RSC seminar, 6 November 2024
RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2024
Series convened by Professor Tom Scott-Smith and Professor Catherine Briddick
Refugee Afterlives: Home, Hauntings, and Hunger examines the cultural production of two generations of Vietnamese refugee(s’) children: the 1.5 generation (those who were children when they arrived in the host country) and the second generation (those who were born to refugees in the host country). Analysing a broad range of non-fiction and fiction writing by these two generations in France, Canada and the USA, this book discusses how they grapple with their positionality as refugee(s’) children and the attendant problematics of loss. How they recuperate this loss by deploying notions such as home, hauntings and hunger is central to this analysis. Refugee Afterlives identifies the tools deployed by the 1.5 and second generation, tests their limits while understanding that these writers’ creations are constantly changing and shifting paradigms and will continue to be so over the next decades. Each writer is finding their own voice and pathway(s) and while these may sometimes overlap and contain commonalities, afterlives by default imply plurality and differences. This book offers ways of examining these texts, juxtaposing them, contrasting them, putting them in dialogue with each other, underlining their differences, but ultimately demonstrating that there is much to be gained in seeing how 1.5ers and the so-called second generation Vietnamese refugee writers contribute to a wider discussion of Vietnamese refugee(s’) children and what happens to them after resettlement.
About the speaker
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, ODID, University of Oxford. She is also Sir William Golding Research Fellow at Brasenose College and lecturer at Christ Church College. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She has published peer-reviewed articles on gender, migration, refugees, postcolonial identities and exile. She is the author of Locating Hybridity (2015), Migrant Masculinities (2021), co-editor of Catching up with Time (2022). She is currently working on a monograph on refugee children’s narratives.