ABSTRACT

This book presents diverse, composite, non-exclusive and non-hierarchical perspectives on displacement of people as represented in literature. It examines the experiences of migration as a result of wars, natural disasters, religious strife, loss of livelihoods and shifts in local and global economies and the vulnerabilities they expose.

Bringing together scholarly insights into literature about displacement and migration from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the book interrogates the development frames of Western modernity and situates displacement within the discourse of disenfranchisement of citizens by nation-states. It explores the experiences, memories and expressions of displacement in literature and how literary works critique ethical and moral responsibilities of states and communities that often do not account for the loss which displacement causes to the health, education, career, or relationships of displaced people.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, philosophy, migration and diaspora studies, development studies, African studies and Asian studies.

part I|115 pages

Displacement

chapter 1|15 pages

Disaster's Offspring

Catastrophe, Narrative and Society

chapter 2|19 pages

A Philosophy of Displacement

“Passer-by” Ethics under the Microscope

chapter 3|19 pages

America * in the Contemporary Postcolonial African Imagination

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing around Your Neck

chapter 4|20 pages

Nativizing Colonial Ghosts in the Postcolony

A Composite Perspective on Displacement

chapter 5|28 pages

Asking the Right Kind of Questions

Seeing India through the Eyes of Slavoj Žižek

chapter 6|12 pages

The Philosophy of Displacement

Re-reading Hannah Arendt in NRC Times

part II|35 pages

The Literary Politics and Phenomenology of Displacement and Belonging

chapter 7|20 pages

The New Citizenship

Seyla Benhabib's “The Right to Have Rights”

chapter 8|13 pages

The Libraries of the Migrants

Dissemination of Books as Dissemination of the Self?

part III|84 pages

Writing Displacement

chapter 9|18 pages

Writing in Times of Displacement

Towards Transformation

chapter 10|14 pages

Voices beyond Borders

Exile and Refugee Poetry and Performance

chapter 11|22 pages

Interrogating, Confronting and Reconstituting Displacement and a New Politics, Poetics and Spirituality of Dwelling

The Ethics, Aesthetics and Responsibility of Home and the World *

chapter 13|16 pages

Writing Displacement

Memory, Violence and Their Ancillaries in Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: The True Story of a Child Soldier