Refugee Voices: Performativity and the Struggle for Recognition

This book explores how participatory creative production can allow refugees to be recognised in emotional, legal and social ways. It also explains how decisions around participation in these forms of creative production can equally exclude refugee voices from the public sphere, inhibit recognition, and in fact lead to refugee misrecognition.

Building on the concept of ‘performative refugeeness’, it considers how refugee voices are ambivalently enacted in alternative forms of media and considers the differences between the refugee voices expressed in and beyond them, in contexts surrounding their creation. Furthermore, it analyses the forms of refugee voices expressed in such creative projects, which encompass fiction, photography, video, audio, and/or drawing—in linear, as well as ‘messy’ and ‘interrupted’ ways—and assesses how promises of offering a voice might claim to have been fulfilled in such cases.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of migration and refugee studies, media and culture studies, performance studies and communication studies.