Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada
© 2021
Exploring "refuge" and "refugee" as concepts that shape Canadian nation-building both within and beyond national borders, Refugee States takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach to describing how refugees articulate their relation to and defiance of official discourses. Through close examinations of refugee movements, contexts, and subjectivities, this collection reveals how Canada has relied upon the rejection and inclusion of refugees as a crucial means of statecraft.
Bringing together renowned and emerging scholars from multiple disciplines, Nguyen and Phu illuminate the historical, political, and cultural conditions that produce refugees as well as the narrative of humanitarian benevolence that persists nationally and internationally. Highlighting landmark cases, the editors and contributors together develop critical refugee studies as a framework for understanding, nuancing, and critiquing the production of Canadian humanitarian exceptionalism – the international image and discourse of Canada as a liberal, tolerant, and welcoming haven for people fleeing oppression, persecution, and unfreedom. In doing so, Refugee States offers alternative modes of understanding past and present refugee passages to and within Canada, and brings to light the many ways in which refugee subjects navigate displacement, migration, and resettlement.
Product Details
- Series: Cultural Spaces
- World Rights
- Page Count: 256 pages
- Illustrations: 2
- Dimensions: 6.0in x 0.0in x 9.0in
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Author Information
Vinh Nguyen is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo.
Thy Phu is a professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough. -
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Critical Refugee Studies in Canada: An Introduction
Part One: Historicization
1. Shifting Grounds of Asylum in Canadian Public Discourse and Policy
Johanna Reynolds and Jennifer Hyndman2. Untangling the Strands of Memory: Historicizing the 1914 Komagata Maru Incident and the Concept of Refugeeness
Alia Somani3. Erasing Exclusion: Adrienne Clarkson and the Promise of the Refugee Experience
Laura Madokoro4. Petitions and Protest: Refugees and the Haunting of Canadian Citizenship
Peter NyersPart Two: Conjunctions
5. Where Are We From?: Decolonizing Indigenous and Refugee Relations
Jennifer Adese and Malissa Phung6. Queer and Trans Migrants, Colonial Logics, and the Politics of Refusal
Edward Ou Jin Lee7. Producing the Figure of the “Super Refugee” through Discourses of Success, Exceptionalism, Ableism, and Inspiration
Gada Mahrouse8. Cross-Racial Refugee Fiction: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
Donald GoellnichtEpilogue: The Exceptional and the Ordinary
Contributors
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Subjects and Courses