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Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse

Online ISBN:
9780823241194
Print ISBN:
9780823233557
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse

April Shemak
April Shemak
Department of English, Sam Houston State University
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Published:
1 November 2010
Online ISBN:
9780823241194
Print ISBN:
9780823233557
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Offering the first interdisciplinary study of refugees in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States, this book relates current theoretical debates about hospitality and cosmopolitanism to the actual conditions of refugees. In doing so, the author weighs the questions of truth value associated with various modes of witnessing to explore the function of testimonial discourse in constructing refugee subjectivity in New World cultural and political formations. By examining literary works by such writers as Edwidge Danticat, Nikl Payen, Kamau Brathwaite, Francisco Goldman, Julia Alvarez, Ivonne Lamazares, and Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, theoretical work by Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, as well as human rights documents, government documents, photography, and historical studies, the book constructs a complex picture of New World refugees that expands current discussions of diaspora and migration, demonstrating that the peripheral nature of refugee testimonial narratives requires us to reshape the boundaries of U.S. ethnic and postcolonial studies.

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