Materialising Exile

Focusing on the highly diverse Karenni refugee population living in camps on the Thai-Burma border, this innovative book explores materiality, embodiment, memory, imagination, and identity among refugees, providing new and important ways of understanding how refugees make sense of experience, self, and other. It examines how and to what ends refugees perceive, represent, manipulate, use as metaphor, and otherwise engage with material objects and spaces, and includes a focus on the real and metaphorical journeys that bring about and perpetuate exile. The combined emphasis on both displacement and materiality, and the analysis of the cultural construction and intersections of exilic objects, spaces, and bodies, are unique in the study of both refugees and material culture. Drawing theoretical influences from phenomenology, aesthetics, and beyond, as well as from refugee studies and anthropology, the author addresses the current lack of theoretical analysis of the material, visual, spatial, and embodied aspects of forced migration, providing a fundamentally interlinked analysis of enforced exile and materiality.

This book revisits Australian histories of refugee arrivals and settlement – with a particular focus on family and family life. It brings together new empirical research, and methodologies in memory and oral history, to offer multilayered histories of people seeking refuge in the 20th century. Engaging with histories of refugees and ‘family’, and how these histories intersect with aspects of memory studies — including oral history, public storytelling, family history, and museum exhibitions and objects — the book moves away from a focus on individual adults and towards multilayered and rich histories of groups with a variety of intersectional affiliations. The contributions consider the conflicting layers of meaning built up around racialised and de-racialised refugee groups throughout the 20th century, and their relationship to structural inequalities, their shifting socio-economic positions, and the changing racial and religious categories of inclusion and exclusion employed by dominant institutions. As the contributors to this book suggest, ‘family’ functions as a means to revisit or research histories of mobility and refuge. This focus on ‘family’ illuminates intimate aspects of a history and the emotions it contains and enables – complicating the passive victim stereotype often applied to refugees. As interest in refugee ‘integration’ continues to rise as a result of increasingly vociferous identity politics and rising right-wing rhetoric, this book offers readers new insights into the intersections between family and memory, and the potential avenues this might open up for considering refugee studies in a more intimate way. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants & Minorities.

In Exile, Incorporated, author Rosanne Liebermann argues that the biblical book of Ezekiel makes rhetorical use of the human body to construct a specific in-group identity for its ancient Judean audience--namely Judeans who experienced forced migration to Babylon in the sixth century BCE. As Liebermann shows, Ezekiel encourages certain bodily practices within this group that identifies them as "true" Judeans, while also evoking feelings of disgust regarding the bodies of those who do not conduct such practices. In this way, Ezekiel encouraged an isolationist Judean identity that could survive displacement from the homeland.

"Discusses the ways in which material culture affected and reflected how people grappled with social, cultural, and material upheavals during times of war"--

Emphasizing the resilience of theatre arts in the midst of significant political change, Theatre After Empire spotlights the emergence of new performance styles in the wake of collapsed political systems. Centering on theatrical works from the late nineteenth century to the present, twelve original essays written by prominent theatre scholars showcase the development of new work after social revolutions, independence campaigns, the overthrow of monarchies, and world wars. Global in scope, this book features performances occurring across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The essays attend to a range of live events—theatre, dance, and performance art—that stage subaltern experiences and reveal societies in the midst of cultural, political, and geographic transition. This collection is an engaging resource for students and scholars of theatre and performance; world history; and those interested in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. The Introduction ("Framing Latine Theatre and Performance") of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

With a focus on the object and where it is situated, in time (memory) and space (mobility), Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture embodies a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach. The chapters track the movement of the objects and their owner(s), within and between continents, countries, cities, and families. Objects have always been considered with an eye to their worth – economic, aesthetic, and/or functional. If that worth is diminished, their meaning and value disappear, they are just things. Yet things can still fulfil functions in our daily lives; they hold symbolic potential, from personal memory triggers, to focal points of public ritual and religion; from collectors’ obsession, to symbols of loss, displacement, and violence. By bringing into dialogue the work of specialists in ethnology, art history, architecture, and design; literature, languages, cultures, and heritage studies, this volume considers how displaced memory – the memory of refugees, migrants, and their descendants; of those who have moved from the countryside to the city; of those who have faced personal upheaval and profound social change; those who have been forced into exile or experienced major personal or collective loss – can become embodied in material culture. This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.

We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of 'animate' and 'inanimate', 'natural' and 'supernatural', 'self' and 'other', 'authentic' and 'inauthentic'. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once. Adopting an 'object-centred' approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how 'things' mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies. An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.

Building Noah's Ark for Migrants, Refugees, and Religious Communities examines religion within the framework of refugee studies as a public good, with the spiritual and material use of religion shedding new light on the agency of refugees in reconstructing their lives and positioning themselves in hostile environments.