Cultures In Refuge

New formulations of globalisation have radically altered how people conceptualize the movement of people, ideas and capital throughout the globe, with questions of securitisation and transnational sentiment re-shaping long-standing Western concepts of asylum and human rights.R Mason + A Hayes, Uni Southern Queensland; D Ghosh, UTS Sydney.

New formulations of globalisation have radically altered how people conceptualize the movement of people, ideas and capital throughout the globe, with questions of securitisation and transnational sentiment re-shaping long-standing Western concepts of asylum and human rights. Questioning the manner in which the reception of sanctuary in modern Australia changes migrants' sense of belonging, this interdisciplinary volume focuses on the disjuncture between receiving sanctuary and feeling secure in one's self and community. With emphasis on the formation and expression of migrant and refugee cultures, the book deliberately blurs the distinction between migrants and refugees, in order to engage more directly with the subjectivities of lived experience and social networks. Presenting research from the fields of sociology, media studies, politics, international relations and history, Cultures in Refuge places explores the manner in which notions of asylum and refuge affect the processes of articulating and negotiating identities.

Refuge in a Moving World draws together more than thirty contributions from multiple disciplines and fields of research and practice to discuss different ways of engaging with, and responding to, migration and displacement. The volume combines critical reflections on the complexities of conceptualizing processes and experiences of (forced) migration, with detailed analyses of these experiences in contemporary and historical settings from around the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies – including participatory research, poetic and spatial interventions, ethnography, theatre, discourse analysis and visual methods – the volume documents the complexities of refugees’ and migrants’ journeys. This includes a particular focus on how people inhabit and negotiate everyday life in cities, towns, camps and informal settlements across the Middle East and North Africa, Southern and Eastern Africa, and Europe.

Desperate to escape the increasingly vehement persecution in their homelands, thousands of refugees from Nazi-dominated Central Europe, the majority of them Jews, found refuge in Latin America in the 1930s. Bolivia became a principal recipient of this influx — one of the few remaining places in the entire world to accept Jewish refugees after the German Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Some 20,000 refugees arrived in Bolivia, more than in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa — the leading British Commonwealth countries — combined. In Bolivia, the refugees began to reconstruct a version of the world that they had been forced to abandon. Their own origins and social situations had been diverse in Central Europe, ranging across generational, class, educational, and political differences, and incorporating various professional, craft, and artistic backgrounds. But it was Austro/German Jewish bourgeois society that provided them with a model for emulation and a common locus for identification in their place of refuge. Indeed, at the very time when that dynamic social and cultural amalgam was being ruthlessly and systematically destroyed by the Nazis, the Jewish refugees in Bolivia attempted to recall and revive a version of it in a land thousands of miles from their home: in a country that offered them a haven, but in which many of them felt themselves as mere sojourners. Hotel Bolivia explores an important, but generally neglected, aspect of the experience of group displacement — the relationship between memory and cultural survival during an era of persecution and genocide. Employing oral histories, family photographs, artistic and documentary portrayals, it considers the Third Reich background for the emigration, the refugees’ perceptions of past and future, and the role of images and stereotypes in shaping refugee and Bolivian cross-cultural communication and acceptance. It examines how the immigrants remembered, recalled and reshaped the European world they had been forced to abandon in the institutions, culture, and community they created in Bolivia. In documenting life stories and reclaiming the memories and discourses of ordinary persons who might otherwise remain hidden from history, Hotel Bolivia contributes to a major objective of contemporary historical studies. But it is also directly concerned with theoretical issues, increasingly evident in historical writing, focusing on the contextualization of memory and the interdependence – and tension – between memory and history. In reflecting on remembered experience, over time and between people, the ultimate objective of this book is to contribute to the historical study of memory itself. “A curiously inspiring corner of Holocaust history: the story is of how culture and memory survive, and change, in the shock of new surroundings.” — Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost “A form of doing history that offers fresh intellectual insights while touching the heart.” — Ruth Behar, University of Michigan, author of The Vulnerable Observer andTranslated Women “It is rare that a scholarly book reads like a novel. Leo Spitzer’s compelling Hotel Bolivia not only is beautifully written but changes the way we think about history... This groundbreaking book will become required reading in numerous fields, including Latin American studies, Jewish studies, diaspora studies, immigration studies, and ethnic studies.” — Jeffrey Lesser, Brown University, author of Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question “Evocative, thoughtful, and otherwise impressive... Vividly introduces readers to a little-known aspect of refugee history during the Holocaust.” — Kirkus “A searing account of the Jewish refugees’ checkered experience... Part memoir, part oral history, Spitzer’s eye-opening study uses interviews with surviving refugees (now widely dispersed around the world), plus letters, photographs, family albums and archival documents to explore the trauma of displacement.” — Publishers Weekly

“Rich and colorful… [Refuge] has the kind of immediacy commonly associated with memoir, which lends it heft, intimacy, atmosphere.” –New York Times The moving lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, seen through the prism of global immigration and the contemporary refugee experience. An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other's wisdom and, ultimately, rescue. Meanwhile, refugees of all nationalities are flowing into Europe under troubling conditions. Wanting to help, but also looking for a lost sense of home, our grown-up transplant finds herself quickly entranced by a world that is at once everything she has missed and nothing that she has ever known. Will her immersion in the lives of these new refugees allow her the grace to save her father? Refuge charts the deeply moving lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, seen through the prism of global immigration. Beautifully written, full of insight, charm, and humor, the novel subtly exposes the parts of ourselves that get left behind in the wake of diaspora and ultimately asks: Must home always be a physical place, or can we find it in another person?

"As an Indigenous scholar researching the history and archaeology of his own tribe, Tsim D. Schneider provides a unique and timely contribution to the growing field of Indigenous archaeology and offers a new perspective on the primary role and relevance of Indigenous places and homelands in the study of colonial encounters"--

Millions of people are displaced each year by war, persecution, and famine and the global refugee population continues to grow. Canada has often been regarded as a benevolent country, welcoming refugees from around the globe. However, refugees have encountered varying kinds of reception in Canada. Finding Refuge in Canada: Narratives of Dislocation is a collection of personal narratives about the refugee experience in Canada. It includes critical perspectives from authors from diverse backgrounds, including refugees, advocates, front-line workers, private sponsors, and civil servants. The narratives collected here confront dominant public discourse about refugee identities and histories and provide deep insight into the social, political, and cultural challenges and opportunities that refugees experience in Canada. Contributors consider Canada’s response to various groups of refugees and how Canadian perspectives on war, conflict, and peace are constructed through the refugee support experience. These individual stories humanize the global refugee crisis and challenge readers to reflect on the transformative potential of more equitable policies and processes. Contributions by Howard Adelman, Irene Boisier Policzer, Shelley Campagnola, Matida Daffeh, Eusebio Garcia, Julia Holland, Bill Janzen, Katharine Lake Berz, Michael Molloy, Adam Policzer, Pablo Policzer, Victor Porter, Boban Stojanović, Cyrus Sundar Singh, and Flora Terah

How do people whose entire way of life has been destroyed and who witnessed horrible abuses against loved ones construct a new future? How do people who have survived the ravages of war and displacement rebuild their lives in a new country when their world has totally changed? In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the trajectory of Somali Bantus from their homes in Somalia before the onset in 1991 of Somalia’s civil war, to their displacement to Kenyan refugee camps, to their relocation in cities across the United States, to their settlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine. Tracking their experiences as "secondary migrants" who grapple with the struggles of xenophobia, neoliberalism, and grief, Besteman asks what humanitarianism feels like to those who are its objects and what happens when refugees move in next door. As Lewiston's refugees and locals negotiate coresidence and find that assimilation goes both ways, their story demonstrates the efforts of diverse people to find ways to live together and create community. Besteman’s account illuminates the contemporary debates about economic and moral responsibility, security, and community that immigration provokes.