American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting
April 24-27, 2008 in Long Beach, California

Deadline for abstracts: 15 Nov. 2007
(to be submitted through the ACLA website at http://www.acla.org/acla2008/).

Nomadism, Human Rights, and the Refugee Narrative

Refugee narratives embrace a range of storytelling—from those which recount the lives of internally displaced populations and people fleeing the nation to those that relate the predicament of people rendered stateless when territories are transferred as regimes collapse. As the trope of flight defines these narratives of displacement, migrancy, and temporary shelters, the paradigm of the nation-state along with its attendant category of citizenship come to a crisis, and the human rights claims of the homeless are foregrounded. The border-shifting postnational thrust of such narratives is evident in genocide testimonies like Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire. On the other hand, the historical violence of colonialism and neo-imperialism have also propelled a phenomenon of postcolonial nomadism retold from locales of violent intersections of the secular nation-state and the cultural claims of immigrants who are driven out of their homelands by the unequal global distribution of resources. These postcolonial junctures particularly render visible how women become both the site of contest between such opposing claims and the site of struggle for human rights from the interstices of such contests as in Fadela Amara’s Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto—a memoir about Algerian Muslim women in France.

This seminar is an invitation to make meaningful interventions in this topic. Among the many topics that could trigger enriching discussion about refugee literature are:

--Rights of internally displaced populations and the postcolonial state
--Dialogue between refugee narratives and the immigrant narratives of decolonized populations
--Difference between the refugee and the stateless refugee
--The doctrine of national security/border-sealing versus the rights of the refugee
--Women, children, and the disabled as refugees

Depending on the number of papers, this panel will meet on two/three consecutive days. Presenters are strongly encouraged to attend all sessions of the panel. This unique conference set-up allows a small group of researchers to pursue a particular topic intensely within the format of a larger conference.

For questions about the panel, please contact the seminar organizer:
Basuli Deb (Basuli.Deb@quinnipiac.edu)

For submitting paper proposals and for more information on the conference, please visit the official conference website at http://www.acla.org/acla2008/.