Gurnham on Stopping the Boats, Changing the Narrative: How the Migrant Refugee Bildungsroman Became a Ghost Story

David Gurnham, Stopping the Boats, Changing the Narrative: How the Migrant Refugee Bildungsroman Became a Ghost Story, 37 Law & Literature 29-52 (2025). Here is the abstract.

What literary conventions best help us understand the migrant refugee’s claim for protection, and the terms on which law claims to offer it? One contender to have attracted attention recently is “bildungsroman” (“formation novel”), since the narrative of the refugee escaping danger and oppression to find safety and stability within a host state arguably maps onto bilgungsroman’s themes of a protagonist’s difficult personal journey from margins to social acceptance and flourishing. However, this view is now seriously undermined by legislative initiatives in the UK aimed at ensuring migrant refugees who cross the English Channel in small boats should have no cause to hope for such a happy ending. By way of a close reading of the narrative implications of these initiatives, this article proposes a thorough rethink of our approach to figuring the irregular migrant refugee. Rejecting bildungsroman as now implausibly optimistic, the article suggests we look instead to the ghost, whose “presence” is typically the chief problem for those to whom it appears, whose “shape” is uncertain, and whose complaints and demands inspire dread and strenuous efforts to make it disappear. The article employs these conventions to draw a new relationship between refugee migration law and the arts, and argues that if the UK’s policies for “stopping the boats” may be characterized as an attempt to effect such a disappearance, then the migrant refugee’s reappearance in visual art offers a ghostly figuration of resistance and of admonishment at injustice unredressed and obligations unfulfilled. The article traces these qualities and explores their critical potential through two recent works of visual art, namely “The Walk” (2021–22) and Gideon Mendel’s “Dzhangal” [“Jungle”] (2016–17). Both of these works admit of multiple readings, but both also crucially resist the punitive and reductive framing of migrants in law in some surprising ways.

Download the article here.

Diver and Bradshaw on The Grapes of Wrath: An Artful Jurisprudence @alice_diver @qubschooloflaw

Alice Diver, QUB School of Law, and Jules Bradshaw, Liverpool John Moores University Faculty of Law, have published The Grapes of Wrath: An artful jurisprudence? in volume 2021 of the Steinbeck Review. Here is the abstract.

By documenting the harsh realities of the era, The Grapes of Wrath (‘GOW’) calls to mind those distressing UN Country Reports that both describe and denounce avoidable landscapes of poverty, hunger, homelessness, and dispossession. Steinbeck embeds the novel’s harrowing images within an unforgiving framework of human rights violations, most of which flow directly from human greed. The novel’s prescient yet timeless warnings speak not only to the various humanitarian crises brought about by climate change and unethical commercial practices, but also to many ongoing, perennial global atrocities: corrupt political regimes, gendered injustices, ethnic cleansing, and displacement of entire populations. It is landscapes such as these that still serve to both spark and underpin refugee existence: the need for a compassionate system of asylum-granting, firmly grounded in human rights law, clearly remains as urgent now as it was in Steinbeck’s time. As witnesses to such chronic disregard for human dignity, readers of the novel are not only tasked with judging those responsible: we must also evaluate the perennial failings of the various global and domestic systems that have enabled and perpetuated such egregious rights violations. The final scene, drenched in symbolism, still serves as a quasi-courtroom: before the bared breast of a Lady Justice figure we become jurists, and cannot help apportioning blame for all that has been witnessed over the course of the Joad’s journeying. A close reading now, almost a century later, serves as a timely reminder that similar atrocities continue: migrant and refugee populations remain especially vulnerable, not least where they have been displaced by poverty or political crises from all that was once familiar. This article argues that the novel’s central focus on “social realism” demands much in the way of “moral and emotional effort” (Benson, 9) from the reader: we should leave the book with nothing less than a highly “active compassion for the dispossessed” (Wyatt, 12).

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Poon on How a Body Becomes a Boat: The Asylum Seeker in Law and Images @juselk

ICYMI:

Justine Poon, Australian National University College of Law, has published How a Body Becomes a Boat: The Asylum Seeker in Law and Images, at 30 Law & Literature 105 (2018).  Here is the abstract.

Asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat to seek protection have been the catalyst for significant legal reform and the proliferation of political discourses. The paper analyses the metaphor of the boat as being a common trope in the legislative category of the “unauthorized maritime arrival” and in the government images that advertised this legal change. The figure of the boat effaces the asylum-seeker's body from the frame of law and discourse and constructs a myth about sovereignty and borders that enables coercive control over asylum seeker bodies.

Call For Chapter Abstracts: Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland @routledgebooks @thomgiddens

From the mailbox: via @thomgiddens and sheinz@austin.utexas.edu

Call for Chapter Abstracts

Deadline for 750-word proposals: March 1, 2018
This call is for chapter proposals for a book that is under contract with Routledge, titled Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland, edited by Kumarini Silva and Margaret Franz.
Final selection decisions will be made by April 2018. Final essays (of 3500-5000 including references and notes) are due November 2018. 
For proposal submissions or queries: Kumarini Silva, kumi@email.unc.edu and Margaret Franz, mfranz@live.unc.edu

Description: 

The resurgence of virulent nationalism in the US and Western Europe, the expulsion of the Rohinga from Myanmar, and the perpetual containment of refugees off the coast of Christmas Island remind us that even as commodities and capital move relatively seamlessly through national boundaries, people do not. In fact, scholars ranging from Aiwha Ong, Gloria Anzaldúa, Etiènne Balibar, and Robert DeChaine, show that the boundaries and borders defining who belongs and who does not proliferate in the age of globalization although they may not coincide with national jurisdictions. This is because the border is at once material and symbolic, crystallizing how belonging is mediated by material relations of power, capital, and circuits of communication technology on the one side and representations of identity, nation, and homeland on the other. This edited collection of essays asks how these boundaries are made and sustained. How do you know when you belong to a country? What kinds of feelings, schemes of representation, media ecologies, and material conditions link body and nation? In other words, when is the nation-state a homeland? We seek chapters that attend to these questions through the prism of borders, boundaries, and borderlands.  You can direct your proposal to the general theme, or to one of the following sections:

I. Territories, Sovereignties, and Legal Geographies

II. Mediated Circuits of Belonging 

III. Narrating Families, Narrating Homelands





Description: 

The resurgence of virulent nationalism in the US and Western Europe, the expulsion of the Rohinga from Myanmar, and the perpetual containment of refugees off the coast of Christmas Island remind us that even as commodities and capital move relatively seamlessly through national boundaries, people do not. In fact, scholars ranging from Aiwha Ong, Gloria Anzaldúa, Etiènne Balibar, and Robert DeChaine, show that the boundaries and borders defining who belongs and who does not proliferate in the age of globalization although they may not coincide with national jurisdictions. This is because the border is at once material and symbolic, crystallizing how belonging is mediated by material relations of power, capital, and circuits of communication technology on the one side and representations of identity, nation, and homeland on the other. This edited collection of essays asks how these boundaries are made and sustained. How do you know when you belong to a country? What kinds of feelings, schemes of representation, media ecologies, and material conditions link body and nation? In other words, when is the nation-state a homeland? We seek chapters that attend to these questions through the prism of borders, boundaries, and borderlands.  You can direct your proposal to the general theme, or to one of the following sections:
I. Territories, Sovereignties, and Legal Geographies
II. Mediated Circuits of Belonging 
III. Narrating Families, Narrating Homelands

Kathrani on the "Blade Runner" Films and Asylum Law @PKathrani

Paresh Kathrani, Westminster Law School, University of Westminster, has published Do Androids Dream of Asylum? The Blade Runner Films (1982, 2017) and Fear of the 'Other' at 16 The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal 1 (2018). Here is the abstract.

One of the predominant themes of both Blade Runner movies from 1982 and 2017 is the fear of the ‘other’. At the same time as the replicants represent the most obvious other, both films’ enduring genius lie in how they use features like their soundtracks, images and storylines to make the other resonate. Asylum seekers and refugees too are often perceived as others and this film review uses international refugee law as a framework to explore some of the critical themes that arise in both the movies. It argues that there are common issues that underpin the treatment of persecuted people and replicants, especially stemming from otherness, and international refugee law is a good framework to explore these issues.