Refugee Writing, Refugee Reading

This book advances the study of refugee writing by reconfiguring its core analytical frameworks and foregrounding the literary, temporal, and archival practices generated within varied contexts of forced migration and displacement. Moving beyond readings that position refugees primarily as objects of suffering or as catalysts for humanitarian response, it centres refugees as active agents who write, read, and interpret their own histories and those of others. Through close engagement with a range of literary texts in English, Arabic, and in translation, the book demonstrates how these works articulate complex forms of refugee-refugee relationality that unsettle dominant assumptions that displacement is primarily mediated through encounters between refugees and citizens. By tracing the ways in which refugees construct, preserve, and mobilize their own archives, this critical study illuminates how time, memory, and narration are produced from within contexts of protracted uncertainty. In doing so, it reveals alternative modes of embodiment and knowledge that challenge conventional literary and historical frames. The analysis develops the innovative and groundbreaking concept of 'refugee reading' as a critical practice that operates alongside, and in dialogue with, refugee writing, thereby offering a new methodological lens for literary studies. Through this dual emphasis on writing and reading, the book intervenes in, and contributes to, urgent debates on agency, representation, and the politics of knowledge production, highlighting the role of intimate and minoritized archives in reshaping dominant epistemologies.