Contemporary Asylum Narratives ― Representing Refugees in the Twenty-first Century

Taking the turn of this century as a starting point, when new legislation around detention, deportation and dispersal began to take effect, Contemporary Asylum Narratives identifies an emerging cultural engagement with asylum seekers and refugees in twenty-first century Britain. Through a focus on authors, playwrights and filmmakers this study brings literary and cultural criticism to bear on asylum issues by exploring the representational politics that determine our responses to the stateless individuals whose numbers are certain to increase in line with global economic and ecological crises.

Making productive links between refugee studies and narrative fiction, Contemporary Asylum Narratives challenges critical concepts related to migration such as hospitality, cosmopolitanism and globalization. In doing so, the book marks a transition from older, diasporic modes of belonging to the need for identifications that account for the increasingly precarious and contingent migrations of the contemporary era.

Agnes Woolley is Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK.