Assembling the refugee anthology

Abstract

There has been a sudden proliferation of short story anthologies published in response to the refugee 'crisis' of 2015 and the US travel ban of 2017. This article focuses on two of these collections (The Displaced and Banthology, both 2018) in order to ask: what makes an anthology better equipped than a single authored piece of writing to respond to contemporary themes such as migration and displacement? The answer might lie in their heterogeneous form, which allows anthologies to be assembled and reassembled by various stakeholders during their production and reception so that they mean differently in different times and places. Conceiving of the anthology as assemblage brings Deleuze and Guattari's original concept into dialogue with newer notions of queer curation and postcolonial reading, and reveals anthologising processes of selecting and fitting elements together to be deliberate tactics. In particular, these processes highlight the agentic role of the reader, which allows them to make their own assemblages from the multiple interrelations that emerge between the anthology's composite elements. Through developing this concept of assemblage reading I extend the framework of what we think of as a 'refugee anthology' to encompass a much wider range of acts of collective creation.Assembling the Refugee Anthology i 'In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification […] All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage.' (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 4)

Unmooring Literary Multilingualism Studies

“…In English-medium writing on refugee experience, for instance, Anna Bernard (2020) has recently suggested that three genres dominate-poetry, graphic narrative, and verbatim theatre-because of their modes of production and because of the kinds of engagement they ask of their audience. To these we might add the proliferation of short story anthologies published in direct response to the refugee 'crisis' of 2015 in Europe and the US travel ban of 2017 (Bond, 2019). These are all literary forms (among others) which, therefore, a critical literary multilingualism studies needs to take into its purview in order to be able to ask how they figure (or don't) the linguistic unmooredness which is attendant on becoming a refugee, and which is therefore a predominant multilingualism of the world today.…”

Superman in Italy

“…8 The anthologies vary in their modes of composition, from ones that comprise works written specifically for the collection to ones that offer a selection of already published works that span different historical periods and locations. Bond (2019) European country] is in stark contrast with the daily images of the clandestine emigrants who risk their lives in the boats of fortune that have sadly transformed the Mediterranean into a giant cemetery for African migrants" (Sarr, 2019: 65). 12 For a discussion that engages Italy, past and present, see Wallace (2015-16).…”