Book contents
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Genealogies
- Part II Thinking the World
- Part III Transregional Worlding
- Part IV Cartographic Shifts
- Part V World Literature and Translation
- Part VI Poetics, Genre, Intermediality
- Part VII Scales, Polysystems, Canons
- Part VIII Modes of Reading and Circulation
- Part IX The Worldly and the Planetary
- 44 Asylum Papers
- 45 Guantánamo Diary as World(ly) Testimony
- 46 The Nonhuman, the Posthuman, and the Universal
- 47 World Literature as Planetary Literature
- Index
- References
44 - Asylum Papers
from Part IX - The Worldly and the Planetary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2021
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Genealogies
- Part II Thinking the World
- Part III Transregional Worlding
- Part IV Cartographic Shifts
- Part V World Literature and Translation
- Part VI Poetics, Genre, Intermediality
- Part VII Scales, Polysystems, Canons
- Part VIII Modes of Reading and Circulation
- Part IX The Worldly and the Planetary
- 44 Asylum Papers
- 45 Guantánamo Diary as World(ly) Testimony
- 46 The Nonhuman, the Posthuman, and the Universal
- 47 World Literature as Planetary Literature
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter considers what happens to the cartography of ‘world literature’ in times of mass migration and indefinite detention. It focuses on contemporary literature by and about refugees and asylum seekers, using the distinction between emic (written from the perspective of the subject) and etic (written from the perspective of the observer) narratives. It turns to representations of refugees in ‘hospitable’ narratives, such as graphic narrative and contemporary novels, and questions the ethics of recognition in humanitarian storytelling. In a case study of Behrouz Boochani’s autobiographical novel No Friend But the Mountains, a paperless text ‘thumbed’ by a Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker on a smartphone in Farsi at the remote detention centre on Manus Island, PNG, and translated by a transnational authorial assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, it considers how new technologies now transform the possibilities for a literature from the camps in the borderlands where refugees and asylum seekers are detained.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of World Literature , pp. 867 - 891Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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