodated elsewhere; then (once the journalists have departed) ‘realization’ that the available accommodation is insufficient, followed by violent dispersal of remaining camp residents. This narrative disguises the state’s responsibility for the situation and reduces the horizon of migration policy to a single question: how to reduce numbers. It directs resources towards repression instead of integration.

Forced to Flee: Engaging with conflict and community responses to refugees

Forced to Flee is an expansive exhibition covering a range of angles, from the triggers for displacement, the journey that refugees have made, crossing borders, refugee camps, and reception in the UK. The exhibition looks at historical situations as well as recent displacement, and some clear themes emerge. The strongest is an emphasis on the human, the personal experience. Another is the diversity of community responses to refugees arriving in the UK. The third is the focus on conflict as a cause of displacement—though this means other causes are neglected. Overall the exhibition is ambitious and timely.

Refugees at IWM – Filling in the gaps

The exhibition includes refugees from a wide range of contexts. All looked similar to me: they had all lived in camps, fled their own country, and suffered on the journey to arrive at a safe place. The exhibition makes you wonder about how they lived. There are things that give an incomplete impression, but overall it is a really nice exhibition.

Refugees at IWM – Where turning away is an option

There is nothing shocking, dramatic or distressing about Forced to Flee. It avoids representing any of the physical effects of forced displacement on the human body: anguish, injury, illness, destitution, death – or crying. The exhibition not only challenges the idea of the refugee as a silent suffering body, but interrupts the whole set of emotional relationships that go along with that idea. Forced to Flee spans a century of refugee history, but rather than taking each historical moment in turn, the exhibition follows the steps of a ‘typical’ refugee story: the departure, the journey, the arrival, the asylum procedure, the integration process.

Refugees at the Imperial War Museum: a virtual round table

This week we run a virtual round table about the Imperial War Museum’s Refugees season, especially the exhibition Forced to Flee. Drawing together the perspectives of researchers, practitioners, and those with lived experience of displacement, it seeks to engage with and reflect upon the scope and aims of the exhibition, its historical remit and comparisons, its artistic and curatorial choices, and its specific exhibits.

Partition of India

In our second post commemorating the 1947 Partition of India, writer and critic Sandeep Parmar offers a powerful, personal and critical reflection on the workings of refugee memory. We are used to thinking about how later generations host the memories of the traumas suffered by earlier generations but, Parmar asks, 'in the case of Partition, how does the postmemory generation speak of the trauma of silence, not memory, of a postforgetting?