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Precarity in Transit: Travellers by Helon Habila
Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Pub Date : 2020-07-02 , DOI: 10.1080/1013929x.2020.1795349
Helga Ramsey-Kurz

This article offers a reading of Helon Habila’s latest novel Travellers, which was inspired by the onset of the so-called European refugee crisis in 2013. The essay pays special attention to the embodied act of narration and its exploitation by Habila as a mode of cultivating a compassionate understanding of forcibly displaced persons and their often precarious lives in prolonged transit. The analysis follows Butler’s idea of narrative as a mode, on the one hand, of humanising lives violently erased, as they all too often are in the event of involuntary migration, and, on the other, of restoring to “the ethically conscious” world their “capacity to mourn”, where it has been undermined by the systematic denial of human suffering by the nation state and dominant asylum discourse. Theoretical as this approach may appear at first glance, the essay’s goal is to demonstrate that, for Habila’s protagonist, learning to listen to other people’s stories properly and compassionately means to distance himself from the abstract projections of refugee subjecthood he himself endorses as the cosmopolitan intellectual he represents at the outset.

中文翻译:

运输途中的不稳定:Helon Habila 的旅行者

本文提供了对 Helon Habila 的最新小说 Travellers 的阅读,该小说受到 2013 年所谓的欧洲难民危机爆发的启发。本文特别关注 Habila 的具体叙述行为及其作为一种培养模式的利用。对被迫流离失所者及其长期过境中往往不稳定的生活充满同情心的理解。分析遵循巴特勒的观点,即叙事是一种模式,一方面,人性化的生活被暴力抹去,因为它们经常发生在非自愿移民的情况下,另一方面,恢复到“有道德意识”的世界他们的“哀悼能力”已被民族国家系统地否认人类苦难和主导庇护话语所削弱。理论上,这种方法可能乍一看,
更新日期:2020-07-02
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