Introduction

An opened suitcase holds the miniature model of a crumbling room. The room's remaining walls are cracked and pocked-marked, evoking violence, abandonment, and decay. A bag or baggage might thus be a fitting carrier for refugee narratives, as stories of and formed in displaced movement, that cross borders and bring material and immaterial things around the world and back. In examining and expanding “refugee” and “narrative,” we point to the historical and contemporary richness of refugee cultural productions that range in content, tone, form, and modality. The 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol's narrow recognition of what constitutes a “well-founded fear of persecution,” moreover, does not account for the many causes that force people to flee their homelands, which include not only war and ethnic conflict but also ongoing legacies of colonial dispossession, Western intervention, economic underdevelopment, global capitalism, labor exploitation, and climate change.