The modern condition of “refugeeness” has been inextricably bound up with global ideas of race and racial difference. The question of race has always been a thorny one when it comes to the procedural definitions and administration of refugees. The twentieth-century formulation of the refugee emerged alongside dramatic but incomplete shifts in ideas about race and the dismantling of imperial worlds, built upon racializing assumptions that cast colonized peoples as beyond the pale of the humanity that international human rights law means to secure. According to the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “membership” in a race that finds itself persecuted qualifies one for refugee status, and there is of course nothing about one’s racial identity that would prima facie and categorically disqualify one from petitioning for such status according to the Convention. Nevertheless, the construction of the refugee remains entangled in global racial imaginaries of the human and the sub- or inhuman, and of innocence, criminality, and terror, even as humanitarian law and discourse seeks to distance itself from the history of past racial thinking and its shaping of present-day geopolitical realities. If the law is ill-equipped to face, much less redress these contradictions, in this talk, I consider how refugee literatures have treated racialized refugee regimes. Turning to two recent North American novels, Sharon Bala’s The Boat People (2018) and Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021), I argue that this literature heightens the contradictions endemic to a racialized refugee regime as a matter of narrative exigency and racial worldmaking, thereby prompting us to theorize racialized refugeeness otherwise.

Crystal Parikh is Professor of English at New York University, where she specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary transnational American literature and culture. In addition to numerous essays and articles, Professor Parikh has published Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Literature. She is also the author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (Fordham University Press, 2009), which was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary Studies. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (2019), and she co-edited with Daniel Y. Kim, The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015). She is currently at work on two book projects, Worldly Women, a study of transnational feminist ethics in American literature, and First World Problems, which examines the right to security of person and racial form in Asian American literary production. Professor Parikh also currently serves as the Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

This lecture is made possible through the support of the Global Mobility team, International Department, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.