ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to a pivotal moment in global twenty-first-century consciousness of forced migration: that of the ‘refugee crisis’, as it emanated from 2011 onwards most visibly across Europe – though less visibly, also across neighbouring countries within the Middle East. Within this representational landscape, the figures of women with children emerged as symbolically prominent, prompting many questions about the relationship between maternity, feminism, and the politics of cross-cultural encounter. This chapter therefore explores the mobilisation of the ‘refugee mother’ within the literary journalistic work Cast Away by British journalist Charlotte McDonald-Gibson and novel An Unsafe Haven by Lebanese writer and journalist Nada Awar Jarrar. Employing radically different approaches to questions of maternal agency, need, responsibility, and identification, these texts posit the need for a discourse of maternal self-definition as integral to the transcultural feminist imagination.
