| Course Description |
This course explores representations of forced and voluntary migration through a selection of
global literary texts and films. Examining novels, short stories, and films, the course will ask
students to reflect on how aesthetic representations of exile complicate notions of home,
belonging, sovereignty, and identity. Beginning with the birth of the modern refugee after World
War II, with its legal and political consolidation by the UN 1951 Refugee Convention, we will
discuss several dimensions of displacement and the ways in which these are differently
experienced by individuals. We will move from scenes of interminable bureaucratic stasis in
post-war Europe to depictions of border crossings along the Mexico-US border, will hear the
voices of Iranian women alongside those of Vietnamese American writers working to articulate
complex identities, and much more. While examining this constellation of diverse materials, we
will attend both to the historical and political specificity of each as well as to productive points
of convergence that they share by asking:
What do we understand to be the possibilities and limitations of art in portraying the
experience of refugees, exiles, and migrants?
How has exile become one of the central metaphors of modernity, and what does this
universalism bring to the fore and elide?
How can aesthetic representation challenge popular depictions of refugees as innocent
supplicants in need of empathy and instead refigure them as political actors?
How do these complicated texts reinforce and contest narratives that depict forced
migration as a linear movement from unstable peripheries to stable centers?
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