Category: Imperialism

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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Buna: on the culture, creativity, and self determination of East African refugees

Activism, Community, Imperialism, Refugees

Buna: on the culture, creativity, and self determination of East African refugees

January 27, 2020

By Christiane Assefa

Walking into a Starbucks coffee shop in San Diego, California one Sunday morning I was struck by two large images mounted on the wall: one of Ethiopian farmworkers sifting through a wide spread of roasted coffee beans and the other of a jebena, a fragile and sanctified coffee brewing device that many Ethiopian and Eritrean women in the diaspora maintain like a holy grail…

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You Didn’t Kill Us All, You Know — Part One

Cham, Imperialism, Vietnam

You Didn’t Kill Us All, You Know — Part One

April 21, 2014

By Julie Thi Underhill

In-depth introduction to the sometimes fraught relationship between Chăm Americans and Vietnamese Americans. 

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