CHALLENGING THE LEGACY OF ENLIGHTENMENT IDEALS IN CONTEMPORARY REFUGEE LITERATURE: A CASE STUDY OF THE 2015 EUROPEAN MIGRANT CRISIS

Abstract

This project first defines a refugee literary canon by isolating both recurrent themes relating to forced displacement and literary techniques that tend to unite refugee writings spanning different places, nations, and times. Perhaps surprisingly, the European Enlightenment is a central point of origin for refugee writing because its notions of realism, empathy, and cosmopolitanism shaped the literary forms and structures of sentiment that mould this canon. Indeed, I argue that it is precisely this established, presiding Enlightenment framework—however outdated or inadequate—that gives shape and form to what we recognise as refugee literature. However, I also offer new trajectories for refugee writing. I explicate how two recent texts that were written in the aftermath of the 2015 European migrant crisis, Refugee Tales and Exit West, attempt to undo the prevalent formulations of refugee representation through their unorthodox techniques and choice of genres. The Refugee Tales collection embodies simultaneously the assemblage form and the structure of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (a tribute to an ancient, pre-modern, yet quintessentially English literary tradition), whereas Exit West by Mohsin Hamid employs the defining mode of magical realism. Both texts serve to challenge hegemonic discourses that limit refugee expression, both literary and political, and reconceptualise the existing Western purchase on realism, sentimentality, and cosmopolitanism.