Papers by Hadji Bakara
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Politics in English, Edited by Matthew Stratton , 2023
Is there a politics of the refugee? Asking this question in the third decade of the twenty-first ... more Is there a politics of the refugee? Asking this question in the third decade of the twenty-first century might seem counterintuitive. The news cycle brings stories of a new clash of civilizations between the antirefugee right and the pro-refugee left. When crowds assemble at airports with placards that welcome refugees or at borders with weapons to deter them, the political lines appear clearly drawn. But beyond the gesture of welcoming refugees in the abstract or declaring that in the deep past or distant future " we are all refugees," it's difficult to discern what a pro-refugee politics consists of and what visions of human community and of the future it upholds. 1 Locating such a politics is difficult because the " cause of the refugee" has often fallen short of acknowledging them as historical and political actors who participate in movements for social change (Haralambous 182). Instead, refugees have been treated as subjects of a universal responsibility to aid the needy and innocent stranger or, more recently, as the new universal subjects of biopolitical modernity (Agamben 118) or catastrophic futurity (Colebrook 120). Yet in treating refugees as subjects of universal ethics, as the harbingers of an emergent collective " we," or as fundamentally innocent and in need only of the recognition of a sympathetic public or a sovereign state, what we imagine as solidarity with refugees can shade into an act of denying them both a history and a politics. Literature in English since the early twentieth century has variously expressed and suppressed a politics of the refugee. From the mid-century writing of Muriel Rukeyser, W.
The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives Edited By Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Vinh Nguyen, Feb 6, 2023
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
The birth of the modern refugee is nearly always told as a story of territory, in which the chang... more The birth of the modern refugee is nearly always told as a story of territory, in which the changing character of the European nation-state radicalized processes of exclusion. Yet changes to the nation-state in the twentieth century transformed not only how territory was inhabited but also how time was inhabited and experienced. The powers of national sovereignty thus operate not only through lines on maps or militarized borders but also through policing the borders of the past, present, and future. In this essay, then, I offer a broad reframing of modern refugee writing, focusing on the ways that it has emerged with and challenged national sovereignty's power over time rather than over territory. To do so, I examine a recurring figure: a refugee, real or imagined, who refuses to progress forward into citizenship, taking up a posture in time that is queer, backward, and antiteleological.
Journal of Narrative Theory, 2020
Modern refugee literature is about a century old. It emerged in the early twentieth century as th... more Modern refugee literature is about a century old. It emerged in the early twentieth century as the product of and response to a new kind of European nation state, what Karl Polanyi called the "crustacean type of nation" with a "hard shell" and a form of "sovereignty more jealous and absolute than anything known before" (202). Refugees, as the anthropologist Liisa Malkki has noted, exist only because of the specific ways of belonging and not belonging induced by modern nationhood. And this historical coemergence of the nation and the refugee tells us at least one very important thing: refugee writers have always been special witnesses to the shifting grounds of political life. These acts of witnessing have been present from the very beginning of modern refugee writing. In B. Traven's novel The Death Ship (1922), for instance, the stateless protagonist, turned away at every European border, comes to understand that "the passport. .. and not the sun, is the center of the universe" (42). For Traven, who lived stateless for nearly two decades, the introduction of the passport-a "most egregious little modernism," in Paul Fussell's words-was tantamount to a new political order of things, about which refugees became reluctant but vocal experts (26). A decade later, Bertolt Brecht, another stateless German, began to sketch a universal script in the margins of his notebooks that would become the fictional dialogues, Refugee Conversations.
The German Quarterly, 2020
Kant on Human Rights and the Right of Humanity although the name and authority of kant are freque... more Kant on Human Rights and the Right of Humanity although the name and authority of kant are frequently invoked in contemporary human rights discourse, careful attention to his own treatment of rights is rarer. that this is so is
Post45 Contemporaries, 2019
Post45 Contemporaries , 2020
Journal of Narrative Theory, 2020
Refugee Literatures: Migration, Crisis, and the Humanities JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory invit... more Refugee Literatures: Migration, Crisis, and the Humanities JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory invites submissions exploring the life and work of refugees as they engage the humanities today. Just as the mid-twentieth century refugee crisis shaped the emergence and development of aesthetic and theoretical movements around World War II, the mass movement of displaced peoples today stems from a convergence of forces concomitantly reshaping art and humanistic thought, from economic globalization to climate change, neoliberalism, neoimperialism, resurgent nationalisms, violence against black, latinx, Muslim, and queer peoples, and the waning securities of sovereignty and citizenship. In light of these crises, refugees and other undocumented peoples have come to appear less an exception to an otherwise stable world order and more like harbingers of things to come –– embodiments of the " new normal " in a world of permanent insecurity. And yet, Edward Said once warned that an impulse to universalize the refugee might lead scholars to ignore the particularities of the refugee's plight and to " banalize their mutilations. " Alive to Said's warning and to the need to give voice and critical attention to the lives of the violently displaced, this special issue asks how writings by and about refugees –– past and present, real and imagined –– might intersect with the work of the humanities to engender democratic life in a precarious world. When refugees speak, how do they tell their stories? What narrative, poetic, rhetorical, and legal forms have they used to give account of their lives? How has the emergence of new forces and dynamics of migration over the last century affected these forms? What are the archives of refugee history and life? How do refugee narratives engage scales of literary study such as national, transnational, world, global, and planetary literature? Where does migration studies fit into the humanities today? What are the advantages and dangers of taking up the refugee as a figure of comparison with other precarious subjects: the poor, students, the indebted, black and queer peoples? What can longer literary histories of migration and exile tell us about the contemporary crises? Please submit essays of 25-35 pages (no less than 6250 words) and in MLA style (8 th edition) to the Special Issue Editors, Hadji Bakara at [email protected] and Joshua L. Miller at [email protected]. (Address inquiries to the Special Issue Editors as well). Submission Deadline September 1, 2018.
American Literary History
Conference Papers by Hadji Bakara
Routledge eBooks, Apr 12, 2023
Paper presented at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting
Los Angeles, California.
Paper presented at “Organizing Power,” Annual Social Science History Association Conference, Chic... more Paper presented at “Organizing Power,” Annual Social Science History Association Conference, Chicago
Paper presented at "Whole Worlds," Annual English Graduate Student Conference, University of Chic... more Paper presented at "Whole Worlds," Annual English Graduate Student Conference, University of Chicago
Paper presented at “Text and Violence,” Annual MadLit Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Paper presented at “Capitals,” Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association,... more Paper presented at “Capitals,” Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, New York University
Paper presented at “Geography of Ideas,” Annual U.S. Intellectual History
Conference, Universi... more Paper presented at “Geography of Ideas,” Annual U.S. Intellectual History
Conference, University of California at Irvine
Paper presented at “States of Suspension” Annual English-Art History Graduate Conference, Univers... more Paper presented at “States of Suspension” Annual English-Art History Graduate Conference, University of Chicago
Paper presented at “American Literature and the World Conference,” Yale University
Paper presented at “Collapse, Catastrophe, Change,” Annual Meeting of the American Comparative... more Paper presented at “Collapse, Catastrophe, Change,” Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Brown University
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Papers by Hadji Bakara
Conference Papers by Hadji Bakara
Conference, University of California at Irvine
Conference, University of California at Irvine