Category: Race

Literary Spotlight: “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives”

Community, History, Imperialism, Literary World, Literature, Race, Refugees, Oral History

Literary Spotlight: “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives”

September 23, 2021

By Nithya Rajan

The Displaced is a collection of seventeen short stories by writers who are refugees. Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, each story narrates the writers' experiences of displacement from many countries—Việt Nam, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Ukraine, Mexico, Ethiopia, Bosnia, fleeing varied circumstances— genocide, poverty, war, state repression, and civil war, of their journeys through different routes, transit points and destinations; journeys that, as one of the authors, Maaza Mengiste, puts it, “break a human being and rearrange them inside” (135). Together these stories challenge singular narratives about displacement and “of perpetual crisis and suffering” in the Global South (Tshuma, 160).

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Transient Performance

Art, History, Race, Refugees

Transient Performance

March 17, 2021

By Sean Metzger and Kimberly Chantal Welch

A photograph of Scherezade Garcia’s In My Floating World, Landscape of Paradise, from the series Theories of Freedom, (2011) adorns the cover of our special issue of Cultural Dynamics on Transient Performance. The material artwork is a sculpture that uses more than thirty swim rings (also called inner tubes or lifesavers) of different sizes and in various hues of blue: either solid or with prints. Suspended in the air or against a wall, these objects are bound to one another with plastic ties; many of them have airport luggage tags that read “JFK.”

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The Trouble with Talking — or Not Talking — about Race

Literary World, Race

The Trouble with Talking — or Not Talking — about Race

May 5, 2014

By Aimee Phan

In Aimee Phan’s essay, she debates why mainstream critics fail writers of color. The original essay was featured in Talking Writing and on the website, diacritics.org.

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