Refugee Archives


Book Description

This volume gives an extensive overview of current developments in the field of archival collections relating to German-speaking refugees located in Germany, Austria, the USA, Ireland and the UK. The contributions illustrate the three interlinked areas of refugee archives, Exile and Migration Studies research and related databases and other resources. The articles investigate their interrelationship as well as the future challenges facing all three areas by focussing on larger archival holdings as well as collections relating to individuals and organisations and more recently established electronic and online resources and finding aids. The volume is aimed at researchers and archival practioners alike and should be especially useful for anyone starting out in the field.




Networked Refugees


Book Description

Almost 68.5 million refugees in the world today live in a protection gap, the chasm between protections stipulated in the Geneva Convention and the abrogation of those responsibilities by aid agencies. With dwindling humanitarian aid, how do refugee communities solve collective dilemmas? In Networked Refugees, Nadya Hajj finds that Palestinian refugees utilize information communication technology platforms to motivate reciprocity-a cooperative action marked by the mutual exchange of favors and services-and informally seek aid and connection with their transnational diaspora community. Based on surveys conducted with Palestinians throughout the diaspora, interviews with those inside the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, and data pulled from online community spaces, these findings pushback against the cynical idea that online organizing is fruitless, emphasizing instead the productivity of these digital networks. "With nuance, sensitivity, and fascinating connections across diverse social settings, Nadya Hajj offers a blueprint for how transnational networks can motivate reciprocity to solve communal problems." WENDY PEARLMAN, author of Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement "In this remarkable book, Hajj deploys her considerable theoretical and empirical gifts. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding refugee experience." TAREK MASOUD, coauthor of The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform "Through stunning ethnographic and survey research, Hajj provides enormous insights into the way Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the diaspora not only resist the destruction of their community but have found new ways of rebuilding it, challenging us to think differently about Palestinian refugees and their reimagined futures." SARA ROY, Harvard University.




Refugee Lives in the Archives


Book Description

This book introduces the unique archive of letters, textiles, hand-drawn maps, emails and photographs from asylum seekers held indefinitely in offshore detention at Topside Camp, Nauru 2001-5. These artefacts introduce the distinctive and creative forms of resistance produced by asylum seekers in the remote Pacific camps on Nauru and Manus Island, and they expose their experiential histories of radical suffering and trauma. Paying due deference to the creative and aesthetic agency of these various documents and artefacts created by the undocumented here, Gillian Whitlock generates a cultural biography of the Nauru camp that humanizes those who have remained unseen and unheard, and features the activist campaigns and the political resistance that assert the agency of witnessing refugees. Structured around the collections of various artefacts exchanged between detainees and humanitarian activists, Refugee Lives in the Archives draws on emerging theories from detention centres and the asylum seekers themselves in a distinctive and expansive Pacific imaginary of refugee life narrative. Building on Whitlock's substantial body of work in testimonial, documentary and archive practices, this book focuses on the 'testimony of things' and probes an approach to archival studies that moves life writing in new directions, to respond collaboratively to the diverse materiality of story-telling and exchanges in the unique and creative forms of asylum seekers' voices, stories and epistemologies.




Rescue Board


Book Description

Featured historian in the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust on PBS • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • In this remarkable work of historical reclamation, Holocaust historian Rebecca Erbelding pieces together years of research and newly uncovered archival materials to tell the dramatic story of America’s little-known efforts to save the Jews of Europe. “An invaluable addition to the literature of the Holocaust.” —Andrew Nagorski, author of The Nazi Hunters and Hitlerland “Brilliantly brings to life the gripping, little-known story of [a] transformative moment in American history and the crusading young government lawyers who made it happen.” —Lynne Olson, New York Times bestselling author of Last Hope Island For more than a decade, a harsh Congressional immigration policy kept most Jewish refugees out of America, even as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In 1944, the United States finally acted. That year, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, and put a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle in charge. Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together a team of D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. Together, they tricked the Nazis, forged identity papers, maneuvered food and medicine into concentration camps, recruited spies, leaked news stories, laundered money, negotiated ransoms, and funneled millions of dollars into Europe. They bought weapons for the French Resistance and sliced red tape to allow Jewish refugees to escape to Palestine. “A landmark achievement, Rescue Board is the first history of the War Refugee Board. Meticulously researched and poignantly narrated, Rescue Board analyzes policies and practices while never losing sight of the human beings involved: the officials who sought to help and the victims in desperate need. Top-notch history: original and riveting.” —Debórah Dwork, founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, and coauthor of Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946




Hitler’s Jewish Refugees


Book Description

An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.




The Refugee Experience


Book Description




Refugee Imaginaries


Book Description

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representationPlaces refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities researchBrings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politicsThe refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness. Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.




The Ungrateful Refugee


Book Description

A Finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction "Nayeri combines her own experience with those of refugees she meets as an adult, telling their stories with tenderness and reverence.” —The New York Times Book Review "Nayeri weaves her empowering personal story with those of the ‘feared swarms’ . . . Her family’s escape from Isfahan to Oklahoma, which involved waiting in Dubai and Italy, is wildly fascinating . . . Using energetic prose, Nayeri is an excellent conduit for these heart–rending stories, eschewing judgment and employing care in threading the stories in with her own . . . This is a memoir laced with stimulus and plenty of heart at a time when the latter has grown elusive.” —Star–Tribune (Minneapolis) Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel–turned–refugee camp. Eventually she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. In these pages, a couple fall in love over the phone, and women gather to prepare the noodles that remind them of home. A closeted queer man tries to make his case truthfully as he seeks asylum, and a translator attempts to help new arrivals present their stories to officials. Nayeri confronts notions like “the swarm,” and, on the other hand, “good” immigrants. She calls attention to the harmful way in which Western governments privilege certain dangers over others. With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee challenges us to rethink how we talk about the refugee crisis. “A writer who confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees




Wartime Captivity in the 20th Century


Book Description

Long a topic of historical interest, wartime captivity has over the past decade taken on new urgency as an object of study. Transnational by its very nature, captivity’s historical significance extends far beyond the front lines, ultimately inextricable from the histories of mobilization, nationalism, colonialism, law, and a host of other related subjects. This wide-ranging volume brings together an international selection of scholars to trace the contours of this evolving research agenda, offering fascinating new perspectives on historical moments that range from the early days of the Great War to the arrival of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.