For our last formal reading this semester (before we get to the good stuff – your papers!) we are tucking into Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, which he wrote while detained on Manus Island using a smuggled phone and by texting out his story, one WhatsApp message at a time. It is a …
Continue reading “Refugees in Literature: No Friend but the Mountains”
I wasn’t initially going to assign Sonia Nozario’s Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (Random House, 2007) but it caught my eye at some point last summer. I don’t even remember where I saw the reference but I was intrigued because there has been so much discussion …
Continue reading “Refugees in Literature: Enrique’s Journey”
After a really productive few weeks considering the history of refugees via film, we are shifting course slightly to consider the history of refugees in literature (fiction and non-fiction). In reading texts by refugees and journalists the goal of this theme is to learn not only about historical and contemporary events involving refugees but about …
Continue reading “Refugees in Literature: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees”
Over the next two weeks we are going to be digging deeply into contemporary refugee crises with two films Fuoccomare (Fire at Sea) and I want to Live (2017, about the Syrian refugee crisis). Fuoccomare is a 2016 Italian documentary about Lampedusa Island, a beautiful Sicilian island in the Mediterranean, a long-standing and very popular …
The 1994 Rwandan Genocide took place over a period of 100 days when Hutu extremists and armed Hutu militias attacked and murdered members of the dominant Tutsi minority in the country. An estimated 800,000 people were killed between 7 April and 15 July 1994. Refugees fled the country as early as April 1994. When the …
To start this semester, we will continue our exploration of refugees and film with a very recent production, Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017). Ai Weiwei is an acclaimed artist and filmmaker who is perhaps best known to the general public for his collaboration with the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron to design the famous …
Over the past few months there has been a great deal of discussion about Bill 21 in Quebec, a law that bans the wearing of religious symbols in public in the interest of secularization. As a number of critics have observed, the law disproportionately affects Muslim women and there is therefore a suspicion that the …
[edited 25 November, p.m. based on class feedback] We are incredibly fortunate this week that we will have the chance to chat with Dr. Diana Allan about the history of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and her 2009 film, Terrace of the Sea. As context, it is important to keep in mind that Palestinian refugees now …
Next week we’ll spend some time as a class looking at contemporary news coverage about refugees and forced migration and identifying where historical context might provide some useful insights. Often, news stories about refugees skim any mention of a larger historical connection and so our impressions of refugees, their experiences, and the idea of “crisis” …
On 9 November 1989, thirty years ago this month, East Berliners learned that they would be able to cross into to West Berlin. It marked the beginning of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war in Europe. The end of the cold war seemed to mark an era of …
History of Refugees and Forced Migration