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States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories
Includes bibliography.
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| Main Author: | |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Department of English Language and Literature
2015
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| _version_ | 1867613170255790080 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Braam, Marilyn Elizabeth |
| author2 | Twidle, Hedley |
| author_browse | Braam, Marilyn Elizabeth Twidle, Hedley |
| author_facet | Twidle, Hedley Braam, Marilyn Elizabeth |
| author_sort | Braam, Marilyn Elizabeth |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Includes bibliography. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/13664 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:31:53.390Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publishDateRange | 2015 |
| publishDateSort | 2015 |
| publisher | Department of English Language and Literature |
| publisherStr | Department of English Language and Literature |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/13664 States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories Braam, Marilyn Elizabeth Twidle, Hedley Refugee Stories Includes bibliography. This thesis probes three texts to explore pathways between narration and refugee voices. In Dave Eggers’ text What is the What (2008), the words ‘novel’ and ‘autobiography’ on the title page set a framework for an exploration of the displacement of both genres. As Achak Deng, the Sudanese refugee-exile claims to have “gone out in search of a writer,” so this thesis has sought textual manifestations of the voices of those labeled “refugees”. In Eggers’text a temporarily-gagged narrator presents the question as to how the writer-refugee collaboration allows the voice of a refugee to be heard. In Little Liberia: an African Odyssey in New York (2011), Jonny Steinberg’s placement of himself inside the text demonstrates a different narrative approach to this question as he opts to share subject-space with refugee-exiles, Rufus Arkoi and Jacob Massaquoi. Unsettling the idea of ‘protagonist’, the text challenges borders between story and history, telling and writing. Through a narrative relationship Steinberg probes acts of recounting, listening, reviewing in the routes he takes to the text eventually written. By contrast, Luxurious Hearses, a novella by Uwem Akpan, places the extreme fate of the refugee-protagonist in the hands of a third-person narrator to wrestle with the distinctions between voice, mediation and representation. Through Jubril and his co-commuters, the text investigates forms of “rupture” (Bakhtin, 2000) that occur when identities are opportunistically exposed to social labeling. Writer, reader and displaced person emerge as subjects of an economic framework which positions them within the powerful confines of terms such as citizen, refugee, exile. Said’s affirming insight thus presents a challenge to all on this continuum to “cross borders, (to) break barriers of thought and experience” (Said, 2000:185). Reading the text then becomes associated with interpreting events through the collaborative work of relating, and through reviewing the frames of reference. This thesis examines narrative approaches to refugee voices with the question ‘How do voice and narration inflect the transitions in these texts involving refugees?" Rather than the easy transference this may seem to involve, acts of entrusting the timbre of such stories to texts require political vigilance and a sensibility cognizant that a globalized environment implicates all in the crises creating refugees. 2015-08-10T06:32:07Z 2015-08-10T06:32:07Z 2015 Master Thesis Masters MA http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13664 eng application/pdf Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Humanities University of Cape Town |
| spellingShingle | Refugee Stories Braam, Marilyn Elizabeth States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories |
| title_full | States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories |
| title_fullStr | States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories |
| title_full_unstemmed | States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories |
| title_short | States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories |
| title_sort | states of displacement voice and narration in refugee stories |
| topic | Refugee Stories |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13664 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT braammarilynelizabeth statesofdisplacementvoiceandnarrationinrefugeestories |