This chapter explores Dina Nayeri’s use of life writing in The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) to represent refugees as political, as opposed to humanitarian, subjects. The camp is a leading trope in her narrative of flight and refuge, used to explore literature as a means for problematizing the damaging, hegemonically determined connection between citizenship and gratitude. In recounting her trajectory from child refugee to successful author, she places special emphasis on her time spent in the refugee camp Barba. The camp was a space of despair and interminable waiting, but also one of intimacy and gossip; when reflecting on her former campmates, she understands them as subjects who tried to shape their own stories, however painfully. This view clashes with the humanitarian paradigm that casts refugees as passive victims and demands gratitude, a prerequisite for empathy and aid. In rejecting this paradigm, she tells her life’s story as one of a collective, weaving it in with her fellow refugees’; the community of the camp enabled her to become a storyteller. She undermines the Bildung plot of individual success, and thereby points to modes of narrating refugee subjectivity that do not rely on eliciting the kind of empathy that functions instrumentally to uphold global inequalities.

This volume brings together research on the forms, genres, media and histories of refugee migration. Chapters come from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches, including literature, film studies, performance studies and postcolonial studies. The goal is to bring together chapters that use the perspectives of the arts and humanities to study representations of refugee migration. The chapters of the anthology are organized around specific forms and genres: life-writing and memoir, the graphic novel, theater and music, film and documentary, coming-of-age stories, street literature, and the literary novel. 

How do particular genres and forms, with their distinct conventions and histories, shape representations of refugee experience? How do representations of refugeedom transform the conventions of genres such as memoir, theatre, comics, song, the essay, poetry or the novel? In this chapter, we outline a humanities approach to refugee studies with reference to significant contributions in the field. Then, we introduce the genres and forms covered in this collection and the relevance of these forms for claiming human rights: the memoir, the graphic novel, poetry, theatre, song, documentary film, media art, the Bildungsroman and the literary novel.