Co-sponsored by The Center for European Studies and Department of French & Italian
Abstract
Few figures embody the condition of liminality as explicitly as the modern refugee. Whether
it is a refugee’s experience of life in transit or their perpetual waiting, their relegation to
‘temporary’ spaces like camps and detention centers, or their displacement from historical
time into exceptional temporalities of ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis,’ refugees are barred from the
inhabitation of accepted community, a stable present, and a common future. What’s more,
attitudes towards refugees show how closely the boundaries of an imposed liminality can
double as the boundaries of the political imagination. As Hannah Arendt predicted nearly a
century ago, the imagined exceptionality of refugees––their perpetual betweenness––has
become the condition of intelligibility for conceiving both territorial sovereignty and historical
progress. Only if refugees are kept in suspension, that is, can order be maintained in both
space and time. In recent decades, however, several interlocking forces––including
neoliberalism’s pervasive dispossessions, perpetual war, and climate catastrophe––have
created an unprecedented number of refugees globally, and so dissolved the imputed
boundaries of the refugee’s liminal position. As it becomes increasingly common to anticipate
what Donna Haraway calls a collective future “without refuge,” the refugee’s place morphs
from one of liminality to universality. This lecture uses refugee writing from the last century–
–from Jewish refugee writers in the 1940s, to South Asian refugees in the 1980s, and African
migrant writers in the present––to examine and theorize the political effects of unsettling the
liminal status of the displaced, migrant, or otherwise non-sovereign person
Hadji Bakara is an Assistant Professor of English language and literature at the University of Michigan. Dr. Bakara focuses on 20th and 21st century global, Anglophone, and American literatures, especially in their relation to histories of war, empire, migration, and human rights. He is interested in the ways that literature helps shape the political and epistemological categories by which we live, such as “freedom,” “citizenship,” “rights,” the “human,” and the “future.” This makes Dr. Bakara something of a generalist, and he welcome departmental conversations and graduate students from across historical periods. Recently, Dr. Bakara completed a literary history of human rights in the twentieth century called Governments of the Tongue: A Literary History of Human Rights (under contract with University of Chicago Press) which includes chapters on stateless and refugee writers (B. Traven, Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht), the early architects of P.E.N International (H.G. Wells, Storm Jameson), poet-statesmen who helped draft the United Nations declarations of human rights (Archibald MacLeish), imprisoned writers (Kim Chi Ha, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’O, Agostino Neto, Jacabo Timerman), writer activists and members of Amnesty and P.E.N (Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Susan Sontag, Muriel Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter), and writers who confronted violence and identified as witnesses (Albert Camus, Czeslaw Milosz, Carolyn Forché, Adrienne Rich, J.M. Coetzee). Parts of this book have been published in American Literary History and German Quarterly.